Re:Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files fr...
by loup-vaillant on Monday April 16, 2018 @08:04PM
(#16854172)
> A reasonable person would not assume that content you can only get to by editing a URL manually is supposed to be accessible to the public.
A reasonable person could totally use crawlers like DownThemAll, and fail to notice that some URLs they request are not, in fact, accessible by clicking through a web page. That's different from accessing something you know isn't accessible by mainstream means.
I did that several time to download some porn. The process is simple: search for whatever I'm interested in in a search engine, click on whatever image looks interesting, see if I the URL has numbers I can modify to access nearby images (they will have hopefully the same theme, or even depict the same scene).
The first URL was clearly publicly available. I got it legitimately through a search engine, or by clicking around. How am I supposed to guess that some of the others are off limits?
A reasonable person could totally use crawlers like DownThemAll, and fail to notice that some URLs they request are not, in fact, accessible by clicking through a web page. That's different from accessing something you know isn't accessible by mainstream means.
I did that several time to download some porn. The process is simple: search for whatever I'm interested in in a search engine, click on whatever image looks interesting, see if I the URL has numbers I can modify to access nearby images (they will have hopefully the same theme, or even depict the same scene).
The first URL was clearly publicly available. I got it legitimately through a search engine, or by clicking around. How am I supposed to guess that some of the others are off limits?