Court Rules Burning Porn = Making Porn

An anonymous reader writes "An appeals court has upheld the prosecution of a Michigan man who was charged with production of child pornography after downloading and burning pornographic pictures from the Internet. The pictures were created by a Russian website that the man was not affiliated with in any form. From the court decision (PDF): 'After reviewing the dictionary definition of the word make, the circuit court stated that the bottom line was that, following the mechanical and technical act of burning images onto the CD-Rs, something new was created or made that did not previously exist.' Is this simply a court's overreaction to a scumbag pedophile? And how does this affect the lawsuits by the BSA, RIAA, and MPAA?"

Comments

Re:No, he didn't

[sopuli]

Burning the child porn must be illegal because it is part of the distribution chain that supports the production of child porn. What if he burnt it with the intent of selling it on? What if he burnt 500 copies? Or should there be an exception in the law that makes it ok to burn a private copy of your child porn collection? That way you could still arrest the real distributors, without vicitimizing the poor lone pedophile who only supports the abuse of children by purchasing the child pornography.