Recent Legal decisions and how they effect Second Life

(Personal Note:) I in no way participate in nor encourage Age Play sex, either in real life nor Second Life!

In the last year, which I have been inside Second Life, I have read hundreds of posts in the old SL forums, and many blogs about Age Play… including but not limited to the following…(links follow) C|Net news, Second Life Insider, Clickable Culture, Raph Koster’s website, reBang weblog, Second Life Herald and another, Kotaku, Susan Mernit’s blog, and ZDNet. My personal opinion on the issue really does not matter….

An article dated Jan.3, 2007 on C|Net called Police blotter: Detecting Computer-generated porn?(link) gave me pause to contemplate how these real life court rulings will affect not only Age Play, but porn in general inside Second Life.

A warning should be inserted here I think: These are U.S. court ruling and only apply to the United States. A ruling in the UK completely contradicts these findings.

Way back in 2002, the Supreme Court overturned a federal law banning the possession of images of minors in lascivious poses that were either software altered adults or completely computer generated. Since that ruling prosecutors have had to prove beyond reasonable doubt that images are of real children.. not adults which have been changed by software to appear young, nor totally software generated images.

The case the c\net news article covers was a of man with charges of one count of possession of child pornography. Initially the FBI brought in a computer Science professor who had designed a program to determine if an image was real, but dropped him as a witness when it was uncovered that his program had a 30% false-positive error rate.

The FBI then changed tactics and brought in a forensic audio, video, and image analysis… Claiming he could simply look at an image and figure out which is legal and which is not. Yet he concluded that 6 of 19 jpegs definitely depict real children and 10 others APPEAR TO BE real children. The Judge Nancy Gertner wasn’t impressed.. mentioning the difference between an (illegal) 17 and (legal) 18 year old would be hard to distinguish… going on to say whether the images in this case are real or virtual cannot be determined based on mere observation, not even by a photographic expert.

C|Net news Has considerably more excerpts from Judge Gertner’s August opinion I will not try to cover them here, but I was left wondering just what these court ruling do to affect Second Life….

Being as all the images in Second Life are computer generated… (with the exception of real photographs uploaded) there seems to be basis for the Age play issue as well as other sexual acts to come to a finial conclusion.

There are many different views on what is morally right and what is legally right in Second Life as well as real life. In real life community standards seem to be the stick to measure what may be legal or illegal regarding porn… but where does that leave us in Second Life.

Robin Harper (aka Robin Linden) has been quoted in the old SL Forums as saying “There are people in (’Second Life’) who are role-playing children engaged in sexual activities. While not a terms-of-service violation–no illegal activity–it could be argued that this behavior is broadly offensive and therefore violates the community standards. If this activity were in public areas it would be viewed as being broadly offensive, and therefore unacceptable.”

In an interview with CNET News.com in April of 2006, Robin stated

“if a critical mass of ‘Second Life’ participants were to ask that something additional be done about sexual age-play, Linden Lab would tackle the issue in some way. So far, there hasn’t been a general outcry.”

But Harper also pointed out that what has made “Second Life” popular among its 170,000 players–and it’s growing at a rate of about 20 percent a month–is the freedom it affords people who want to try out new persona’s, particularly in private sections of the virtual world, she said.

“We’ve tried very, very hard not to broadly ban role-playing type behaviors,” Harper said, “because when all is said and done, the ability to try new behaviors and try new things out is a big reason people are in virtual worlds.”

Just how these role playing actions affect the actions of real people in real life…  Not being a psychologist, I am not prepared to even began to guess. But if the courts have as much trouble deciding if a picture in a child porn case is real or not and if that conclusion is needed to bring a verdict in the case… It  would appear to me as if Second Life’s totally g=computer generated images would have nothing to worry about…. at least in the US.