guilty of fictional crimes

Ogiue Maniax has a very important post about a man charged with a crime for possessing obscene manga. I was not familiar with the case prior to his post but it really is a chilling matter. As he points out,

fiction should have every right to depict an aspect of reality while not being completely behold to it or the law. In other words, if fiction were to be forced to depict a world where everything is legally okay or turns out that way, fiction would die. Imagine Death Note without murder.

It’s worth reading the whole post for the details. In a nutshell, what is being punished here is thoughtcrime.