It was necessary for Lupe to come to court and convince the prosecutor that she was of a legal age to feature in a porn movie. Her age could be found in a register that exists to provide the information to prevent such mistakes. The prosecutor was informed about these facts but he persisted in bringing charges.
The prosecutor will continue to prosecute and the expert witness will continue to provide expertise even though he was off by more then five years. They lost a case.
Another way of looking at this sorry saga would be that the movie deliberately had Lupe pretend to be a teen. This would make the prosecutors case understandable and the director morally culpable.
The picture shows the David. It is probably the best known statue in the world. It is a nude of a young man. There is no clue as to the exact age of the model, we cannot ask. It is however irrelevant because we cannot study Western art and not deal with the many nudes that are an essential part of it.
When Wikipedia informs about pornography, it needs to explain what it is. This is necessary because there are aspects of it that people should know. It is for instance essential to inform that sex with children is illegal all over the world. It is equally important to explain how different sex with minors is appreciated in different jurisdictions.
The big brouhaha about images with a sexual nature in Commons is very much a cultural clash. The WMF board indicated that there are too many images of a sexual nature that harm the primary goal of the WMF projects. This is objectively true as it resulted in the Wikimedia domain being blocked from for instance Iran. Sadly Wikipedia is so big that it has its detractors, they created a lot of noise and consequently initial cleaning up actions were a bit hasty, even ill considered. The need for a clean up of images, particularly of images that would have been best kept private is necessary. Necessary because they harm our prime objective.
After some cool deliberation and a bit more of a consensus about what we need and what not, things will improve. Quality illustrations will clarify quality articles and our priority remains that we provide the rich resources students can use in all their studies.
Thanks,
GerardM
2 comments:
I'm with you all the way on this perspective...except in the bit about Iran.
You've talked about how sexual/nude content is what got us blocked in Iran. I say totalitarian regimes use porn as an excuse to block content they don't like from a political perspective. This is empirically true in places like China, were a recent "porn crackdown" also was used to expunge the work of political dissidents online.
I suspect it's the same game in Iran, and frankly the idea of Wikimedia altering its editorial strategy to make the Iranian theocracy happy makes me want to barf. Editorial compromise is not what got us unblocked in China, so have some cojones.
That is so wrong; WikiPedia is not blocked. The WikiMedia domain is. So the encyclopaedia and its illustrations are fine, it is just that students can not select their own illustrations for their projects.
Thanks,
Gerard
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