Viewing Child Pornography in New York...Follow

...is apparently no longer grounds for prosecution.

http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/08/11602955-viewing-child-****-on-the-web-legal-in-new-york-state-appeals-court-finds?lite



So it's okay to look at it now, as long as you don't download it or print it out (or, yaknow, create it).

Am I the only one that worries this will create more "demand" for child pornography to be made in the first place? And that allowing people to view this without any retribution is going to cause more closet-perverts to come out of hiding, thereby looping down to point #1 and causing more to be made? Heh. Seems like there's the possibility of a vicious (and disgusting) cycle to form here.

I understand the distinction that's being made here, but one would also think that actively using a web browser to navigate to web pages which include child pornography would qualify as "dominion and control", provided that you can prove intent (which, based on the dozen other counts the defendant was convicted on, seems entirely reasonable).

SCotUS or bust.

I fully expect some attorney will challenge this by contending that repeated viewing constitute a pattern of behavior that shows dominion was exercised, while some housewife that is just trying to download 50 Shades of Grey and happens to click on a link to "almost legal!!!" will be excused.

I know nothing about the case, so if anyone could clarify it would be appreciated, but I'm wondering if the intent was to decriminalize accidental access to it in cases where the images were either hidden or control over the computer can't be proven (as in cases where malware could be responsible)?

That's just what comes to mind because there was a student around here arrested a while back for CP distribution in which there was a CP video embedded in another file he was seeding. There's every reason to believe he had no idea it was there, and I don't know if he was actually charged with anything. But just made me wonder what the extent of the law was.

Yeah, required showing of intent on something that can get you thrown in a gulag for 10 yrs and renders you unable to ever hold a real job seems like a reasonable requirement.

Going out on a limb here and assuming that the pictures were all thumbnail size. I can only imagine what my cache looked like when I frequented /b/ a few years ago.

Intent is very important. If nothing else, the following hypothetical situation could occur. Lets say an engineer working on a road project that will pass near a small town needs to look up the phone number for one of those small town city planners, and goes to the website for that small town. she types the address correctly, but discovers to her horror that the web page has been hacked and now prominantly features very illegal images. She shuts off her monitor and calls the IT department in a panic, babbling incoherantly about some sort of image on her computer and it wasn't her fault and she doesn't want to get fired. Tears were involved hypothetically. They arrive, turn on the monitor, realize that this is seriously deep ****, immidiatly shut down the whole computer, replace it with a new one, and take the old one to quarentine. Management is notified, they send it up the chain until eventually the Attourney General of that particular state is involved and the FBI. At some point during that chain of events, forensic cache data was requested to determine source of the image, etc, which hypothetically origionated in belarus. The hard drive was eventially transferred into FBI custody where it hypothetically still sits to this day.

At least several people "saw" the image. Not a single one of them sought out that type of material or would have viewed it of their own accord. Did they break the law by being unwillingly subject to that image? The engineer had the correct web address, and had that page been viewed at any other day it would have been the correct web page. The IT technicians involved were not informed ahead of time of the content, and immidiatly turned it off when presented with it, but they still also technically saw the image. Other computer repair technicians are presented with similar situations from time to time. I think that people who draft laws related to that type of legislation don't necessarily take such things into account.