Wikipedia's SOPA box

[oslecamo]

No, actually, I read the full description of the new policy, and that's pretty much NOT what they're doing. They're setting up a council to evaluate maturely all the material that is flagged, allowing appeals processes, and using criteria that are VERY rational, considering how subjective the label 'porn' is. 'Paedoshit' is just as informal as they've EVER been, no change there.

Nope, they're cutting first, asking questions later when they ask them at all. Actually they had been doing so already, and they admit it themselves, so that "council" is a facade if I ever saw one.

Of course, discussing the butchery or enslavement of whole civilizations and realities with cutting-edge tech is all fine and dandy, but an exposed female nipple? Completely inadmissible!

[Prime32]

Of course, discussing the butchery or enslavement of whole civilizations and realities with cutting-edge tech is all fine and dandy, but an exposed female nipple? Completely inadmissible!

Discussing genocide doesn't cause people to complain to their ad provider and cut off the site's maintenance costs.

[Tshern]

Of course, discussing the butchery or enslavement of whole civilizations and realities with cutting-edge tech is all fine and dandy, but an exposed female nipple? Completely inadmissible!

Discussing genocide doesn't cause people to complain to their ad provider and cut off the site's maintenance costs.

Though apparently talking about mass murderers causes something similar if we are to learn anything about Jello Biafra's trial.

[dman11235]

Yeah, there's that.  Honestly I don't see too much wrong with that policy.  I've always been one of the first to point out that nudity=/=porn, but that's not the way most of the worldUS works, so they have to do what they have to do.  My problem would be if they are doing what oscelcamo said, or the overzealous cutting you mentioned Prime.  But if they've fixed that, no harm done, right?

@Agita: The thing about porn is that it is defined by intent.  If the intent of the "art" is as a sex aid or masturbatory aid, then it's porn.  No matter how good the plot is, it's still porn.  Yes, this does require some subjective determining factors, but that's what it is.  So yes, you can actually have porn without nudity, and you can have nudity without porn.  And sexualizing kids I think we can all agree is wrong, so I don't really blame them for fighting it.  and yes, sexualizing a 700 year old who looks like she's 10 is sexualizing a 10 year old.  Shoving that down your throat (Really?  That's the phrase you chose?)?  Not a fan, but I mean, come on, that's not exactly a controversial subject.

[veekie]

Controversial yes, but the main thing is overzealous elimination. It is difficult when some accepted series push the line in the name of fanservice, or even go well beyond, while others are barred more from reputation than anything else. Where do you draw the line between porn with plot and plot with porn? Or even extreme titillation with plot.

[Tshern]

and yes, sexualizing a 700 year old who looks like she's 10 is sexualizing a 10 year old

Legally speaking this is not true, right? Also, it is worth noting that underaged people are being sexualised all the time with no legal consequences whatsoever. So many child celebrities walk around with the most obvious intention of drawing such attention to themselves that it's hard to ignore. Sexualisation has no objective limits, so I suppose it's hard to draw a solid boundaries though.

Veekie pointed out something similar to my last point. I am sure some people are manning the barricades because of The Game of Thrones' nudity, but that doesn't make the series a porno.

[skydragonknight]

We have the technology. Google has a "Safe Search" option when image surfacing IIRC. Just require that to be the default setting for all browsers and if anyone goes viewing porn then its their own damn fault afterwards ("The website you are atempting to access contains graphic and/or nude images. Are you SURE you want to view it? Yes/No). Trying to control the internet itself is expensive and largely ineffective. But if you specifically control it where it comes into contact with the user, it's not too hard or expensive.

[dman11235]

Legally: no.  But come on, it's just common sense, if you're attracted to the body of someone with the body of a 10 year old, then you're attracted to the body of a 10 year old.

ON Game of Thrones: see my previous post.  Nudity=/=porn, and porn=/=nudity.  They are separate scales, and you can in fact have sex explicitly shone without it being necessarily porn.  Here's a good example: I was given a show called Angel Something or Something Angel or whatever.  It was season 1 of an anime about three girls who drive mechs.  Can't really remember the plot, partially because there wasn't really a plot so much as a "use this as an excuse to show these girls blowing stuff up, shooting things, or being sexy".  For the most part, it was just generic episodes, bland and uninteresting.  So then came the obligatory swimsuit episode.  Tell me if this sounds familiar: bunch of girls get invited VIP to a pool party, they wear sexy, ridiculous clothes (one wears a skimpier Faye Valentine copycat outfit normally, and wore something even more ridiculous in the swimsuit), and that's when I stopped watching the series.  Basically, they took a typical, no wait, stereotypical porn premise and made a "non-porn" TV episode based around it.  That episode was porn, pure and simple, despite the lack of true nudity (does a swimsuit that looks like body paint count as nudity?).  The others before that?  No, not porn, just bad.  The ages of the various girls?  I can't remember, but one was somewhere around 8 or something.  Was she sexualized in the swimsuit episode?  Yup.  The flat chested troubled teen?  Yup.  The busty older teen?  Absofreakinglutely.  The somehow even bustier middle aged (re: probably around 20) woman? Less so than the busty teen (probably around 16 or something).  Was this show categorized as porn?  Or course not, there's no nudity.  Is it porn?  You better believe it, the only possible reason I can think of for that entire episode was sexual arousal.  Not just fanservice, but porn.

EDIT: Actually, legally it might be in the US.  I think I remember a case where a guy was arrested for possession of child pornography when the porn in question involved no actual kids, but lolicon hentai, the "stars" of which may or may not have been underage, but certainly looked way too young.

[veekie]

Legally speaking this is not true, right? Also, it is worth noting that underaged people are being sexualised all the time with no legal consequences whatsoever. So many child celebrities walk around with the most obvious intention of drawing such attention to themselves that it's hard to ignore. Sexualisation has no objective limits, so I suppose it's hard to draw a solid boundaries though.

Well, sexualisation itself is difficult to enforce due to vague boundaries(heck, around here, the religious right considers pretty much everything from the West to be sinfully oversexed, with tight clothing, exposed cleavage falling under that umbrella etc), after all theres a fetish for everything. Victimisation can be enforced to some degree.

The question here though, when they draw the line loosely. How do you quantify the difference between an action/drama/tragedy/horror series with a character acting inappropriately/showing a lot of skin(i.e. the bulk of anime), against a series where the whole point is showing lots of skin and acting inappropriately?

[dman11235]

Agreed on that veekie.  Gratuitous sex/nudity/violence/etc. is actually pretty easy to determine.  Can the scene exist without the questionable content and not lose any meaning at all?  If yes, then the content is gratuitous.  That's the first step to determining whether or not it's porn in disguise.  the next  step: determining whether or not the amount of gratuitous scenes and the quality make the whole thing something other than just "mature content".  That's harder, but generally it shouldn't be too hard to determine whether or not most of them go too far.

[bhu]

Controversial yes, but the main thing is overzealous elimination. It is difficult when some accepted series push the line in the name of fanservice, or even go well beyond, while others are barred more from reputation than anything else. Where do you draw the line between porn with plot and plot with porn? Or even extreme titillation with plot.

I'll play devils advocate for a moment just for shits and giggles:

Why bother drawing a line?  Banning of porn is done 'to protect children', most of whom can easily get around any barrier placed on them and quite zealously do so.  When i was a child the internet didnt even exist and I'd seen fisting by the time I was 12 (granted i was darn sneaky).  If you're banning something to protect a group why bother if they can simply find it at will elsewhere?  It doesn't make you any better as a person or more moral, it just demonstrates your lack of comfort with human sexuality.  It doesn't suggest the material has a fault, it suggests you do.  And if you do that's fine.  Don't view shit you can't handle.  Telling other people not to view what you're mentally disabled over is crossing a line though..

[dman11235]

bhu, that reminds me of something a politician said about one of the tax reform bills or something.  He basically said that the bill that would close some loopholes was useless because the well off had people working to get that money back.  Effectively he said "why bother with the tax reform?  They're just going to get around it anyways."

A bit more relevant, some things are damaging to see as a child.  Studies have shown as much.  That's one reason I tend to avoid films and shows with high amounts of violence, but don't really care too much about sexuality in them.

[Wrex]

bhu, that reminds me of something a politician said about one of the tax reform bills or something.  He basically said that the bill that would close some loopholes was useless because the well off had people working to get that money back.  Effectively he said "why bother with the tax reform?  They're just going to get around it anyways."

A bit more relevant, some things are damaging to see as a child.  Studies have shown as much.  That's one reason I tend to avoid films and shows with high amounts of violence, but don't really care too much about sexuality in them.

Some things are definitly injurous to young children. now, there have been studies done that show that nudity and ordinary human sexuality don't have a deleterious effect on young children. (Granted, such a study would have to be done by survey. It's not like you can convince parents to let their kids see that, so the results are obviously a bit iffy). These same studies have often shown that excessive violence is far more harmful because of it's desensitiving effects.

[bhu]

Studies are problematic. 

For one to be valid you need to ensure that they did several things.

You need to make sure they followed proper procedures, studied a large enough portion of the population as opposed to one small sampling which may be skewed.

You need to ensure the people conducting the study don't have an axe to grind as well as the participants.

And most importantly you need to know who is funding it.  Because most of the time someone isn't funding a study, they're funding the results.  As in "I believe blah is harmful, find evidence of it".  Which is a small step away from "suprress any evidence contrary, and make shit up if you have to and want our money."

[dman11235]

I can find three studies about it from when I did a couple papers on a tangentially related paper for school.  More if you want to count non-children (one study I almost used looked at the effects of violent movies on the crime rates of surrounding time frames, over a period of multiple years, I believe around 3, found that when a violent film opened and did well, crime went down for a bit, then rose up overcompensating for the drop be a statistically significant margin).  Unfortunately I can't prove it since they're in an academic article database that can't be accessed by those outside of the Indiana university system (Ivy Tech, BSU, IU, and probably more), and I can't do anything about linking them to you guys.  So yeah, I'm kinda pulling an "I'm an expert!" on this one, but I actually have seen and read the studies....

[Agita]

No, actually, I read the full description of the new policy, and that's pretty much NOT what they're doing. They're setting up a council to evaluate maturely all the material that is flagged, allowing appeals processes, and using criteria that are VERY rational, considering how subjective the label 'porn' is. 'Paedoshit' is just as informal as they've EVER been, no change there.

Nope, I read through the description too, and came to the opposite conclusion. I haven't been following the processes firsthand very closely, since I just learned of this yesterday, but secondhand accounts of the activities so far seem to support my suspicions.

@Agita: The thing about porn is that it is defined by intent.  If the intent of the "art" is as a sex aid or masturbatory aid, then it's porn.  No matter how good the plot is, it's still porn.  Yes, this does require some subjective determining factors, but that's what it is.  So yes, you can actually have porn without nudity, and you can have nudity without porn.  And sexualizing kids I think we can all agree is wrong, so I don't really blame them for fighting it.  and yes, sexualizing a 700 year old who looks like she's 10 is sexualizing a 10 year old.  Shoving that down your throat (Really?  That's the phrase you chose?)?  Not a fan, but I mean, come on, that's not exactly a controversial subject.

*cough* Yeah, that phrasing wasn't the best for the occasion. Sorry about that.
But yeah, you can have nudity without porn and vice versa. I doubt the capacity of this 5P council to understand that. Looking through their profiles, especially the preferences where they were available, the majority of interests I found were standard Manly American Man-acceptable series, with some outliers, which leads me to suspect that there is about the same amount of objectivity going on here as there is on the SomethingAwful forums when anything Japanese and raunchy comes up. Mind you, I'm hardly unbiased here, due to a long history of annoyance at SA's standards. It's less a matter of disagreeing with the premise and more a matter of finding the standards that end up used excessive, and strongly distrusting the council's neutrality.

[Tshern]

Legally: no.  But come on, it's just common sense, if you're attracted to the body of someone with the body of a 10 year old, then you're attracted to the body of a 10 year old.

Oh yes, I quite agree. It is sad that people cannot really decide what they are attracted to.

ON Game of Thrones: see my previous post.  Nudity=/=porn, and porn=/=nudity.  They are separate scales, and you can in fact have sex explicitly shone without it being necessarily porn.

Yes, but who is to draw the line? I am relatively certain that, say, William Rehnquist would render judgements different from mine.

Was she sexualized in the swimsuit episode?  Yup.  The flat chested troubled teen?  Yup.  The busty older teen?  Absofreakinglutely.  The somehow even bustier middle aged (re: probably around 20) woman? Less so than the busty teen (probably around 16 or something).  Was this show categorized as porn?  Or course not, there's no nudity.  Is it porn?  You better believe it, the only possible reason I can think of for that entire episode was sexual arousal.  Not just fanservice, but porn.

I disagree about it being porn. Pornesque, perhaps, but not porn.

EDIT: Actually, legally it might be in the US.  I think I remember a case where a guy was arrested for possession of child pornography when the porn in question involved no actual kids, but lolicon hentai, the "stars" of which may or may not have been underage, but certainly looked way too young.

Alright, fair enough.

[oslecamo]

ON Game of Thrones: see my previous post.  Nudity=/=porn, and porn=/=nudity.  They are separate scales, and you can in fact have sex explicitly shone without it being necessarily porn.  Here's a good example: I was given a show called Angel Something or Something Angel or whatever.  It was season 1 of an anime about three girls who drive mechs.  Can't really remember the plot, partially because there wasn't really a plot so much as a "use this as an excuse to show these girls blowing stuff up, shooting things, or being sexy".  For the most part, it was just generic episodes, bland and uninteresting.  So then came the obligatory swimsuit episode.  Tell me if this sounds familiar: bunch of girls get invited VIP to a pool party, they wear sexy, ridiculous clothes (one wears a skimpier Faye Valentine copycat outfit normally, and wore something even more ridiculous in the swimsuit), and that's when I stopped watching the series.  Basically, they took a typical, no wait, stereotypical porn premise and made a "non-porn" TV episode based around it.  That episode was porn, pure and simple, despite the lack of true nudity (does a swimsuit that looks like body paint count as nudity?).  The others before that?  No, not porn, just bad.  The ages of the various girls?  I can't remember, but one was somewhere around 8 or something.  Was she sexualized in the swimsuit episode?  Yup.  The flat chested troubled teen?  Yup.  The busty older teen?  Absofreakinglutely.  The somehow even bustier middle aged (re: probably around 20) woman? Less so than the busty teen (probably around 16 or something).  Was this show categorized as porn?  Or course not, there's no nudity.  Is it porn?  You better believe it, the only possible reason I can think of for that entire episode was sexual arousal.  Not just fanservice, but porn.

Objection!

First, from wikipedia the definition of pornography:

Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter.

Now as already indicated, sexual=/=nudity. Yes, the clothes of the characters on that episode of Burst Angel(the name of the series) were quite revealing, but the characters don't have any kind of sexual behavior. Lots of animes (and mangas) have at least one episode like that.

This is, how many of Negima chapters weren't an excuse to just show the cast in skimpy clothes or geting naked?

Now the line between fanservice and porn may indeed very thin, but the diference is how the skimpy clothed characters behave. If they're just having innocent fun and nobody is trying to hump anything, then I don't believe it can be called as porn.

Also, a monster does show up in the mid of the episode.

Here's the episode in question in youtube.

Hmm, now that I see it again, the flat-chested main character's swimsuit isn't anything special, and the little girl isn't wearing anything particularly revealing at all if you ask me.

And most importantly you need to know who is funding it.  Because most of the time someone isn't funding a study, they're funding the results.  As in "I believe blah is harmful, find evidence of it".  Which is a small step away from "suprress any evidence contrary, and make shit up if you have to and want our money."

There's lies, there's lies, and then there's statistics. In particular when studying human behaviour, is basically impossible to do a completely unbiased study when you decide which data is valid and what isn't.

A completely unbiased study of the human population would conclude that each of us has one developed breast and one testicle in average.

[ariasderros]

There's lies, there's lies, and then there's statistics. In particular when studying human behaviour, is basically impossible to do a completely unbiased study when you decide which data is valid and what isn't.

A completely unbiased study of the human population would conclude that each of us has one developed breast and one testicle in average.

I will be quoting this in real life quite often from now on. Thank you so much.
Also, Respect.

[bhu]

EDIT: Actually, legally it might be in the US.  I think I remember a case where a guy was arrested for possession of child pornography when the porn in question involved no actual kids, but lolicon hentai, the "stars" of which may or may not have been underage, but certainly looked way too young.

Alright, fair enough.

Cases in the US vary heavily, and depend a lot on the locality and the desire of a prosecutor/judge to make an example to be reelected.  A recent federal court decision said that simply viewing child pornography could no longer be considered a crime.  Why?  Because to report it you have to actually see it.  So anyone reporting it would go down for a felony and be registered as a sex offender. if they'd ruled otherwise.  Hence no one would ever report it.  Actually producing and distributing it remains as illegal as ever. 

There have been numerous bills designed to make lolicon or photoshop sex crimes but all of them have failed in teh US because of common sense: the crime the bills charged them with was the same as harming an actual child, as opposed to viewing a drawn image that looked like one.  If an actual child hasn't been harmed you can't prosecute someone for said harm.  If the people responsible for producing said bills would alter the language they could probably get it squeaked through.