Question. Are we effectively legalizing teenagers selling their nudes here? Personally I would oppose such a thing and would urge the Senate to ensure the language of the bill doesn’t end up doing that.
I can't really read that into the text. Possession and distribution of child pornography is already illegal. And if a minor were selling their nudes for money, the website responsible for hosting them would be forced to ban them from using the site.
You seem to be missing something here; a site itself doesn’t have to be used. They could easily use a messaging service that can send images or videos. iMessage and WhatsApp, for instance, are both end to end encrypted and thus they literally have no way of checking if nudes or pornography depicting minors have been sent.
Effectively, one of three things has to happen:
1. Children are free to sell their nudes or
actually be their own pornographers with essentially minimal legal restriction.
2. Either explicit or backdoor (by imposing penalties on services through which these types of images are sent) ban on end-to-end encryption. This is a serious privacy breach and also undoes the rest of the bill entirely - these services will have no way of distinguishing between paid and unpaid nudes and will be forced to block all of them anyway.
3. The distribution exception is limited only to distribution “not involved in commercial activity”.
I hope everyone can see why the first two options are undesirable.
