> profiting from the naked image of a child who couldn't consent for themselves.

As an honest question, I'm curious whether the "naked" part makes this worse in your opinion. I, personally, don't feel any shame about my body at that age -- too young for me to even remember -- being seen. (As opposed to a nude photo of me now being distributed without my approval.)

To me it seems like the nakedness is irrelevant -- if it was a violation of consent to use his baby image, then clothes don't negate the violation.

For myself, no. I've played naked ultimate frisbee points before and there are undoubtedly pictures of me naked doing ridiculous shit as part of college frisbee team hazing floating around the internet (or one of my former teammates hardrives) somewhere - and I honestly don't care.

Although, that said, those pictures have never surfaced. My feelings about them might change if a coworker pulled them up unexpectedly one day and started giving me shit for it.

Whatever our individual feelings about nudity - or how it should be perceived in society (and I agree, it should not be shameful or automatically sexualized the way it is) our society does view nudity a certain way. And people are allowed to feel about they feel about that. If it makes it worse for him, and it sure seems to, then that's something we have to respect. Even if we wish it were otherwise.

My main thing is voluntary consent. He couldn't. He should have been able to. I don't think parents should have the right to effectively sell their kids before they can consent. If that means we don't can't use kids younger than a certain age in modeling and marketing, so be it.

There are billions of photos of infants and young children used in instruction manuals, text books, advertising, and as stock photos. What's more, these are very often necessarily taken in various states of undress, for example the diapered infants on the box of the kiddie pool in my backyard.

Another example: the instructions for my pediatric otoscope used photos of an infant, showing proper placement. This is a commercial use.

Do you propose that all of these photos should be made illegal?

EDIT: And what about movies? Should we ban infants and small children from film as well?

but no child can consent to anything, so unless we just put a blanket ban on media depictions of under-18s, we have to rely on the consent of the parents

i really don't see what the moral question is. they wanted a photo of a newborn swimming, they bought the photo of a newborn swimming

I think it'd be reasonable to reduce the age of consent to kids who actually can consent. 18 is pretty arbitrary. I think it's pretty clear a 14 year old can consent to many things. A 10 or 8 year old can probably also offer partial consent.

But a newborn can't. A 2 year old can't. A four year old can't. The line of when a kid can understand what they're consenting to gets blurry from there. And we probably just need much more nuanced consent laws rather than a blanket "You can legally consent at 18, and your parents can consent for you before that."

There are certain things we need to let parents consent to - like medical care. But we don't need to let parents consent to the use of their kids image in media. We don't need to allow parents to sell their kids.

And I don't think "Well, they can't consent and if we give them consent we can't do this class of thing" is a good enough reason to deny them the ability to consent.

So we can't use naked pictures of kids who can't consent in media, or pictures at all. So what? Voluntary consent is important. If respecting voluntary consent means there are things we can't do - then there are things we can't do.

>or pictures at all

To be clear, consent relates to things like, well, album covers and other types of commercial photography such as marketing and advertising. There's no consent needed for editorial (e.g. news) photography.

This also wouldn't even be a discussion if this were some obscure art photography. It just happens to be on an iconic album cover.

Movies and TV shows would be pretty weird if you couldn't ever show children. So would school yearbooks, typically printed by a for-profit company.

> or pictures at all. So what? Voluntary consent is important

How far are you willing to push that?

Should I need to destroy photos that accidentally capture an infant in public?

Should children not get vaccine shots until they can meaningfully consent?

My comment answered the vaccine shots (medical procedure). The one below mine answered the "destroy photos" - commercial use is different from incidental, personal, or news reporting in current consent laws. And that seems like the right line to draw.

So you're proposing an entirely new legal regime around the interminably gray area of commercial activity, and it's intersection with the equally gray area of consent by children, which is currently centered on age, typically late teens for most uses?

Relief in the courts would require a completely new body of common law. In the mean time, legislation would be the only way to provide compensation to victims of un-consented childhood photography.

What specific ideas do you have for laws that could start to provide this relief?

The history of psychological effects on child actors and children of "blogger moms" indicates there should be atleast some ethical concerns.

Just because parents consent doesn't mean that parents are looking out for their children or understand what the effects of fame as a young child will be.

I don't have cut and dried answers here, but I don't think you can pretend that there aren't ethical concerns with media protrayal of young children that need atleast some consideration.

Edit: Personally, I think that if a photograph of a naked baby was important to this piece of art, the ethical solution would have been to keep the baby's identity anonymous (at least until he was 18). That would have done a lot to balance the ethics here, especially as the identity of the baby shouldn't matter.