Child pornography blocking again

[Ben Wilhelm]

Kraktus wrote:
> Warez is bad, but it hurts people's wallets, not innocent children, so
> it's more of an economic crime than a crime against humanity.  In
> other words, blocking child porn is more worth the effort.

One could easily argue that the transmission of child porn doesn't hurt 
children at all, and it's the *production* that does. From there, you 
run into a supply and demand argument - the more supply there is, the 
lower the demand is. Economically speaking, legalizing the transmission 
of child porn might actually *reduce* the harm done to children.

Obviously, this doesn't count the people who may get interested in 
pedophilia thanks to child porn, the people who may decide to produce 
some now that it's easier to transmit, or - on the other side - the 
people who end up *not* committing any of the pedophilia-related crimes 
due to being able to *ahem* get their frustrations out with porn.

It's not a clear-cut case at all, in any direction, and I would 
personally rather Tor stuck to their original game plan ("anonymous 
internet access") than any kind of grafted-on possibly-counterproductive 
morals ("anonymous internet access for the things that we personally 
feel are morally justifiable with a day or two of thought").

(On the same vein one could actually argue that warez is worse, as 
economically, warez discourages production of software, using the same 
logic where freely distributed child porn discourages production of more 
child porn. The situation isn't really parallel though - child porn is 
illegal to produce and that changes the system quite a bit.)

-Ben