Janegb88

First of all, I would like to wish you and your family all the best as you go through this tough time of trying to rescue your son from his moment of thoughtlessness.

Secondly, I am not a US citizen and so not familiar with US law but here in the UK the law is based on intent, meaning that you intended to do what you did (there is some fancy Latin name for this). Now consider this, as lots of files on the P2P network have been deliberately misnamed, by who no one knows, and so by checking the names on these illegal files it can be shown that your son was not after them but really after legal files. And also most experienced P2P/Limewire users will tell you that most of the time we don’t really know what we are downloading until it’s downloaded or take special precautions (such as Bitzy).

Therefore, if what you say is true, it would be hard pushed for any (proper) legal system to convict on what was an accidental download.

Another small thing to remember, whenever you download stuff USING Limewire you are actually downloading from other P2P users individual PCs, and possibly servers, and P2P users live all over the world.

Anyway, hope your authorities see sense and drop this case against a clearly naive youngster.



UK Bob