It is alleged in the complaint (you can view this at the bottom of ) that McCarthy profited from this technique to the tune of some $90,000 since 2005.

Channelsurfing wasn't storing any purloined content, McCarthy wasn't responsible for the content being acquired and distributed by the sites his site linked to, and he wasn't an owner of those sites, yet what the complaint cites as the offense is specifically the distribution of copyrighted material and that isn't actually what McCarthy did; he merely published a load of links to content that he put a frame around while the actual delivery was done by the linked-to sites.

This may seem a fine distinction but it's an important one because the complaint is based on the fact that Channelsurfing was guilty of link aggregation which, as far as I know, isn't illegal. Indeed, if it was an offense then anyone sending a link to any kind of copyrighted material in an e-mail message or on a blog would be also have to be guilty.

Actually, consider this: Google, Bing, Yahoo and every other search engine has to be hugely liable to similar prosecution because they are all major link aggregators and many of those links will, unintentionally, be to copyrighted material!

There's a significant campaign from the likes of to petition Janet Napolitano, the director of Homeland Security, and John Morton, director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the agencies involved in the prosecution), to rethink the position of their departments and we really should support the . But this support shouldn't be seen as McCarthy being innocent.