Anime Vice Anime/Manga News

As the Phillippines bans hentai with legislation, New Zealand reportedly prepares to go to court regarding three different cases of possession of “sexualized Manga cartoons (Hentai).” New Zealand's censorship inspector Peter Pilley says that these offensive materials have been found via peer-to-peer tracking software known as Squirrel Hunter; the software is supposedly being used in 19 different countries even now.

Of course, it hardly needs to be said that these cases all revolve not around just any hentai, but hentai featuring characters who appear to be underage-- it's distressing how many media outlets are quickly using the catchall of “hentai” to refer specifically to materials that obviously contain underage children in sexual situations, whose legality has long been debated even by hardcore anime fans.

There's also some talk of “voluntary Internet filtering,” which is currently in a trial stage and which is intended to censor “only images of child abuse.” The trial has included as many as 600,000 people who were having their access filtered-- I'd love to see some of the data from that trial. That said, it looks like all the filtering is being done by real live people, which hopefully means that Mom and Dad's video of baby Bobby falling down and saying something adorable about it isn't being unfairly censored as “child abuse.”

Any New Zealanders out there reading? What do you think about all of this?