Danbooru

a legal/ "arse covering" concern

Posted under General

I am not (to my knowledge) under suspicion, and I have no intention of being; the point of the exercise is to obey the law to the letter and then live my life as normal. Particularly the freedom to browse t'internet without worrying about committing a crime within UK borders given the continuing counter intuitive lawmaking that's going on here.

Making use of a physical proxy machine (as in, having the web client and image browser located) in another country means at no point am I actually *storing*(key part of the wording) the information in any way that can be proven. Using an encrypted terminal session to a remote host is pretty basic anyway, so it wouldn't be unusual. If I was going to make that investment then it would have been nice to contribute to the site out of hours, but no matter.

Thanks for the further filtering idea, hadn't occurred to me for some reason.

I'll agree that at this point changing hobbies or emigrating would be a lot more intuitive, but I figured i'd check all available options before doing either.

Roderic said:
Peripherally how easy would it be to run a mirror of the danbooru data set? If it ends up that i must continue running an X tunnel on a collocated machine for the exclusive purpose of danbooru browsing, I might as well run a mirror on the same hardware to reduce my cable usage.

I have a full mirror, but it's currently not possible to make it public for reasons unknown. Remind me on Saturday afternoon (GMT+2 here) or later, I'll look into firing off an email to the storage provider to sort it out.

Roderic said:
Making use of a physical proxy machine (as in, having the web client and image browser located) in another country means at no point am I actually *storing*(key part of the wording) the information in any way that can be proven.

Just for the record, I sincerely doubt that this would be a valid legal defense. If you commit tax evasion by putting your money in a Swiss bank account, you can still be prosecuted in the US if it can be proven that the account is yours. (The reason Swiss banks are popular for tax evaders is because they generally refuse to provide this proof, not simply because they are in a foreign country.) Likewise, you'd still be storing data on the remote computer in your possession, so you'd likely still be running afoul of the law.

Disclaimer: The following comments, despite my background, are not meant to be nor are they recommended in place of actual legal counsel.

In the US, the legality is still pretty murky, actually. Yes, Christopher Handley was sentenced to six months on a plea deal to avoid fifteen years. He, however, was convicted using obscenity for possession of comics that depicted underage girls directly involved in explicit sexual activity and bestiality. One important thing to note about that is obscenity is and always has been murky. The Supreme Court has almost always avoided defining it, leaving it in the realm of community standards. (And similarly vague definitions) Similarly, it has a pretty good track record of not trying obscenity cases. It does get a bit more complicated then that, but there is at least one case of a man being brought up on obscenity charges for selling obscene films only to be let off when it was shown his local community made up the greatest share of his customers. On the other hand, more than one website has been shut down for trafficking "obscene" materials.

Long story short: the state of naked cartoon underage children not based on real children will remain uncertain as long as it's legality remains hinged on obscenity and obscenity remains defined as is. Regardless, the less likely your community is to consider material as obscene, the safer from successful prosecution you'll probably be.

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