Killing off snuff films

Policing the Internet has always been iffy, in part because of its international character and free speech issues, but also because laws have not kept up with technology.

However, just as child pornographers are prosecuted for what they do online, so, too, should there be laws in place that allow for prosecution of those who deal in death porn, or snuff films. The video that Luka Rocco Magnotta allegedly shot of himself murdering and dismembering Jun Lin, is one of those. It was posted recently — but has since been taken down — by Mark Marek, an Edmontonian who runs a website that features videos of true crime.

In an interview with CBC Radio, Marek argues that his site is about “real life events . . . raw reality in its truest form. Honest, uncensored, real. Like life itself.”

It’s ironic that Marek says his policy is never to post any videos showing animals suffering, but he has no qualms about showing humans suffering.

It is one thing when photographers and videographers capture the deaths of people on film in the course of covering an uprising or a riot, for example. It is quite another when a killer is filmed committing the bloody act and his video ends up on the Internet for sick minds to click on. This is obscenity.

Free speech comes with limits, and the law needs to spell out those limits for those who would make and distribute such films, just as it has for the kiddie pornographers.