Trials & Litigation
Bare child on Nirvana album cowl wasn’t youngster porn sufferer, federal decide guidelines
October 3, 2025, 9:27 am CDT
Nirvana band members Krist Novoselic, Dave Grohl and Kurt Cobain in September 1993. (Photograph by Mark J. Terrill/The Related Press)
A 1991 Nirvana album cowl displaying a unadorned child floating underwater towards a greenback invoice will not be pornography, a federal decide dominated Tuesday.
U.S. District Choose Fernando Olguin of the Central District of California dominated in opposition to Spencer Elden and tossed the 2021 that case he filed over the image taken when he was 4 months previous, report the New York Occasions, Law360 and Reuters.
Elden had sued beneath a federal legislation that enables civil cures for many who had been victims of sure crimes as minors. Elden claimed that Nirvana’s Nevermind album cowl violated the legislation as a result of it amounted to industrial youngster pornography.
Olguin disagreed after inspecting a number of components. They included whether or not the focus of the depiction is on the kid’s genitalia, whether or not the setting is sexually suggestive, whether or not the kid is nude, and whether or not the depiction is meant to elicit a sexual response within the viewer.
No issue “comes near bringing the picture inside the ambit of the kid pornography statute” apart from the truth that Elden was pictured nude, Olguin stated.
“This picture—a picture that’s most analogous to a household picture of a nude youngster bathing—is plainly inadequate to help a discovering of lasciviousness,” he wrote.
See additionally:
ninth Circuit reinstates go well with by now-grown-up Nirvana album-cover child
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