I value the freedom of people to do what they think is right over my ability to force them to do anything other than not force others to do what they think is right. Well the big Eastern European production studios used only professional photographers with cutting edge equipment of the time. I have no idea what the quality of the 'average' CP is though. I don't imagine that it is mostly extremely low quality though. Anyway the production of new CP could still exact a price if distribution were handled securely. Although the content will leak immediately to P2P networks. I do think directly paying for the production of CP should be illegal, just as I think that the production of CP should be illegal. I will try to dig up a link to a typology of CP offenders I read once. Googling around a little didn't find it for me, but I can probably still dig it up. I don't believe it listed the prevalence of each type of CP offender though. I can also likely find several other citations for the somewhat counter intuitive claim that pedophiles are not the most common CP offenders, although this will entail me digging through google and a bunch of .PDFs. So in short when I get more free time I will get your citations and post back with them, and until that point in time feel free to not believe me . CP offenders are a pretty diverse bunch and certainly pedophiles are in their ranks, however the comprehensive typologies include a lot more offender types. Curious people, sadists, libertarians, pornography addicts, voyeurs, non-pedophile philes (infantophiles, hebephiles, ephebephiles) ((although this is somewhat of a stretch as most people incorrectly lump them together with pedophiles regardless, and some people don't even consider jailbait to be CP)) and a lot of other things I cannot immediately recall. Curious offenders may search for CP not because they have any sexual attraction to children but rather out of a desire to see what the big deal is all about. They usually are busted with a few images, sometimes even in their caches and not even saved. Thankfully they are not very commonly arrested as law enforcement do make some attempts at focusing resources to people with larger collections and people who search for more disturbing materials / materials more indicative of being a child molester. However sometimes these people get tangled up in the web when they use P2P programs, as they don't realize the images they downloaded are being served from their computers, and thus they have been elevated from the bottom of the target list to a much higher position as a distributor. Libertarian offenders are pretty similar to curious offenders, although their driving motivation to look at CP is because the government restricts them from doing so. They pretty much have the same pattern as the curious offender. Sadists who are not pedophiles may still be attracted to hardcore child pornography, it is not the age of the victim that they find attractive but rather the suffering inflicted upon the victim. Sadists who view/distribute CP are the highest priorities for law enforcement, and they signal their status by having collections of largely 'hurtcore' CP. They are more likely to use security measures to protect themselves, and to be parts of a community as well (people who are parts of a CP community are also higher priority targets for LE than people who do not engage in networking). Pornography addicts may view CP even though they are not pedophiles, because they become addicted to looking at taboo images. Their progression may be similar to that of the stereotypical drug addicts, starting with softcore legal materials and working up to extreme legal materials prior to moving into illegal materials of increasing extremity. This is a very common sort of offender, and they are often big collectors and as such pretty high priority targets of law enforcement. They are also very vulnerable to law enforcement operations as they tend to use P2P networks (making them distributors in many cases, often unintentionally) and limited security measures. A voyeuristic offender may view CP due to a desire to see people who have been covertly recorded in sexual situations. They would be more attracted to the fact that a spy cam recorded someone in a bathroom naked than they would be to the fact that the person it recorded naked was underage. And of course there are the various other age related philes, pedophiles only being attracted to children from ages 2 to 12 but CP encompassing all pornography of anyone under 18. Law enforcement put the highest priority on people who view infant porn, and the least priority on people who view jailbait porn (which is often freely distributed even through otherwise legal amateur sites, with very little law enforcement attention given to the viewers/distributors or producers for that matter in the case of self created CP). Since in common speech pedophile means anyone attracted to anyone under 18, and technically child porn means porn with anyone under 18 in it, this can seem like kind of a stretch. Websites can still charge a premium now for adult porn because a lot of old people and internet noobs don't realize they can get the same exact shit for free. Also I know that legality will not increase demand. I can assure you that nobody who doesn't want to look at CP today, is going to run out and start looking at CP because it has been legalized. I imagine you think that legalizing heroin will lead to a bunch of people running out and trying it as well? You are going to need to show me the mechanism by which this will happen. The people who produce CP have their own reasons for doing so, and only the commercial producers (who are essentially extinct, and who would still be breaking the law by producing anyway), attention seekers (who produce for the props they get from the CP community) and exclusive content seekers (who produce CP to satisfy the membership requirements of private producer only communities) seem open to the formation of a supply and demand relationship. A very small percentage of the children who are molested on photo/video, are molested for the primary purpose of child pornography production. Should we not buy diamonds because they could be blood diamonds? Should we not buy shoes or electronics or anything else from Asian countries because they could have been produced by slaves in sweatshops? Your argument is that we should outlaw diamonds, shoes and electronics because otherwise people might buy them and fund immoral activity, leading to even more immoral activity. My argument is that we should punish the people who are doing immoral things and leave the innocent people who are not hurting others alone. The thing is that the increased demand would be impossible to determine if distribution took place only over a properly designed PIR infrastructure. If zero people or a million people are downloading CP from the PIR network, nobody would be able to tell.