Yeah, I'll bite on this as, where on-line freedom turns into cynical exploitation is a matter I've given a lot of consideration over the last couple of decades.

First things first: As a species the age at which we reach ***ual, by which I mean reproductive, maturity is linked to nutrition. Unless you farm your own food or conscientiously buy 100% organic and/or vegetarian/vegan then the chances are you've growth hormones in your system that you wouldn't otherwise have.

As far as what you may get up to with your 15-y-o sister goes there are cultures where adolescent ******, basically practising lovemaking for an adult partnership, is viewed as entirely normal. Mine is not one of those cultures.

Similarly, in a lot of mainland European countries the age of consent is 13 or 14, which is wholy in line with traditional scriptural concepts of adulthood, e.g. the Jewish Bar Mitzvah.

The data seem to suggest that the prohibitive legislation in the UK, though I don't know about the US, leads to parents turning a "blind eye" on the one hand and not really feeling comfortable discussing strategies concerning how to have fun without unwanted pregnanices. The problem is that if as a parent you let your premises be used for under-age *** then your kids can be taken away and put into care. Again I'm not a parent yet.

So far as I know the Euro-belt doesn't link ***ual consent to legal adulthood as such and, despite the UK having this odd precedent whereby one can do glamour shoots at 16, E.g. Linzey Dawn MacKenzie, Samantha Fox, one can't participate in the democratic process, i.e. vote, until 18. Again I don't know.

In many ways it's immaterial as the UK has by far the highest per capita rate of underage teenage pregnancy in Europe and the US is the source of 40% of the world's kiddie porn. What doesn't help in the UK is that people know **** well that getting pregnant and being a single mum puts you high on the priority list for getting a council house and also entitles you to numerous state benefits.

As such, legally, in the UK at least and I believe the US laws work similarly, if you click on something that purports to be kiddie porn, succeed in downloading it, and it is what it says on the tin then you are guilty of having made indecent images of a minor. You instructed the software to download it and write it to disk. Similarly, if you then leave the downloaded files open to sharing you are guilty of distributing indencent images of a minor. It's all a bit "should you get caught", but yes, it's illegal.

The long and short of it is that even the Ancient Greeks, who organisations such as NAMBLA cite as the precedent for the constitutional rights to pederast their friend's kids, tended to engage in ***ual contact in the context of an apprenticeship which would start at age 13 or so.

On the other hand, I remember this topic was discussed amongst parents in front of kids when I was growing up and, at age 10, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't at least curious. The fact is that, staring 40 in the face, I'm still a virgin in *** terms and don't know how I would feel if I wasn't.

Whilst I'm happy making friends with people with of all ages in a social context the ***ual attraction of legal-age teenagers and early twenty-somethings, despite that they have a lot of energy and are up for trying all manner of things in order to find out what they do and do like, wanes in the post-coital phase when all you want to do is discuss social policy or the day's current affairs and they want to hop between the various MTV channels. As such I can't say I'm interested in anyone below about 25 myself in terms of "settling down" and "raising a family".

Yet just because, as a youngster, I was curious about something I haven't experienced doesn't offset the real and lasting damage to self-esteem and, by implication, security of person that people who were involved in paedophilia as children consistently report, the feelings of fear of reprisals, of a lack of control, of susceptibility to STDs and suchlike.

But, ultimately, when I was 13/14/15 I fancied 13/14/15 y-olds and how else given I grew up in a climate where feminist theory bemoaned the fact that most men didn't even know there are such things as clitores, never mind where they are and, as such, in a society where most boys had some access to porn I do consider it was a valuable resource in the long-term. Not that we had terabytes of it we could download by a ping IP hack-around when we should've been concentrating on our schoolwork, you understand.

I certainly wasn't interested in 40-, 30-, or even 20- something homemakers with pockets of cellulite and wonky teeth as a 14-y-o but these days, so long as the people in the pix or footage are genuinely up for it, I'm more than happy to give them the attention they seek by posting images.

Then again one high-profile case in the UK recently featured a 14-y-o with a false ID working as a lapdancer. And I believe she was 14 when she got caught not when she started. Quite where this leaves proprietors who want to promote a responsible, legal, all-in-good-fun image of the *** trade yet can't at interview tell the difference between a 12-y-o and a 21-y-o is anyone's guess but, as she had a false ID, they were exonerated under Law!

If I'd had a false ID at 14 I'd've got my bike license sorted rather than been a rent boy.

One thing I have noticed though is that some sharers seem to stick kiddie porn keywords towards the end of the buffers of images of mainstream porno. I wasn't aware of this but am satisfied that what I have on disk features only adults of legal age. This doesn't in itself stop it from having been made exploitatively though.

From what I've read recently the UK and the US both have specialist task forces in their vice squads that aim to tackle the problem of illegal porn. As such, perhaps the best way to proceed if you feel strongly about it is to get the IP of the host – and please note it would have to be the image host's and not simply the LW or other p2p ultrapeer's IP – and report it via your local Police.

I know, filesharing itself it is a grey area. If I buy CDs from a second-hand trader the artists get no royalties, same for ex-libris books for academic library ****** and other markets. Sure I prefer to have shelf after shelf of real books rather than e-books archived away on disk but the majority of books in my own library at home have made no royalties for the authors past those generated by the original sale, not a penny.

That having been said I'm into p2p e-books so I can try before I buy, so I know if I see it on a shelf in a bookstore that I want the book. By far the most bandwidth I've used p2p for has been e-books.

Similarly, the stuff I'm bringing to the network as a sharer is of the following nature: either it's original material I've generated myself, it's been sourced via traditional royalty-free channels such as anonymous ftp archives and has been subject to processing to add value, or it conforms to fair usage under international copyright law.

Once more, if you've genuinely found illegal material and feel strongly enough to have posted here complaining about it I suggest you try to find it again, get the IP, and report it. But only you can make the decision concerning whether you're willing to accept the downsides of anarchy. What I can tell you though is that any dedicated task force such information would get passed to aren't about to jail you for owning a pirate copy of Appetite for Destruction; this aspect of intellectual property law is being tested, generally, by the people who profit from DRM rather than state-controlled law enforcement agencies.

So, the long and short of it is that if you wish to end the practice of posting exploitative and illegal material then get the IP and turn it over. But no-one can do that for you. I've been searching for e-books and have found an encouraging amount, and probably haven't seen the specific files you're thinking of when you made this post.

Hope I haven't gone on at too much length. I just want to make it clear that I, personally, prefer a certain amount of porn to be available; it's just it's not what I'm into p2p for. Similarly I'm all for all the freedoms we can get but agree that being raped underage hardly constitutes freedom for the people at the receiving end, isn't likely to ensure they grow up into creative balanced adults and is likely to costing the taxpayer in the long run due to the associated trends for criminality, violence and substance abuse (as opposed to substance use).

So, do what you feel is right is my advice.