“A professor accused of offenses against morality for creating a link from her university department’s Web site to a site promoting bestiality showed up with her students for an investigative hearing… English professor Josephine Ho, who is also the director of the National Central University’s Center for the Study of Sexuality, put the link to ‘Beast Love’ on the center’s Web site in April… The site, which features pictures and a manual, has sparked discussion about the fine line between pornography and academic research… If prosecutors decide there is a case, Ho will be charged with violating Article 235 of the Criminal Code.” — Taipei Times (Taiwan)

The ready availability of bestiality on the internet makes it easy to forget that in many places — perhaps even most places? — bestiality is illegal, and so is pornography featuring bestiality. Though most net-crime resources are dedicated toward the prevention of hacking and kiddie porn, it’s fully possible a person could get arrested for disseminating pictures of sex between animals and humans.

But what constitutes “disseminating?” Setting aside the issue of whether any information — illicit pornography, bomb-building diagrams, racist propaganda — should ever be illegal, is linking to a site tantamount to distributing that site’s content? It’s a very difficult question. A link is just a pointer, after all — and yet you could say that a pimp is just a pointer to prostitutes, or a lookout is just a pointer in a bank heist. Sometimes a pointer is an integral part of a crime — an accomplice, an accessory.

So would a regular old hyperlink fall in that category? Logically it probably should, though practically speaking it would be safe to guess that laws surrounding linking methodologies will be randomly applied: a bestiality case here, a terrorist case there, with none of them setting a globally accepted precedent. After all, if you make it illegal to link to bestiality or other illegal information, then you could indict Google, any other search engine, and any spider or crawler that indexes information that could include such pornography. You could indict a lot of key players in the internet business — not because they deliberately distribute bestiality, but because their technologies inevitably stumble across whatever weird information is out there, and there happens to be plenty of bestiality out there.

In principle you ought to be responsible for your bots, but in practice your bots are on their own.

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