[Clipart] pron

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Jonathan Leighton <turnip at turnipspatch.com> writes:

> > The images deleted by Rejon were photos not SVG, so in this case
> > deletion was perfectly justified (I pondered to do it myself)
> 
> Ah right. Is this not prevented by the upload script then?

No.  The upload script allows arbitrary filetypes to be uploaded.

This is how wmf was originally handled and is still how bzipped
collections are handled, because Archive::Tar does not support bzip
compression.  

Consequently, items that are not vector images can be uploaded as
"other".  We have received a number of images that clearly are not
vector (JPEG and PNG being the most common formats, but we also have
received .bmp and GIF images) and also some items that are not images
per se (e.g., PDF, avi) and some things I cannot identify (e.g., at
least one .ai file, whatever that is, possibly a video format, but I'm
guessing).  They generally end up in the failed archives.

I was (probably naively) hoping that the issue of vector porn doesn't
come up soon, because I do not wish to be involved with distributing
it; it is a pleasant surprise to me to hear other people on the list
saying that we don't want to be a repository for that.  So far I think
the riskiest thing we've got is a mermaid, but she's wearing
seashells.  (There are also some sillhouette diagrams such as you
might find in a children's anatomy book, and a highly stylized "sexy
woman" that is so abstract you can't tell if she's wearing clothes or
not.  I might see flagging the latter with an "erotic" keyword, but I
couldn't make a decent argument to the effect that it's porn.)

Raster porn, however, is an *easy* call: we can reject that as
"definitely not vector clipart", and I don't think anybody is going to
come up with a coherent argument to the contrary.  Frankly it would
not bother me in the least if we developed a policy of deleting any
raster image that looks even vaguely like it might be construed as
containing nudity or porn -- collecting raster images is an explicit
non-goal of the project anyhow, and any that we do collect are purely
incidental and are going in the failed files archives anyway, which we
don't advertise on the downloads page or anything, and my take on the
matter is that that is unlikely to change in the forseeable future,
unless someone knows something I don't.

With vector images we probably should be a little more careful, e.g.,
have several people review the images in question before performing
any deletion, so that no one person can be accused of unilaterally
censoring the collection.  If it is a group activity, then it is
self-censorship, i.e., the library deciding for itself what to
publish, which is something that everyone who publishes ultimately
must do in one way or another.  I'm thinking here of protecting the
reputations of the people doing the deletion, from accusations of
censorship.

Like I said, I was hoping that the question of vector porn wouldn't
come up.  But that's probably naive; if whe had a procedure in place
for dealing with it, before it happens, that might be better.

-- 
Open Clip Art Library:  Drawing Together
http://www.openclipart.org/