Pornography in Cyberspace: An Analysis of Legal and Technological Challenges

Cyberspace facilitates dissemination of Pornographic material of various forms that include text, drawings, cartoons, sculptures, paintings, photographs, films, videos, animations and computer generated images. This pornographic material often contains malware and other related security threats that can infect the system and thus make it vulnerable to attacks.Pornography has become one of the contentious subjects of debate for legal fraternity and communication technologists in-spite of the fact that there have been legislations and frequent government interventions around the globe to limit the accessible pornographic material on the Internet. Pornography, more particularly child pornography is on the rise because of its easy access, heavy financial gains for its propagators and growing use of the Internet by youngsters.The size of the global pornography industry is 97.1 billion dollars, with 13.3 billion in the United States alone. This amount in the United States is larger than the combined revenues of professional football, basketball, and baseball franchises, and exceeds the revenues of the three largest broadcast networks.The Internet, aided by technology-induced anonymity has popularized the sex business more than any other means of advertisement. With unlimited access to a variety of websites, and the impediment of needing to enter a brothel physically removed, immoral gratification is just the click of a mouse away from any intending customer. Anonymity has been an aid to most crimes perpetuated on the Internet and other IT applications. For instance, immoral contents can be viewed in the closet, on a laptop, on a palmtop etc without the reservation that any other person will know about the content being consumed. While technological advancements have produced radical shifts in the ability to reproduce, distribute, control, and publish information, the Internet in particular has radically changed the economics and ease of reproduction. Reproduction costs are much lower for both rights holders (content owners) and infringers alike. One consequence is an erosion of what were once the natural barriers to infringement, such as the expense of reproduction and the decreasing quality of successive generations of copies in analogue media. Acquiring equipments for analogue reproduction are quite expensive, for example the printing press. Also digital copies produced using computers and Internet facilities are perfect replicas, each a seed for further perfect copies. The average computer owner today can easily do the kind and the extent of copying that would have required a significant investment and perhaps criminal intent only a few years ago. Computer networks have also radically changed the economics of distribution. With transmission speeds approaching a billion characters per second, networks enable sending information products worldwide, cheaply and almost instantaneously. As a consequence, it is easier and less expensive both for a rights holder to distribute a work and for individuals or pirates to make and distribute unauthorized copies.The pornographic material can be uploaded anonymously from one place and accessed from any other place with much ease and pace. Any prohibition on dissemination of such material will be determined on the basis of understanding of moral values and the place accorded to them in a particular society. This understanding varies from country to country and even from community to community in a society and there is no uniform standard to determine it. For example, while the US considers computer generated sexually explicit images of children legal, they are illegal in the UK, Hong Kong and Canada. Further, not all countries prohibit sexually explicit images of children. Moreover, cultural mores may preclude an open discussion of issues such as sexual abuse, sex and pornography, which may delay passage of legislation banning child pornography. On a global level, though, definitions vary from region to region, country to country, there is no consensus on key terms relating to this area. What is considered illegal material in one country may be legal in others. Some have opposed Internet regulation by the government arguing that it should be self-regulated by site owners, parents, and international cooperation.Definitional issues also include what constitutes a child and what constitutes pornography. In the US, the minimum legal age for sexual activity can range from 14 to 18. As well, the age of majority varies from one country to another. Internet child pornography presents a number of challenges that traditional printed material does not. For example, the Internet allows offenders the luxury of anonymity and it is possible that this ability to remain unknown may be a contributing factor to the increased number of child porn consumers who may not otherwise seek this type of material. Additionally, the anonymity of the Internet allows adults to create online profiles indicating they are children, thereby giving them easier access to children. Compounding the problem is the relative ease in which online predators can utilize anonymous proxy servers, many of which are free and located in other countries. Proxy servers allow a single computer connected to the Internet to act for one or more other computers. By using a proxy server, an individual‘s online criminal activity appears to have been committed by the proxy server. In the same way potential predators can pretend to be children.This raises many legal, technological and social issues. For example: whose community or national standard will determine whether the material in question is obscene or not? Is it the standard of place of origin or place of destination? Is there any need to create a new definition of community for online obscenity cases? How to exercise jurisdiction especially when a porn site has been uploaded in one country, server is in another country and this site is accessed in another country. How to enforce decision against an offender whose is beyond the borders of one’s country. Is it technologically possible to make porn sites inaccessible or to filter out these sites? Can there be a legal obligation to service providers to put technological measures in place to reduce, if not eliminate, dissemination of pornographic material. An attempt is made to address these issues in this paper.Filtering in its several forms has been the only technological method to make pornographic material inaccessible at destinations. An Internet filtering system may be mechanical, text-based, image-based or combination of these. The mechanical filtering is based on creation of URL or IP address. The text-based filtering is based on machine learning or non-machine learning filtering algorithms that analyze the Web content for sensitive words or phrases commonly used in pornography. Image-based filtering utilizes content based image retrieval (CBIR) methods for image analysis.

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