Makes no sense, you download every web page and every resource it links to (images, css, javascript) every single time you clink any link. All those files are saved on your hard drive, it's been downloaded automatically for you. If you don't download it, the browser can't display it.

I would imagine the distinction lies in where it is stored, and whether there has been an intention to save it.

If you can get prosecuted just by having the material on your harddisk then it would be a problem for a lot of people - the article talks about sending out lots of spam with this stuff, which will be saved to our harddisk. Even if it goes in the spam folder and you never see it, it will still be on your harddrive.

It would be reasonable that there's a difference, otherwise more or less anyone could be indicted for child pornography.

But you can't just depend on where it's downloaded, you'd simply manually download everything to your cache folder just to be technically not breaking the law.

Obviously, I think people who like child porn are bad; however, I can't help but think all these attempts to prevent it is just pissing in the wind. You simply cannot filter information that people, however misguided, want to trade with each other. They will find a way around any system you attempt to put in place.

Haven't everyone figured this out yet by watching all the failed attempts at killing mp3 sharing? Information wants to be free. You just can't stop people from communicating.

Computers store huge amounts of information if you know just how to extract it :) doing the above suggestion would leave traces for us to find (this is not a 10 minuts job; your looking at days of work per HDD).

Although that sounds correct, I suspect it's difficult to argue the distinction between an image download and an image cached by the browser to people who are extremely untechnical.