I suppose I can admit that I have for a long time not been in favor of legalizing the payment for child pornography, but rather only possession and distribution that does not involve a financial transaction. What caused me to change my mind in regards to for profit distribution is largely that it is seen as not immoral by many libertarians. The primary libertarian argument I have heard for why even payment for distribution should be legal, is because the payment is really for the costs of distribution. I have for a long time thought that CP possession and distribution should not be illegal, but then I must ask myself is it right to put restrictions on the people who legally provide CP, that are different from the restrictions put on people who provide other things? It seems that saying distributors of one legal thing must not be paid to compensate for the bandwidth consumed and other costs incurred, is not in line with freedom. Actually the way I worded my response made it not paradoxical. The thing is I value peoples right to teach whatever they want to their children more than I value children being taught things that I think are correct. The thing is even though religious people are wrong about very many things, they have functioned in society for quite some time now, and indeed they are the overwhelming majority of the world. Although more intelligent people are less likely to believe in religions in general, even some very intelligent people have been religious, and there are many religious doctors and scientists even. Hell, some Christians even believe in evolution, but that God started the process. So not every religious person would desire to teach their children nothing of real value. Although I can admit that a significant enough number of them would. But even though I am quite certain that what I believe is right, I can recognize that the people who want to teach creationism are quite certain about what they believe is right as well. So long as they do not force my children to learn Creationism, I don't really care what they teach their children. We could fight with them etc, or we could just mind our own business. That is what is great about libertarianism and horrible about statism, statists believe in one size fits all solutions, the public schools will teach from one curriculum to all of the students, and the curriculum will of course be biased (for lack of a better word?) as pretty much everything is once it gets any significant distance away from math (I don't think anyone disagrees that 1 + 1 = 2??). Even in the US schools they teach children many lies about drugs, I would not want my children subjected to such bullshit. In a libertarian society on the other hand, you are free to have your children taught your beliefs but you are not allowed to force people to teach their children your beliefs and you are not allowed to force people pay for the education of your child. I mean I think that if I know someone named Bob, and Bob has a little girl, that I should not legally be able to pay Bob (edit: for -> to create) pictures of him molesting his little girl. to do so would be equivalent to paying someone to murder someone for me, and even though I am not carrying out the murder I am directly funding it. However, if someone sells CP that they did not pay a producer for, and someone sends them money for that CP, I do not think that this should be illegal. This is not funding the molestation of children, this is funding the transfer of data. Unless a clear and direct link can be established between the funds and the molestation of an actual child, with proof given that the payment was sent in order to create new images of a child being molested, then I do not think it is an issue. I will try and get you some citations within the next two days , I am a bit too busy right now to hunt down obscure .pdfs and dig through them The thing is I don't think that adult pay sites offer these things over filesharing services. To access a pay site you need to sign up, get your credit card out and join. To get the same shit for free from a p2p network, you type in the name of what you are looking for. Pay sites do not have more choices than P2P networks, because P2P networks have almost everything from every pay site + a bunch of amateur shit that is not on pay sites. They have fresh content but only for a small period of time before it makes its way to filesharing sites, and additionally I am not sure what sort of customization you are talking about. I said 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 it would be similar between heroin legalization and CP legalization. The desire for both will not change, which is the only claim that I made. The demand may increase slightly, but I doubt by much. And why don't these commercial producers exist today? There are plenty of hidden services, bitcoin, etc. The CP groups that have been operating online for over a dozen years consist of some of the most skilled internet security people in the entire world, it isn't like they couldn't set up a commercial distribution channel. And they already have millions of CP images to boot! But I just don't see it happening. The last group that tried commercializing old images was pwnt by interpol, but at their peak they served 30,000 customers in the entire world, which is a small drop in the bucket compared to the total demand for CP. I think that nobody really wants to risk their entire lives in jail so they can make some commercial CP that will be freely available within days after its commercialization. The financial incentives for CP are not going to increase if distribution and possession are legalized. In fact they will probably drop if anything, just like the prices for recreational drugs would drop and the cartels would go out of business overnight if drugs were legalized. There are already freely accessable distribution channels for CP that are not going to be shut down any time soon, Tor for one and possibly even more infamously Freenet which is probably one of the biggest CP caches ever. It is very difficult to prove that anyone requested CP from Freenet, because it has strong plausible deniability built into it, and it is very difficult to tell if someone originally inserted content into Freenet as well. The feds have not taken down any Tor hidden services, it is easier to trace them than to prove that someone downloaded anything in particular from Freenet. Also don't forget bitcoin and bitcoin blind mixes, which make getting money from customers and cashing it very secure. It isn't like people with massive access to CP are not aware of these technologies, so where are these huge production studios you are worried about, and where are these commercial CP providers you are worried about? The studios have all been gone since the mid 2000's and the commercial sites are all but extinct as well, even though with with modern technology distributing commercially is easier than it has ever been, there is nobody doing it currently and a few years ago the last group of people doing it were pwnt (and they had 30,000 customers in total, and they were not producers). Do you have incontrovertible proof that someone who pays to view a CP image has caused a child to be molested? Nope. Sure it could happen, but it will not happen in all cases. I could go to a hidden service, download some CP (but I wont because eww), and sell it to you for fifty bucks right now. Did a child get molested because of our transaction? No. Did your demand for CP cause child abuse to occur in this instance? Nope! It is not an absolute fact though, as I explained above. I never argued that CP distribution should be entirely regulated to private information retrieval protocols, but it is just a thought experiment for you so you can see that you are not really concerned with the demand for CP but rather are simply against CP in general. If the demand for CP can be perfectly obfuscated, and the demand for CP is the only reason to keep CP possession and distribution illegal, then if CP is distributed with PIR it shouldn't be an issue,