State v. Holland

Under Article I, section 9 of the Oregon Constitution, police searches of peer-to-peer file sharing sites is not an illegal search and does not violate a defendant's rights.

Defendant appealed his conviction on 20 counts of first-degree encouraging child sexual abuse, based on Defendant making 13 child pornography files available on a file sharing network. The police located Defendant by using programs that search peer-to-peer file sharing networks for child pornography, then locating the IP addresses of participating computers. Defendant argued that the way the police gathered the evidence from his computer was in violation of Article I, section 9 of the Oregon Constitution. The trial court denied Defendant’s motion to suppress and motion for judgment of acquittal on the same argument. This case is controlled by a recent Court of Appeals case, Combest, where this Court decided that police programs that search peer-to-peer sites are not so intrusive as to constitute a search because the information obtained was the same that was available to other network users. Since the search was legal and the evidence admissible, the trial court did not err in denying Defendant’s motions. Affirmed.