There is a very thin line that separates nudity in art and nudity in pornography.
And apparently, the German heavy metal band Scorpions has played dangerously on that line, by teasing a potentially illegal content.
On the internet, this happened when the original cover art for the 'Virgin Killer' album depicted a nude prepubescent ten-year-old girl, who has her genitalia obscured using a shattered glass effect, was first uploaded to Wikipedia.
The cover was designed by Steffan Böhle, and according to reports, the girl is either his niece or daughter.
The photograph was taken by Michael von Gimbut.
When asked, Michael von Gimbut emphasized that his wife, the model's mother and sister, and three female assistants had been present during the shooting
"Back then, we loved and protected children and did not sleep with them," he said
It all began in May 2008, when the U.S.-based social conservative site WorldNetDaily reported the Virgin Killer cover image on Wikipedia to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
But since the FBI concluded that the artwork did not violate any U.S. laws, the report was then sent to Wikipedia community's internal debate.
Then, on December 5, 2008, six internet service providers in the UK blocked access to a Wikipedia article belonging to the Scorpions, as well as the article for the band’s album Virgin Killer.
The ISPs blocked the pages after they were blacklisted by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), the UK’s self-regulated online watchdog, which had responded to a complaint lodged by a member of public.
The ISPs responded by saying how the image is depicted as "erotic posing with no sexual activity."
The decision by the watchdog annoyed many Wikipedia contributors in the UK, who were unable to edit the page.
The incident sparked huge controversies that according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the entire online encyclopedia was briefly unavailable to some users due to the high traffic that overwhelmed the ISPs’ filtering systems.
Days later, on December 9, 2008, the IWF reversed its decision.
In a statement, the watchdog said that despite the album cover’s potential illegality, the “length of time the image has existed and its wide availability” made censoring it useless.
According to Rudolf Schenker, the German guitarist and founder of the hard rock band Scorpions, he said that he thought the cover art was a "great thing," and that he had "pushed the band to really stay behind it" as he felt that people would "think differently" when they looked at the lyrics and realized that the cover art was only being used as "a symbol of the lyrics."
But due to the controversy, Schenker changed his mind.
"We would never again do something like this."
It's worth noting, that the Virgin Killer album was Scorpions' fourth studio album, first released in 1976.
At that time, it also made controversies because of the nude prepubescent girl at its cover, and had to be sold in a black plastic covering in several countries. In the U.S. and the UK, it was eventually replaced by an image of the band.
It was only when an article on Wikipedia for the album was created, that the controversy went from offline to online.
In August 2015, a court in Sweden said that it considered the album cover to be child pornography.
It's also worth noting that old Scorpion albums were "usually done by other people," according to the Scorpions former band member.