The Supreme Court of India is hearing arguments from child protection organizations after the Madras High Court ruled that downloading and watching child pornography is not a criminal offense. In January, the High Court dismissed charges against 28-year-old S. Harish, who was caught in possession of two pieces of child sexual abuse material on his
Sorry, but that’s just incorrect. You unknowingly downloaded a whole bunch of things just in the process of making this comment.
This is one of the issues that has confounded people since the invention of the world wide web; from a computer’s perspective, there is no such thing as “viewing” a file. Everything is a download. The only difference is what your computer does with the file after the fact.
If you load up a thread on a forum and someone posts a CSAM image to that thread, your compouter will download it. You don’t have to make any active choice, other than loading the thread itself, for that to happen. Same on Discord, WhatsApp, or anything else. All forms of access are downloads.
Edit to add: None of this is relevant to this particular case since the defendant allegedly viewed the video multiple times across a period of two years, which, y’know, is in absolutely no way accidental. But it’s still important to understand the distinction because there are a lot of situations where it absolutely does matter.
That… Is a relevant detail that is not in the article. That does seem to change things.
Oh really? I thought we just viewed it in a cloud based system and we only put it on our system if we choose to. Interesting.
Even if that were true, how would your device display anything without downloading it first? In your example, your device is the end point for the cloud based system, which means it downloads from the cloud.
I don’t know enough about cloud based systems. I thought you were just viewing it. Such as all the work was done sever side and very little client side. I am not a software engineer. I just play games and have an idea of what’s going on.
This person in question viewed it many times and that is not “accident”. Which is exactly my point.
In reference to cloud gaming, that’s more akin to watching a live video stream. Your device may not be doing the processing to generate the video, but it is still streaming (live downloading) the video. Whether it decides to store that video is up to the device’s settings. But it is 100% downloading the video in order to display it.
I hear ya. I misunderstood the mechanism. I thought it was more of a pass through.
you might be shitposting here, and i can’t tell. It’s served to you over the internet. Even if hypothetically, someone were to send you an encrypted file of something highly illegal (lets say classified government documents) and asked you to hold on to it. But never gave you the key, and you never bothered figuring out what it was. Even if you downloaded it knowingly, you don’t know what it is, and therefore have no reason to assume anything negative about it.
The semantic technicality here, is that download is 99.99% of the time used to refer to an action where the user explicitly grabs a copy of something, you computer doesn’t automatically “download” something, in the form that the user downloads the something. This is called caching for a reason. Hell even download caching, is just caching used for an active download.
Download itself is also a network terminology, referring to incoming data, moving to you, also known as RX and TX in shorter form. But even that is only a referential term, and merely refers to where and how the data is flowing, rather than what it actually means for it to be downloaded. Because someone else, could upload illicit materials to your network, and under your description, that would also count as “you downloading it” regardless of whether it gets put anywhere in your network, or if it just gets bounced back or whatever.
you also use the term loading, which is incongruent with downloading, so i’m curious whether you think loading and downloading are the same, or different, if you are, again just shitposting.
This is just about the only correct statement in this rambling mess of a comment. Yes, downloading means that data is moving to your system.
So, given that fact, how do you imagine that your web browser displays an image without downloading it? How does the data comprising the content of the image end up on your system in order for the web browser to render it without traveling to it from the server; ie, being “downloaded”?
like i said it’s all semantic. In this case, download is almost certainly being used to describe a scenario where the original image was sent in whatsapp, and then downloaded to the phone locally, and found on the phones filesystem. Otherwise we would not be using the term download here. That could be a language barrier thing i suppose. But in the contexts of what it’s implying, i doubt it.
likewise, i could just as easily argue that everything you “post” on the internet is actually an upload, and as a result, you upload every interaction you have on the internet, however it’s only contextually used to describe something like “uploading a youtube video” where there a very clear contextual meaning presented. Same thing with download, people download games, but listen to the music or “stream” it from spotify, it’s technically downloading, but it’s actually not.
Going by the contextual, and colloquially referred to definition of “download” (hell the article linked literally says “he watched it for two years” so try to semantic that one out) download in isolation, is the flow of traffic to you, from somewhere else, downloading, downloaded, or a download, that verb usage of it, as opposed to an adjective usage of it, is completely different. The article does not say “download” it says “downloaded, downloading” and any potentially related forms of that word refer to the act of download, of which is being locally and explicitly stored on your device. The only instance where this wouldn’t apply is if he didn’t download it (notice the verb form usage) and it was actually cached by whatsapp, and that somehow lead to him being arrested.
Which is a possibility, but is also a completely different scenario.
Yes. Again, that’s literally what is actually happening.
You keep throwing out these statements like “Oh, well if that’s true then we might as well also say this is true” and then “this” turns out to be just the most banal shit.
I genuinely don’t think you even know what it is you’re trying to argue here. You’re either so down in the weeds of some bizarre semantic sophistry that you’ve lost track of daylight, or you’re arguing points that no one else was disagreeing on while acting like you’ve just dropped the Pentagon Papers.
Either way, I really can’t be bothered anymore. I’ve tried my best, but it’s like trying to teach a pigeon to read.
i literally started this entire thread off based on semantic technicalities, why are we acting like this ISN’T what im talking about? Nobody should be shocked by this. I didn’t come to argue the legality of holding CP because if i did, it would be very short, it’s illegal, plain and simple, that’s how the law in the US works.