The following post was first published on Google+ in September 2012. You may read the comments there before commenting here. According to some people, it’s a post that should be kept and not disappear in the volatility of my G+ account swapping. As the subject is highly controversial, I ask readers to use their judgement and not their emotion if they want to debate.
Murder is a terrible thing. I think we all agree that murdering is one of the worst act a man can possibly commit. Murder is something that we would prefer to not exist. And there is no doubt that someone committing a murder should be severely punished by the society.
Nevertheless, it exists. Hiding it doesn’t make it less real. Each year in every country, people are murdered. With the increasing availability of video devices, it is not uncommon to have murders recorded.
A decade ago, there was that terrible idea that some people were killed in front of a camera for the pleasure of sick and rich people that wanted to buy such videos. It was called “snuff movies”. I’ve no idea if it was really common but, those days, sick people can afford those movies for free.
Indeed, you can find plenty of videotaped murders: from the terrorists executing a hostage to the sick lone murder recording his actions with his cellphone in order to become famous on the internet. Or those from journalists in a warzone. Or the dashcam of a police car witnessing a police abuse.
We witness murders all the time. We might even enjoy it if we know it has been staged and that actors are perfectly fine. We call that an action/thriller movie.
Should videos of murders be banned? Should we try to criminalize the possession of a video murder?
While I agree that watching those videos only for your own enjoyment is a kind of perversion, at least the person watching them is not hurting anyone. The crime has already been committed and hopefully punished.
Some would argue that those kind of videos could give ideas, could lead to some taking action. But you could counter it by saying that some sick people that would have murdered innocents will be satisfied by watching existing videos. At that point, without scientific studies, you cannot argue in one sense or another. No one can deny that having videos of murders freely available could actually lower the murder rate in our society.
Other would insist that it creates a market for those kind of videos, leading murders to sell their “art”. But, so far, videos of murder are still allowed and we haven’t seen any increase in murders for the sake of making “snuff movies”. Society still stands.
In fact, videos of murders are and should stay legal. Anyone should have the right to watch them. If only, for the sake of information. For years, we have allowed journalists to describe in details how murders happen. Having the video is only the next step. With Internet, any citizen is a journalist and has the right to check for facts.
Of course, there’s also the duty to preserve the privacy of the victim’s family. This is the reason why we could ask some videos of murders to not be distributed on public medium such as newspaper websites or youtube. But we already deal with that everyday when famous people request videos of their private life to be removed. When this happens, it does not criminalize people who previously downloaded the video and still have it on their hard disk.
There is a more important point to be made. If we criminalize the possession of a video of a murder, enforcing the law means putting in place a complete system of surveillance of the citizens. By criminalizing the possession of a given data, you ask the authorities for being able to search any of your data at any time. Worst of all, you allow them to hide anything. The collateral murder video of WikiLeaks could have been completely forbidden because it was representing a murder. Any person who downloaded it could be charged.
I hate violence and murders are horrible. But, for all the reasons listed above, I’m glad that videos of murders are not illegal. You may disagree with me and I respect it. I’m open to debating the issue. But we agree that my opinion doesn’t make me a murderer, right?
As murder, child abuse is a terrible thing. I think we all agree that abusing a child is one of the worst act a man can possibly commit. Child abuse is something that we would prefer to not exist. And there is no doubt that someone committing a child abuse should be severely punished by the society…
Picture by Erica Hampton.
The Murder is a terrible thing… by Lionel Dricot, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Belgium License.
You appear to be arguing the following point: “mere possession of bits should never be illegal”.
I don’t disagree with the arguments you’ve made so far, but let’s take this in a completely different direction to explore how strongly you believe that.
Should I be allowed to possess a list of personal information and banking/creditcard details of people that was stolen from some website that had a security breach? Do you argue that the theft itself was an illegal act but if I hold the results of it as a third party after the fact then I’m completely innocent… unless I use that data to commit fraud?
How about countries that have regulations saying that this type of data has to be handled in a sensitive way with particular security protocols in place? I’m sure you’d agree that these laws are good. If I have this information, however, as an innocent third-party-after-the-fact to a system breakin, am I guilty of not following these laws properly by having it stored in an unecrypted file on my laptop that I carry around with me?
Do the wishes of the victim count in this ? For example, if I was murdered and my murder was recorded, I would like anybody to be able to see the video, the evidences, and to be able to identify the murderer, even in a country where it’s forbidden. (And in an ideal world, I would like my murderer to know that he is recorded committing the crime, and that the record will be publicly available, so he should think twice before doing it.)
« If we criminalize the possession of a video of a murder, enforcing the law means putting in place a complete system of surveillance of the citizens. By criminalizing the possession of a given data, you ask the authorities for being able to search any of your data at any time. »
I think the worst thing in this is that having knowledge of a crime becomes a crime. Authorities who think that having knowledge of a crime has more probability to lead to crime than to help to fight crime basically think that the society is globally evil. And the “watchmen” would watch the act of watching instead of watching crime itself.
Exactly like the people who thought that an opensource software would never be secure, and that a free collaborative encyclopedia would never be reliable, a state who criminalize access to murder videos is a state that considers everybody as a potential criminal before everything.
Are you claiming (in your last paragraph) that possessing images of child sexual abuse should also be legal?
We have had access to videos of murders for a long time, you can easily see them in docs about wars of historical importance, or of repressions of rebelions, its easy to find videos of executions, if only for the sake of information (i remember a well known one about vietnam, somebody grabbing another and shotting in the head, in front of the camera). It just is, but as everything, possessing some should be ok, possessing a large collection of it could be seen as something worriying.
For the last paragraph, good luck, you’ll have a hard time being forgiven of that one, you know that murder is not the worst thing a human can do, right? sexual abuse of a child is considered much much worse (and i find that worriying too).
I guess the last paragraph has to be understood as ironical, as the whole text. Anyway, if Ploum wants to be elected , he will have to be extremely clear on that point and the Parti Pirate will have to publish something to make clear that they have no intention of making legal the possession of that kind of videos.
In the case in which the whole text was not ironical, I want to If we criminalize the possession of a video of a murder, enforcing the law means putting in place a complete system of surveillance of the citizens. By criminalizing the possession of a given data, you ask the authorities for being able to search any of your data at any time. W answer about a point :
«If we criminalize the possession of a video of a murder, enforcing the law means putting in place a complete system of surveillance of the citizens. By criminalizing the possession of a given data, you ask the authorities for being able to search any of your data at any time.
»
This paragraph is plain wrong.
It is already forbiden to posses wapons at home while nobody is asking to authority to be able to check.
I find that security through obscurity is never a good idea. Outlawing video or other documentation of crimes in the hope to “stop the fruition of nasty stuff” or not to give hints to criminals, is akin to putting the head under the sand and hoping for the best.
I see one slight difference between videos of murders and videos showing child abuse: the victim of child abuse might well be still alive. And, for this very reason, the victim should be respected by having videos of himself be made illegal…
Now, if you ask me, I think it should also be illegal to possess or distribute videos showing murders without the authorization from the victim (the same way you can’t use a dead person’s organs without written permission). And, so, the same would apply for child abuse.
> For the last paragraph, good luck, you’ll have a hard time being forgiven of that one, you know that murder is not the worst thing a human can do, right? sexual abuse of a child is considered much much worse (and i find that worriying too).
By who? That’s clearly subjective.
> Now, if you ask me, I think it should also be illegal to possess or distribute videos showing murders without the authorization from the victim (the same way you can’t use a dead person’s organs without written permission). And, so, the same would apply for child abuse.
A video isn’t an organ.
P.S.: By no means do I endorse murder or child abuse, but criminalising the possession of *any* kind of data is insane.