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A Supreme Court case regarding virtual child sexual abuse material
Federal courts and lawmakers are wrestling with (CSAM): prosecutors treat such material as criminal under existing federal statutes in many cases, but constitutional limits from and recent district-co...
Federal prosecutors have used the to obtain convictions involving animated or virtual depictions of minors in sexually explicit conduct—most notably the conviction of and the plea by —while courts hav...
criminalizes many forms of when the image depicts a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct or is “virtually indistinguishable” from such a depiction, but enforcement hinges on several legal thresh...
law draws a firm line between sexual depictions involving real children—which the has treated as unprotected child pornography—and purely fictional or animated sexual content, which is regulated prima...
federal law criminalizes possession, receipt and distribution of (CSAM) and was amended in the 2000s to reach “knowingly access[ing] with intent to view” material online, but courts distinguish betwee...
Yes. Federal law makes possession and even “access with intent to view” child sexual abuse material (CSAM) a crime (18 U.S.C. §§2252, 2252A), and state laws overwhelmingly criminalize possession and o...
Prosecutors seeking to demonstrate that (AIG‑CSAM) is "virtually indistinguishable" from real CSAM rely on a combination of published technical reports, frontline analyst testimony about visual indist...
courts and commentators show a narrow set of defenses that have had measurable success against prosecutions for : First Amendment challenges rooted in , obscenity‑test attacks under , and factual or p...
Courts have treated as legally fraught: longstanding Supreme Court protections for “virtual” depictions mean synthetic images that do not involve real children can be constitutionally protected speech...
Federal and appellate courts have grappled with whether fictional depictions of minors can be prosecuted as obscene, producing a mixed record: the upheld a conviction for obscene written and pictorial...
Federal courts have treated as a narrow but potent avenue to criminalize non-photographic depictions—including manga and anime—only when those works are found obscene under established obscenity law r...
The makes drawn or animated sexual depictions of minors prosecutable under federal law when they meet either a “computer-generated indistinguishable” standard or are found to be obscene under 18 U.S.C...
The in v. struck down parts of the that criminalized “virtual child pornography” — images that appear to depict minors but were produced without using real children — holding that those provisions wer...
Federal law treats computer‑generated images that are "indistinguishable" from real children as through the definitional backbone in 18 U.S.C. § 2256 and through prosecutorial statutes such as 18 U.S....