"James Egan" <jegan@jegan.com> wrote in message
news:85i1rhF31fU1@mid.individual.net...
>
> On Tue, 18 May 2010 20:59:56 -0400, "FromTheRafters"
> <erratic@nomail.afraid.org> wrote:
>
>>I think the
>>author must share in the responsibility....having written it.
>
> And so do I. As far as I'm concerned, making the stuff freely
> available to anyone who wanted it was just a method of spreading which
> exploited a loophole in the law to avoid recrimination.

I'm reminded of an episode of "The Simpsons" where Bart sets in motion
things that result in an offense of some sort. He then exclaims "*I*
didn't do it!".

Art imitates life.

Back to the "spreading" as opposed to "distributing" - consider a worm
program. Often instead of just executing it and allowing it to spread,
it gets distributed as widely as possible (spammed, or published, or
posted and/or artificially made a popular search result) so as to have
multiple starting points. Spreading is a function of the program, and
distributing it is an outside function (possibly another program).