In New Zealand, a man has been jailed for watching cartoon videos of elves, pixies and other fantasy creatures having sex.
Ronald Clark downloaded the Japanese anime cartoons three years ago, setting in motion a train of events that would see him in court and jailed for three months for possessing objectionable material, and sparking debate as to what harm is caused by digitally created pornography.
Clark has previous convictions for indecently assaulting a teenage boy and has been through rehabilitation programmes, but the video nasties he was watching in this case were all cartoons and drawings.
He says the videos came from an established tradition of Japanese manga and hentai (cartoon pornography), a massive, mainstream industry in that country.
They weren't even depictions of people - Clark's lawyer Roger Bowden described them as "pixies and trolls" that "you knew at a glance weren't human".
Bowden said the conviction for possessing objectionable material was "the law gone mad".
However, while the cartoon characters were elves and pixies, they were also clearly young elves and pixies, which led to concerns the images were linked to child sexual abuse.
Anti-child pornography group ECPAT Child Alert director Alan Bell said the images were illegal because they encouraged people "to migrate from there to the real thing".
"The distribution of it is damaging. You have to ask what impact does it have even if it's not harming [an individual child]."
Bell said it had to be conceded that no child was harmed in the images' production but "it's all part of that spectrum". Cartoon images of child abuse were a "huge" problem in Japan and the practice had started finding its way into computer games, he said
Lincoln University philosophy lecturer Grant Tavinor, who writes on the aesthetics of video games, said the case raised two key questions: Did producing the pictures harm anyone, and could their viewing and distribution be injurious to the public good?
"The worry is that viewing or distributing such images could support the sexual exploitation of children even if the production of the images did not actually involve the exploitation of any children," Tavinor said. It's not enough that no one was harmed in the making of the videos, the law takes a protective role and says there are some things we just don't want circulating in society, he said.
Source: Stuff
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So yeah, apparently it's possible to be jailed for possession of elf, pixie, and troll porn.
I don't doubt that his previous convictions had something to do with this. But does 'virtual porn' really encourage people "to migrate from there to the real thing"?
Is the law being too heavy-handed here? Or do we need to 'nip this sort of thing in the bud'?
Anyway, let's hear your thoughts.