Law like love

[rivkat]

Over the years I've seen a number of fan fiction/copyright debates, and (as with most ideological disputes) people's convictions about fan fiction's legality correlate strongly, but not perfectly, with their convictions about its morality. But there's always a set of fan writers & readers who say, often without investigating the subject much, "I know it's illegal but it shouldn't be," and I assume some on the other side who say the opposite, though I don't hang out with them.

The exact same thing happens with discussions of art & fiction featuring underage sex. And here, frankly, we're on firmer ground than with fan fiction & copyright, since there aren't any litigated cases on fan fiction. Depictions that aren't pictures or video of actual minors are judged by the standards for obscenity, not child porn. It is true that the moral panic doesn't distinguish between those, so what the law actually says is not the end of the matter. It is also true that a given piece of fan art could be obscene (writing is much less likely to be so, though it's not legally impossible), just as a given fan story could infringe. The reason lawyers give unsatisfactory answers to reasonable questions is often that the truest answer is "it depends." Moreover, there are of course a huge number of things it's immoral but not illegal to do or say; citizens must populate that set for themselves, whether in communities or as a matter of individual choice.

I'll leave you with the Auden poem.

Comments

[executrix.livejournal.com]

To me, the upsetting element is not 6A's rousing itself from slumber to enforce TOS--it's purging all of a user's journals without notice or recourse (and confiscating the balance of the money the alleged perpetrator was silly enough to pay 6A).

BTW, although obscenity laws are not an intensive focus of litigation (and in a country whose community standards have made hard-core pornography a multi-billion-dollar industry) there is a very long line of cases about when computers can be searched for evidence of child pornography, and more than a few people now serving 20-year prison terms for having child pornography images on their hard drives.