LimeWire Closure Prevents Child Porn Charges

Arizona-based criminal attorney David Michael Cantor claims that LimeWire has “created more sex offenders in the prison system than any other site or service out there,” and that everyone should be glad this “dangerous service” has been closed down.
Last month U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood issued an injunction ordering LimeWire to disable the “searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality, and/or all functionality” of the famed file-sharing program, and since then many have debated its effects.
The RIAA heralded its closure as a “significant step in the bright future of digital music” while most of those who use P2P on a regular basis were amazed that people still even use the program.
Still others pointed out that hundreds of alternatives exist, a point emphasized even further after a secret team of developers released a “LimeWire Pirate Edition” where “all dependencies on LimeWire LLC’s servers have been removed, all remote settings have been disabled, the Ask toolbar has been unbundled, and all features of LimeWire PRO have been activated for free.”
Arizona-based criminal attorney David Michael Cantor has opined that LimeWire’s closure should be welcome news for former users, but not for the risk it posed for copyright infringement charges as some would assume, but rather for the possession and distribution of child pornography.
Cantor says that users were at risk for “accidentally” downloading child pornography that was mislabeled as something else.
“Somebody will go on looking for a music video and then off to the side they’ll see something that says, ‘pthc,’” he says. “That means ‘Pre-teen hardcore’, but they don’t understand that when they click on it. And now they’ve just
downloaded and shared child pornography, and have now flagged themselves and the FBI or local authorities may come and arrest them and seize their computer.”
It sounds rather far fetched that people could download child porn on accident, but Cantor insists that it can, and he has the former clients to prove it. He calls LimeWire an “insidious” service that should’ve “policed themselves better and gotten this stuff off of their network long ago.”
His boldest claim of all is that LimeWire has “created more sex offenders in the prison system than any other site or service out there,” and that everyone should be glad this “dangerous service” has been closed down.
I doubt this is true, but what I doubt even more is the number of “innocent” people that have been wrongfully ensnared in child porn charges for downloading mislabeled copies of “pre-teen hardcore” videos. A P2P service can be “dangerous” if you don’t know what your downloading and from whom. That’s the real lesson of it all.