http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7770781.stm

Summary: A judge in .AU has convicted a man on child pornography charges based on his having a cartoon of the Simpsons characters having sex.

Okay, a cartoon of two characters, even inkblots, having sex is pornography in my eyes. "I'll know it when I see it" may not be the best of legal standards, but it's evidently all we have. Well, there are more, but that's the best-known one.

A cartoon of this doesn't serve any good, and is obviously intended to arouse the viewer's baser instincts. I'll leave the question as to if it is successful to the individual viewer. (Note: The above news article doesn't have any salacious imagery.)

The stretch is calling it child porn. I suspect the judge thought it could be used to lure a child to model these acts. For me, child porn is a rather stark and clear definition: a child was visibly exploited in making this image.

There have been defenses in the past for computerized imagery. That is a murky area. Some simplified depictions of the human form are obviously fake, and others are obviously photo-real. The obviously fake ones I don't count - they may be evidence that the owner is someone I do not wish to associate with, but they are not evidence of a crime.

The photo-real ones, well, that's where the fog comes it. For me, the key deciding point is if the retouching was an attempt to dodge the charge. If one of the ingredients of the image was itself child porn, then the resulting image is as well. If it's Poser or somesuch rendering software cranked to the max, then it's still pornographic, but not exploitive of a child.

But the Simpsons? Come on, man.