Viewing Files on the Web Considered Possession?

Packet Pusher writes "A Georgia lawyer is taking a case to appeals court to prove that the mere act of viewing a website does not constitute possession of the materials that were automatically cached on your hard drive." While the case in question involves pornographic photos, the implications of such a declaration could reach far further.

Comments

Re:20 years over 4 hours?

[adrianmonk]

I think it's absurd that someone could face 20 hours in prison for viewing illegal pictures for 4 hours. But that's just me.

RTFA. He was arrested "for viewing pornographic photos of children online" [emphasis mine].

This is not just somebody's idea of using the government to impose their morality on someone else. This is a case of children being forced into sexual situations and being photographed. Situations that they haven't consented to and aren't even old enough to consent to. It's child abuse, and children who are sexually abused usually go on to have a wide variety of serious emotional problems for decades afterwards if not for their entire lives.

And the reason this guy should go to jail for it, even though he just viewed the photos and did not create them, is that accessing the web site generates demand for the photos, which encourages people to create more. In fact, he may have even paid to view them, which would directly finance the creation of more of them. With a crime as bad as sexual child abuse, it's not reasonable to even allow people to create an incentive to commit the crime.

Having said that, for him to be found guilty of the crime he's accused of, there probably ought to be some evidence of intent. If someone were viewing otherwise-legal pornographic material and stumbled upon some illegal stuff, like child pornography, it would be possible that they didn't mean to view the files and that they just weren't computer-savvy enough to know the photos were still around even though they didn't want them. Still, if he had hundreds and hundreds of photos known to come from a wide variety of different sites, then that might be proof of intent because it'd be just too much of a coincidence for him to keep "accidentally" encountering them.