producing child pornography; you'll be surprised how easy it is

A lower court threw out charges of child porn production against a 17-year-old Michigan boy who downloaded child porn. Circuit Court Judge Mark Trusock reinstated those charges.

The kid did not photograph or record sexual images of children so how did the judge decide that the kid should be charged with production?

The judge bought the prosecution's argument that...

...because [the boy] moved the images from his screen delivered by an Internet server onto his hard drive, he was guilty of producing child porn.

Think what that means.

It means that by reading this blog post--which downloads it to your hard drive--you have produced it.

This blogger begs to differ.

The rest of the story is that the boy is also in trouble for making violent threats against people at his school. For the sake of argument, let's say that the kid was making actual plans to hurt people at his school.

His sentence for actual threats of physical violence against people within his reach could possibly be shorter than his sentence for downloading illegal images if he spends any time on the sex offender registry.