Is There an Age Limit/Minimum on Characters?

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Pssh....the only age of consent in my house is 18. I don't care what the laws say. >_>
 
Is there a way we could move the Servers to a country where the Law recognises the difference between Actual Child Porn and simply RP Smut?

I know that could be difficult though, cause @jared555 needs to maintain the Servers and that might be tough if the Hardware is in another country.
 
Is there a way we could move the Servers to a country where the Law recognises the difference between Actual Child Porn and simply RP Smut?

I know that could be difficult though, cause @jared555 needs to maintain the Servers and that might be tough if the Hardware is in another country.
Frankly speaking, I don't think anyone is interested in going through any sort of hassle like that for the sake of letting a handful of people write children into their smut. Iwaku is a pretty permissive place, but there's a huge gap between saying "yeah, do whatever you want as long as it's not against the laws, you perverts" and actively supporting some of the more extreme aspects of smut writing.

Also, just moving the server would only cover owner asses (and that not very well unless they also move to said other country to be no longer beholden to laws in other countries), users in the US can still be caught and prosecuted for creating illegal material whilst living in the US. Same for a lot of other countries. Oh, and it's worth noting that in a lot of places, including the US, it's actually obscenity laws rather than child porn laws that are most likely to come into play in a hypothetical law enforcement dropping the hammer scenario.
 
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Is there a way we could move the Servers to a country where the Law recognises the difference between Actual Child Porn and simply RP Smut?
Even if the servers were located in another country, as site owner that lives in the U.S. I am still liable for content that I allow on the site and could potentially be held accountable. Be it child smut, allowing illegal downloads, or some whackadoodle posting death threats. When something here on the site gets reported to authorities, I'll get fun phonecalls from police/investigators. And yes, that HAS happened before. These rules aren't just protecting members, they also protect me. 8D


In any case Jorick pretty much nailed everything on the dot about the Hows and Whys!

As a WRITER I want the freedom to write anything I want to write and tell any kind of story I want. Even if that includes morally objectionable, shocking, traumatic content. Stories are not always rainbow kittens, sometimes they have fucked up shit in them, especially for horror/thriller/crime stories. Iwaku does not believe in censorship of content. We want you to have as much freedom that we can give you!

That is why our rule for characters in sex scenes goes as low as 13, even though it's super gross. D: 13 begins the teen years and teenagers realistically start getting involved in sex.

I would honestly have ZERO limits at all, if I didn't have to worry about legal issues that could pop up because of the people that are cybering more than they are roleplaying. Unfortunately, it can be really different to tell the difference between people genuinely trying to tell a story using sex as the focus VS the people who are just getting off on it for cybering reasons. It'd be impossible to moderate properly.
 
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Frankly speaking, I don't think anyone is interested in going through any sort of hassle like that for the sake of letting a handful of people write children into their smut. Iwaku is a pretty permissive place, but there's a huge gap between saying "yeah, do whatever you want as long as it's not against the laws, you perverts" and actively supporting some of the more extreme aspects of smut writing.

Also, just moving the server would only cover owner asses (and that not very well unless they also move to said other country to be no longer beholden to laws in other countries), users in the US can still be caught and prosecuted for creating illegal material whilst living in the US. Same for a lot of other countries. Oh, and it's worth noting that in a lot of places, including the US, it's actually obscenity laws rather than child porn laws that are most likely to come into play in a hypothetical law enforcement dropping the hammer scenario.
Even if the servers were located in another country, as site owner that lives in the U.S. I am still liable for content that I allow on the site and could potentially be held accountable. Be it child smut, allowing illegal downloads, or some whackadoodle posting death threats. When something here on the site gets reported to authorities, I'll get fun phonecalls from police/investigators. And yes, that HAS happened before. These rules aren't just protecting members, they also protect me. 8D


In any case Jorick pretty much nailed everything on the dot about the Hows and Whys!

As a WRITER I want the freedom to write anything I want to write and tell any kind of story I want. Even if that includes morally objectionable, shocking, traumatic content. Stories are not always rainbow kittens, sometimes they have fucked up shit in them, especially for horror/thriller/crime stories. Iwaku does not believe in censorship of content. We want you to have as much freedom that we can give you!

That is why our rule for characters in sex scenes goes as low as 13, even though it's super gross. D: 13 begins the teen years and teenagers realistically start getting involved in sex.

I would honestly have ZERO limits at all, if I didn't have to worry about legal issues that could pop up because of the people that are cybering more than they are roleplaying. Unfortunately, it can be really different to tell the difference between people genuinely trying to tell a story using sex as the focus VS the people who are just getting off on it for cybering reasons. It'd be impossible to moderate properly.
This Internet Law stuff is more complicated than I thought. o_o

Though does the RP VS Cyber thing really matter from a legal perspective?
It may be written for different motivations, but at the end of the day it's both just written material of sexual content.
 
This Internet Law stuff is more complicated than I thought. o_o

Though does the RP VS Cyber thing really matter from a legal perspective?
It may be written for different motivations, but at the end of the day it's both just written material of sexual content.
Yes, it matters a lot. RP can be reasonably argued as a work of art, and as such it would have some nice legal protections (1st Amendment in the US, for example) that could potentially make the difference between an attorney or judge seeing the material as legal or illegal. Cybering is done purely for sexual gratification and as such is inherently weak to obscenity charges because most obscenity charges revolve around material having offensive content and no artistic value.

To make a loose analogy of it, the difference between RP and cybering is the same as the difference between a painting of people having sex and people randomly having sex on a park bench. One is art, the other is not, and art has a lot of legal protections that are very nice to have when you're working in the grey areas of legality, which is exactly where this age of characters question resides.
 
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It can actually be a legal issue for users too. Accessing / possessing certain materials has been enough to get people into trouble before.
 
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