Australian Court Rules That Cartoon Characters Are People
Justice Michael Adams of the New South Wales (Australia) Supreme Court has ruled that cartoon characters are people too. The judge’s ruling came in the case of Alan John McEwan, who was convicted on child pornography charges stemming from his possession of sexually explicit cartoons featuring Bart, Lisa and Maggie from The Simpsons.
Justice Adams explained his determination thusly: “The mere fact that the figure depicted departed from a realistic representation in some respects of a human being did not mean that such a figure was not a ‘person’.â€
McEwan was convicted, fined $3,000, and placed on a good behavior bond.
Really, this is ridiculous. Setting aside the issue of freedom of artistic expression, does this Australian precedent now also open the path to cartoon characters having civil rights such as voting rights, eligibility for unemployment benefits when their publication ends, and the right to marry other “people,” as several thousand Japanese citizens wish to do?
Source: ICv2
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Well, I’m not sure about the issue in Japan, but if otaku want to legally marry their two-dimensional sweethearts, they may soon have that opportunity in Australia. (I wonder if foreign nationals can get marriage licenses in Australia? Maybe they’ll have to marry Australian characters).
I wonder if this will also apply to cartoons depicting cruelty to animals or violent actions in video games.
I know now not to travel through Australia with my laptop; I could be fined $3,000 just for some of my AMVs.
That last part was exactly what I was thinking about — last part to the comment on the article. If animated characters are people, they can be married… The real question is, though: They can only be married to _one person at a time_, it would seem… Tohru Honda is going to have a lot of decisions to make.
(Laura Bailey would get that joke. 😉 )