A rather frightening story from Canada:
A U.S. citizen, identified as a computer programmer and comic book fan, recently flew from his home in America to visit a friend in Canada, and upon his arrival, his iPhone, iPad and laptop were searched by Canadian customs who discovered digital manga images on the laptop. Presumably based on Canadian statutes that treat any sexual images of characters that appear to be under 18 as actual child pornography, the images they discovered were deemed child porn and the man was charged accordingly
As a writer and comic book artist, this is particularly frightening.
What this is basically doing, in effect, is saying that drawings and fiction are absolutely no different than photographs and video. This is going a step beyond protecting children and crossing over into making thought a crime, itself. We have laws against abusing children, sexually or otherwise, not because it's wrong in concept - though obviously it is - but because actual harm is being done to actual children. Children are especially vulnerable and crimes committed against them are likewise especially heinous.
This, however, says that writing a story or drawing a picture is a crime in itself.
Think about that for a moment. Applied other crimes, it becomes glaringly obvious how wrong this is. For example, it's against the law to murder, but violence is in everything we watch and everything we read. Obviously, there's a difference between killing someone and writing a murder mystery. If this law were applied to every type of crime, that difference would be erased. In other words:
Illustrations are not photographs or video of children being sexually abused, and treating them as the same thing not only potentially criminalizes art -- an illustrated version of Romeo and Juliet, for example, could likely earn itself a "child pornography" label under this definition -- it also diminishes the crime of actual child pornography and the real abuse that it documents.
Worse still, is this:
Second, when you extend the definition of child pornography from sexual images of children (who are real people, and have ages) to drawings (which are not real, and do not have ages), suddenly that definition becomes very subjective. How exactly can you tell if a drawing is sixteen years old, or seventeen, or eighteen? Suddenly the determination about whether or not someone is in possession of child pornography -- a deeply horrific and often ruining accusation to make -- changes from clear cut to frighteningly ambiguous.
I think Canada has it wrong on this one. I urge everyone involved in the creative arts to go to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and look into what you can do to help out, and to protect yourself when traveling in and out of the country since what is deemed legal and harmless here is quickly becoming illegal in other places in a frantic march to protect people from their own thoughts.