Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

You might feel differently if your kid had been raped, say. When you only have one principle to deal with, life is simple, but I think there are grey areas in all these issues.

Similarly, the argument to legalise drugs. Personally, I agree with the argument, but a similar demand-supply problem exists in human trafficking (e.g. child sex slavery), but there I think the laws should continue to keep the latter illegal even while it supports the high profits that human traffickers can make. What do you think?



hmm? 'Rape' has auto suggestions.

In general I dont think that consumption of child pornography is much of a crime, the harm has been done by then, and some poor sad git masturbating over a 3 year old isn't going to make it any worse.

Personally I would rather they put significant resources into catching those people who create it, than into changing search engines and blocking dns addresses so that everyone can pretend it doesn't exist.


Demand encourages supply.


Even if nobody's paying?

Given the threat our lawmakers believe piracy poses to content-producers, and that they wish to suppress the production of child porn, perhaps they should actually encourage the piracy of child porn...

(I jest, of course, but the law itself is none too rational here.)


Your demand for censorship encourages supply of censorship, so I guess we should throw you in jail.


yep. demand exists, so does supply.

I am unsure what problem you actually believe is being solved by google?

What google appears to be doing now is attempting to pretend that neither supply nor demand exist at all.

The insanity of that must be fairly obvious?


All else equal, the difference is that taking drugs (may) harm the user, and only the user, while taking a slave obviously involves another person.


Good point. So there would be a set of things that infringe on others' rights, are therefore illegal and therefore support high profits, separate from those that don't infringe and could therefore be legalised.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: