[clug] OT: Hard disk search

[Sam Couter]

Conrad Canterford <conrad at mail.watersprite.com.au> wrote:
> I'm going to suggest that actually, in a judges mind, clicking the
> thumbnail did create pornography, because it caused a new copy of the
> image to be created on the hard-disk of the person clicking the link.

Judges aren't quite that stupid. Judges are in the business of making
judgements of law on areas of expertise that aren't law (which is their
area of expertise), and aren't common lay knowledge. This is what judges
do.

> Some lawyer probably spent many days explaining to the judge in
> intricate detail exactly how web browsing works, and being very literal
> minded about such things, the judge concluded that this was making
> pornography.

I doubt it. The lawyer on the opposing side will have explained that the
copy made (along with the copies in the web browser cache and any HTTP
accelerators or caching proxies) is incidental, and that creating such
copies isn't the purpose of clicking on a thumbnail or link. He'd have
a lot of experts in the field to back him up, too.

I'm with the eariler statement that this may have been misquoted or
taken out of context somehow. I certainly don't believe that any judge
would consider simply clicking a thumbnail or hyperlink to be making
pornography.
-- 
Sam "Eddie" Couter  |  mailto:sam at couter.dropbear.id.au
Debian Developer    |  mailto:eddie at debian.org
                    |  jabber:sam at teknohaus.dyndns.org
OpenPGP fingerprint:  A46B 9BB5 3148 7BEA 1F05  5BD5 8530 03AE DE89 C75C
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