Forum - View topicNEWS: Idea Factory Int'l President: 'We Don't Want to Censor Anymore'
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yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
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Whoa, let's take a step back here. In the US at least governments cannot ban anything unless it crosses the line into "obscenity," which I suspect few if any video games do. Obscenity itself has been hard to define; Justice Potter Stewart is well-known for his "I know it when I see it" comment. Nudity and ordinary sexual acts like intercourse certainly do not qualify. (That link includes an excerpt from Bob Woodward's The Brethren about "movie night" at the Supreme Court. That was the day many of the Justices, all men at the time, trooped down to the basement to watch the material in dispute.) Findlaw doesn't list any obscenity cases before the Court since 1994. The controlling precedent remains Miller v California (1973) which establishes the rule that to be "obscene" a work must lack "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." |
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Lili-Hime
 Posts: 569 |
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I stand by my original post. Sex is okay, nudity is ok; child nudity / pornography is not, even in drawings. There have been news stories about this in the past here, and here. That findlaw site must be broke or outdated because those are juts the first two cases in the US I found on ANN. From one of these: According to United States Code, Section 1466A, it is illegal for: Any person who ... knowingly produces, distributes, receives, or possesses with intent to distribute, a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting, that - (1)(A) depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and (B) is obscene
Miller v California was superseded by New York v Ferber (1982).
Sure these are rarely tried, but imagine say if a major Japanese publisher gets named in an obscenity case.... that wouldn't be very good for their image. The bottom line is that loli hentai is technically illegal in the US, and not in Japan. The only game in question that this company has censored involved the player rubbing a screen in order to remove clothes from girls, sometimes who were prepubscent. So they removed the prepubscent girls. It's not hard to see a case that would go to court over that. Also while the ESRB (game ratings board in the US) cannot censor content it does rate and put advisory labels on games, like we have with movies or the Japanese CERO system. An 'M' rating is equivalent of an R. There is a higher rating called AO or adults only, which is mostly reserved for porn games & extreme violence. It's worth noting that an AO rating has a negative stigma, and to date no console or handheld game has been rated AO as companies have opted to edit their games to get an M rating. It should also be noted that Canada, Australia, Sweden, New Zealand, and the UK all have similar laws that make sexual images of prepubscent girls illegal. As videogames are often licenses for regions (Europe, North America) vs specific countries, this makes it harder when licensing material of questionable legality. |
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yuna49
Posts: 3804 |
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I wasn't really talking about child pornography which has a different legal history than regular "obscenity" cases which largely concern adults. I was reacting to the comment that material might be censored because it is "too inappropriate." That's not the legal standard in the US.
Personally I don't think drawings or animations of children engaging in sex should be banned since no real children are harmed. And I tend to agree with those who say that permitting such fictional depictions may provide a harmless outlet for those who have the urge to engage in sex with children. My view is largely consistent with Ashcroft v Free Speech Coalition (2002) which struck down some of the provisions of the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 as overly broad. The Court found that "virtual" child pornography was not "obscene" under Miller nor constitutionally prohibited by Ferber which you cite. In Ashcroft the Court ruled that "Ferber upheld a prohibition on the distribution and sale of child pornography, as well as its production, because these acts were 'intrinsically related' to the sexual abuse of children." In response to this ruling Congress passed the "PROTECT" Act in 2003 which ruled illegal "a digital or computer image that is 'indistinguishable' from that of a real minor." There are some notorious convictions under the statute like US v Whorley, but none of those cases have reached the Supreme Court as far as I know. While Whorley possessed hentai depicting children in sexual acts, he also had other material involving actual children, so the relevance of his conviction to anime and games is unclear. Personally I find it hard to accept that anime depictions of children are "indistinguishable" from real minors and thus prohibited by the PROTECT Act. While you are reasonably concerned about depictions of pre-pubescent children, the problem with these statutes is that they apply to all minors. A cartoon depiction of two teenagers having sex is clearly very different from one where the children are elementary school age. Nevertheless a strict interpretation of PROTECT would apply to something like 2014's Parasyte where two high schoolers are depicted as having intercourse. As the Court observed in Ashcroft "teenagers engaging in sexual activity ... is a fact of modern society and has been a theme in art and literature for centuries." So I'd have to disagree with your rather sweeping claim that "loli hentai" are "illegal" in the US. Until the Court rules on a case that overturns or modifies the precedent in Ashcroft, I don't think that statement is correct. |
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littlegreenwolf
 Posts: 4796 Location: Seattle, WA |
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It's legal to publish comics featuring people under-aged characters in the us, it just mainly depends on 2 things: 1) the obscenity laws of your state and 2) if you can find a publisher to print it.
It's even easier if it's a digital medium. Comics featuring lolicon have been published for an English audience in America, and there's plenty of comics out there in physical form featuring teenagers. Officially licensed digital releases are even bigger in number. Since no cases to our knowledge have been brought up against Idea Factory that we've heard of I think it's highly doubtful Idea Factory is avoiding it due to legal reasons. Anyone in the industry they're in would already have lawyers well versed in what they can and can't release in the US. |
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strawberry-kun
Posts: 301 |
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It's definitely not for legal reasons since it was announced a little while ago that the game in question that got censored, Monster Monpiece, is being released fully uncensored on Steam.
It's a little silly to me to think that a little minigame would violate obscenity laws. Officially released anime and visual novels get away with stuff just as bad or worse especially in the case of visual novels. Much, much, much worse in the case of visual novels. It takes a lot more than a suggestive minigame to get tried for obscenity. |
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whiskeyii
 Posts: 2250 |
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It's likely less that the content is suggestive, and much more likely that the ages, or age-appearances, of the characters involved are what make it "obscene". Then again, Steam seems to just waffle back and forth. Monster Monpiece is allowed in full, Seduce Me was banned, and Cho Dengeki Stryker is censored (though that being full-on hentai scenes, apparently, it might just be too much of an AO rating headache to deal with).
Published? Officially published? Like, in print and by an official company and everything? That surprises me. Got any examples? |
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strawberry-kun
Posts: 301 |
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I did mean loli content. Officially released anime gets away with far worse loli content than this game does, and that's even more true for visual novels. Heck, there's a game called Imouto Paradise that's officially released in English that features this character as one of the heroines and is actual hentai. There's a disclaimer that all characters are over 18, but really? That's far from the only example as well. I'm not arguing that loli hentai isn't obscene though because it probably is, but it seems incredibly unlikely to me that Monster Monpiece is even close to being illegal due to obscenity. I say that loli hentai is probably obscene just due to how vague the laws are even though people have been charged for it. I can more easily believe the Monster Monpiece situation is an ESRB issue rather than a legality issue. |
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littlegreenwolf
Posts: 4796 Location: Seattle, WA |
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XXXmix by Bosshi, via Fakku, and sold at Anime Expo 2015 with the author there to sign it. It's not all lolicon, had one chapter among several. But either way, it's very unlikely any laws caused this. Just stuff like steam maybe refusing to sell unless it's censored. Yeah, steam allowed that one yuri game recently, but the content in that wasn't that heavy from what I recall. They're lightening up, but not fast enough for some. |
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Stuart Smith
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I can't really agree with that assessment. Arguments and complaints of diversity are just as prevalent in Hollywood, if not more so if only because television and movies are much more mainstream. Whitewashing in cases like Exodus, 21, Avatar, and pretty much every anime adaption gets a lot of internet rage. There's also complaints about only a certain percentage of characters on TV being black, lack of female superheroes and Black Widow being the only main Avenger not to have her own movie series. Other online news sites constantly talk about the lack of diversity, the only real difference is no one seems to take those criticisms seriously. Anita and others have been invited to a few video game companies and conventions to give lectures on diversity in gaming, but no one's ever invited someone like George Takai, one of the more prominent speakers for whitewashing in Hollywood, to do the same, or other people for more diversity. In fact, I remember a segment on Conan where Takai tried to talk about it, but Conan dismissed him as being silly and just generally didn't care and turned it into a joke. It kind of summed up how the argument is treated in the realm of Hollywood. I agree video games are a newer medium so they're more malleable and easier to push around. Has a movie studio ever been in Idea Factory or Koei Tecmo's position or being afraid of releasing a movie due to perceived misogyny? I think movies like I Spit On Your Grave and similar torture porn movies are more offensive than Dead or Alive in that category. I'm not sure what you mean by a video game equivalent version of Hunger Games, but if you mean a game where you play as a female then there's tons.
Qwaser of Stigmata both had it's anime and manga officially released in America. One of the main characters is an elementary school girl who seduces a high school pedophile into being her sex slave. You see things like oral sex, breast lactation/sucking, full frontal nudity, and bestiality. The manga was more graphic, though. Both were way more graphic than any game that's been censored for an American release. Lolicon elements are more accepted by American anime and manga licensors than American video game licensors. The different mindset might be that video games should be mass marketed so censoring out underage girls in Monster Monpiece might get your average gamer to buy it, where as the only anime companies that have that mindset are ones like 4kids and Saban and only marketed anime exclusively towards kids. -Stuart Smith |
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