A New Jersey appeals court has ruled that leaving child pornography images on a file-sharing network constitutes distribution of pornography, even if the person did not actively distribute the images on the Internet.
The defendant, Richard Lyons IV, had been indicted by a grand jury on charges of committing child pornography through the file-sharing network LimeWire. LimeWire is a software program that allows users to create a folder that can be shared between users. Users can use such programs to share and transmit images and files across the Internet.
The images on the folder belonging to Lyons were found by a child porn investigation team that located the computer with the files in 2007. The computer was linked to Lyons’ residence. Later, law enforcement searched Lyons’ home and found at least 25 other child porn videos.
Attorneys for Lyons tried to argue that the files had been contained passively on the file-sharing network. His lawyers also argued that just because he failed to install a switch that would have prevented other Web users from accessing the child porn images did not mean that he distributed child porn on the Internet. Earlier, a Morris County Superior Court judge had dismissed the indictment against Lyons, saying that his failure to change his LimeWire settings to disallow access to these files did not implicate him of child porn distribution. However, the Appellate Court has seen things very differently.
New Jersey criminal defense lawyers will find that this is a very important opinion because of the widespread use of peer-to-peer filesharing programs like LimeWire. The Appellate Court has indicated that it will take very seriously the use of technology to even store images of child pornography if other people could have easy access to such stored files.