How Copyright Lobbyists Are Making The Child Porn Problem Worse

from the sweeping-things-under-the-rug dept

But more emotionally, we turn to a German group named Mogis. It is a support group for adult people who were abused as children, and is the only one of its kind. They are very outspoken and adamant on the issue of censoring child pornography. Censorship hides the problem and causes more children to be abused, they say. Don�t close your eyes, but see reality and act on it. As hard as it is to force oneself to be confronted emotionally with this statement, it is rationally understandable that a problem can�t be addressed by hiding it. One of their slogans is �Crimes should be punished and not hidden�. This puts the copyright industry�s efforts in perspective. In this context they don�t care in the slightest about children, only about their control over distribution channels. If you ever thought you knew cynical, this takes it to a whole new level. The conclusion is as unpleasant as it is inevitable. The copyright industry lobby is actively trying to hide egregious crimes against children, obviously not because they care about the children, but because the resulting censorship mechanism can be a benefit to their business if they manage to broaden the censorship in the next stage. All this in defense of their lucrative monopoly that starves the public of culture.

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Over the years, we've noted that the entertainment industry has gleefully tried to link "child porn" to internet filters, in an attempt to make it easier to force censorship around the globe on the woefully stupid theory that this will somehow reduce infringement. At times they're completely upfront about this , admitting that "child pornography is great!" because it gets politicians to do what they want . Rick Falkvinge has another such story of an industry exec enthusiastically embracing child porn on the belief that hyping up child porn will help get their filtering/censorship plans through. The article does a nice job highlighting similar stories around the globe.But the key point is all the way at the end of the article. All of these attempts to link filtering to child porn. In fact, it makes it worse. Falkvinge quotes a group that helps victims of child porn:We've made this point before about those who try to censor based on child porn claims. Like most folks, I find child porn to be a horrific and dangerous issue. But the way to deal with it isn't through censorship and filters. It's to go after those who are actually responsible for the stuff. It's to track down and prosecute those who are creating and distributing the stuff. Putting up filters for censorship doesn't stop those who are creating and distributing. It just drives them further underground. If anything, it actually makes itfor law enforcement to track them down and stop them.But, thanks to copyright industry efforts, that's what we're getting. And for what? So that they can get ISPs to start putting in filters in a weak and unworkable attempt to stop infringement. It's really quite sickening that some in the copyright industry would go this far, but when you see just how often copyright lobbyists bring up child porn, and advocate for filters, it's hard not to be disgusted at the lows to which they'll stoop in their quixotic battle, where the end result is actually to make life worse for the victims of child pornography.

Filed Under: child porn, copyright, filters, lobbying