I'm going to try this again because I'm high and feeling philosophical.
Why does the question of the origin of the photographs not matter concisely? I fully understand your binary analogy, but it is a bit unnecessarily verbose for most people who know rudimentary boolean algebra and set theory.
Because the photograph has no origin. As you apparently already are aware, digital photographs are merely really big numbers. All numbers exist independently of life, they cannot be created or destroyed they just are. There is a number out there that is identical to a picture of an adult who has never been molested being molested as a child. If I start at 1 and keep counting, eventually I am going to say a number that is equal to a child porn file. When a pedophile takes a picture of a child being molested, they are not creating the number they are merely instantiating it. Now it is true that this is by far the easiest way to instantiate the number that is equal to the child pornography file, although it is theoretically possible to arrive at the same number via coin flips and random chance the probability of this happening is extremely low. In the future it might be possible to arrive at the same number via 3D rendering software, and in these cases the probability of the 3D rendering being equal to a CP file that already exists, without using it as a visual reference, will be extremely low as well. But regardless, in either case it is possible.
The origin of the number doesn't matter because the number has no origin, it just is, like all numbers. The origin of the instantiation of the number doesn't matter because all instances of a number are equal. 1 is 1 regardless of if I come to this number via flipping a coin and random chance, or if I come to this number by starting with 2 and subtracting 1. The act of child molestation is bad, I think we can all agree on that. But the photographic result of child molestation is just a number, it is neutral. Looking at the picture produced by a number that was instantiated by the camera of a pedophile molesting a child is no different than looking at the picture produced by a number that was instantiated by random chance. How could it be different, they are equal numbers, clearly equal in the most fundamental sense of the word.
I don't see how people can attribute such powers to a number. I really don't get how people can think looking at a picture of child abuse causes more children to be abused, or causes additional damage to the depicted child. Paying for such images could create a market sure, and I think paying for the images is bad simply because it is essentially paying for children to be molested. When you view an image of child porn, the child was already molested in the past and there is nothing you can do about it. When you pay somebody who produces child porn for their production, you are funding their enterprise. If you express joy at somebody killing someone, of a particular race for example, in the past, I don't think it should be illegal, even if the killing was horrible and should not have taken place. If you pay somebody because they killed somebody of a particular race, you are essentially paying them to kill people of that race, and this should be illegal.
But we cannot say that newspapers should be banned merely because serial killers may kill to get the stories of the killings published in the papers. It is not the responsibility of the readers of a newspaper if a serial killer kills only because people will read the stories about what he did. Even if people read the stories for their entertainment value (and yeah serial killer stories are quite popular and read for entertainment), it is not their fault that the serial killer kills. We cannot put the responsibility for bad things that happen on the people who enjoy the information created due to the bad things happening, even in cases where the bad things only happened so information relating to them could be produced. Look at the medical information learned from the holocaust, some of the information learned from this horrible tragedy is still used by the medical community today, and it is way controversial as well
Many scholars are now discovering in reputable medical literature multiple references to Nazi experiments, or republished works of former SS doctors. These studies and references frequently bear no disclaimer as to how the data was obtained. Several scientists who have sought to use the Nazi research have stirred soul-searching about the social responsibility and potential abuses of science. These incidents prompt a number of questions for the scientific community. Is it ever appropriate to use data as morally repugnant as that which was extracted from victims of Nazism? If so, under what circumstances?
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This paper addresses the serious ethical problems of using tainted data from experiments on patients who were murdered and tortured by the Nazis in the name of "research." In particular this paper will address: the scientific validity of the experiments; the medical competence of the experimenters; the social utility in using the experimental data; case studies of proposed uses of the Nazi scientific data; the policy consideration involved when scientists use immorally obtained data; the condition and guidelines as to how and when the data is to be used; and the issue from the victims' perspective.
This project was undertaken with the utmost caution. The reader should be aware that the moral climate in the Jewish community is unforgiving to those who find any redeeming merit from the Nazi horrors. Anyone who dares suggest the historical lessons which can be learned from the Holocaust, or from the victims' suffering, risks being labeled a heretic or a sensationalist bent on distorting history for personal gain. Many in the community seriously fear that insights might replace condemnation of the Nazi evil.2
and again I do not see what the controversy is. Simply because the instantiation of this data had a horrible origin is no reason to censor people from the data, or to not make use of the valuable data. In the case of child porn even I would say that it is valuable information in that some studies have shown if pedophiles have access to it they are at a lower risk of molesting children. So in these cases the acts utilized to instantiate the data are beyond a doubt horrible, but the information produced is morally neutral. Now in the case of child abuse images I can see only one potentially good argument and it is that the children depicted feel stress caused by people viewing the images. And although this appears to be a good argument at surface value, it really is not. Because the children cannot tell when people on the internet are viewing their images. There are even technical solutions that can make it impossible for anyone to tell that someone is viewing the images. But even if the child literally has no chance of ever determining if someone views their image or not, they are still going to feel the same exact stress knowing that somebody might view their image. That is always going to be there for them, once images are put onto the internet there is always a chance that they will surface up at some place or somebody will obtain a copy of them. So the act of a person viewing an image of CP has no real effect on the child depicted, the prolonged stress of the child is because somebody put their image on the internet in the first place. I do not believe for a second that if some random person on Tor goes to a CP site and downloads an image of CP that they have any effect what-so-ever on the depicted child. I also do not believe for a second that their act of downloading an image, which caused a log file to gain an extra line or two on a CP server, is going to translate into more children being molested. Even if a hundred thousand anonymous people download a CP image I do not think that this is going to cause more children to be molested. People simply do not molest children because somebody decided to look at freely available CP on some hidden website. And if you think they do, then why are you against the idea of CP distributed via PIR? Because in these cases we can actually hide the fact that anybody is even downloading any CP to begin with! How can a demand that cannot be known translate into anything?
But no matter how many times I point out that there are technical solutions for hiding the demand of CP, people still keep saying that demand turns into supply, which is a dubious claim by itself. But why can they not think of some new argument by now, I have already explained that we can allow pedophiles to view CP without them contributing to any demand that can be determined. So I do not think anybody really thinks that the problem is that demand leads to supply, because even when I address this (theoretical) issue with a (real) technical system, they continue to be against it. Some of them say that the child is abused each time the image is viewed, but I have already given my reasoning as to why the actual viewing of the image does not harm the child: it is the potential for somebody to view the image that causes prolonged harm to the child, a potential that will always exist after an image is published to the internet or otherwise distributed from the producer. Once I have addressed the demand<->supply argument and the revictimization argument, people pretty much have nothing else to say that could be seen as legitimate. Some will say that it should be illegal merely because the images are so disgusting and are images of abuse, but these same people do not want to outlaw images of the holocaust or other war crimes. They say that it is the intent that matters, that when somebody looks at images of the holocaust they are not getting pleasure from it but when somebody looks at images of CP they are getting pleasure from the suffering that happened to others in the past. But this argument is clearly false, they must care about more than intent: they are fine with the police looking at images of child abuse because their intent is to bust the other people looking at the images for pleasure, but they would not be okay with the police molesting children to catch the people molesting children for pleasure! At a basic level they understand that there is a huge difference between looking at images of CP (something they allow the police to do as their intent is "good") and molesting children (something they would never allow the police to do even if their intent is good!). But even though they must realize there is a massive enormous difference they still like to equate the two.
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