I wonder if the ISP got charged as well lol

you see, they are companys and they make monzees that they dont pay taxes on, so its fine. But that guy was a terroristic web activist, subverting the order of the free world by providing free tools to a community of which some used it for illegal purposes.

The article explains that this was basically a flaw in the way the law was written

This “someone” sounds an awful lot like a nation-state actor.

Yikes 😬

Here the crime is privacy, which is the same thing many countries are trying to curtail, including France, which is clamping down hard on encryption.

With time we will see services like protonmail or vpns vilified in order to make them inaccessible to the public.

You shouldn't feel too ashamed, in the end Weber got 5 years of probation on the sentence of "support of general distribution", and shortly after the law was amended to give private persons like Weber the same protection from liability that ISPs enjoy from how people use their network. At least, according to Weber.

You don't need an exit node to browse Tor hidden sites. Acting as a relay middle node is also not a problem.

Exit nodes are kind of a "plausible deniability" thing for Tor users from places where using Tor might be frowned upon, but otherwise you can find anything you may want to use Tor for, on hidden sites themselves.

For as much as I'd like to help the Tor network and the idea of free speech, articles like this are why I'd rather let the CIA and other national sponsors take the brunt of running those exit nodes.

Rule of thumb: You get the blame.

TL;DR: Ask a lawyer.

You can compare them to VPNs for the severity of restrictions (in 2020):

For some more historical info, there is this list on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)#Reception,_impact,_and_legislation

For a more US-centric FAQ, you can check: https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/eff-tor-legal-faq/

Still, most countries don't like random people to let other unidentified random people to do random stuff, most police officers are ill equipped or educated to deal with it, legislation hasn't been tested in most places, and you're running a hard to define, changing, and sometimes random level of risk.

He wasn't searching for it or knowingly distributing it. The way Tor exit nodes work is that you're hosting a machine that lets other people on the Tor network communicate with the internet. You're essentially routing a portion of the entire network's traffic through your machine. You can't really control who is using it or what it transmits at that point.

He got punished because somebody else shared CP, using his equipment to do so. It's like being jailed for having your car stolen and being used to hit a pedestrian.

The feds in multiple countries have used the tactic of hacking someone's computer, putting charlie papa content on it, and then using that as a reason for arrest. I'm with you that partaking in it is completely unexcusable and sick, however that fact is why it's used by governments to gain more control. "Think of the children."