Thread:Tycio/@comment-1713281-20120413040459/@comment-1009000-20120415090043

Hey there, as Spencer pointed out, the year-long ban was a preventive measure - and as such, pretty extreme, I realize that - not so much because of the plagiarism issue, otherwise I would have tried to talk to you first, but because of the child pornography issue. It's a legal issue - child pornography is the sort of thing (and yes, not only real child pornography, with real victims, drawings can be risky already) that gets homes raided, servers confiscated and websites taken down. I'm not going to err on the unsafe side even for a second.

As for the aesthetic/artistic/censorship debate: You're bringing up points well-rehearsed, but misplaced. Of course there is a certain paranoia about pornography in certain contexts that have - mostly in the US - caused discussions about the erotic nature of michelangelo's david, which any sane person must find laughable. And yes, there was even a very absurd debate in England about whether Allan Moore's Lost Girls was child pornography or not. That's not what's at stake here, and neither is posting images that have appeared in Marvel Comics.

The original images you have posted are pornographic in nature in the sense that obviously their main function is to excite sexually. That is made clear both by the context of the site from which you took them as well as the images itself. Can they still be considered art? Of course. But they don't belong on a children-friendly site. Not in a cropped version, not in a censored version. They just don't.

Your crediting the original artists was well meant, but it actually makes the problem worse. By giving the artists, you're giving an easy lead on how to find the original images, ergo giving any ten year-old kid on a computer without safety measures and who knows google a one-click ticket to pornoland. There's no way we can allow this. And, as you are very well aware, we cannot allow posting cropped versions without crediting the original artist for reasons well known.