Are the viewers paying the operator? If not, I'm not sure you can really argue they're legally responsible for "encouraging" the operator. The operator could say, "I'm going to make another child abuse video for every million people that vote for Hillary Clinton", and no one would blame voters for "encouraging" him. Even if the operator has ads on the site, I don't think it's reasonable to call the viewers culpable--their financial contribution is unintentional, miniscule, and possibly negative if they used an ad-blocker.
For all we know, the "operator" was just showing a dump of things he found on an abandoned site five years ago, and was not involved at all in the production, and had no intention to be. Or perhaps he applied the principles of the MPAA and pirated for free as much material as he could, and put it on his website for free so as to try to get viewers to stop paying the producers and supporting their crimes.
(Which, by the way, is a strategy I would recommend law-enforcement pursue if they take their own arguments seriously. Spend federal money on servers hosting free, searchable torrents and direct downloads of CP; perhaps restrict it to material produced at least 20 years ago, and strip out or change any identifying metadata, so as to avoid any semblance of supporting or encouraging the producers of the materials.)
If you want to make the case that the viewers are liable for supporting the production of child abuse materials, that's a specific claim that you would have to prove in any individual case. By no means is it to be assumed.
What you mentioned was "encouraging its distribution", not "its production". Still, I can't imagine why the former would be rationally considered criminal except insofar as it contributes to the latter (notwithstanding rhetoric about "re-victimizing our children every time it is passed from one person to another"--which is completely absurd unless the viewers encounter the victims in real life and mistreat them in a way they wouldn't have if they didn't see the video, which seems outlandish--I doubt if it's even possible to track down the real-life identities of the victims most of the time).
Not everybody is motivated by money. Some people enjoy being rewarded with karma/lulz/creds/likes.
Is someone legally responsible for "liking" a child porn/terror/homeless beating video? Currently you are for the first case, sometime for the second.
Should "liking" or viewing criminal content be a crime? That's a tough question. It certainly encourages the production of such content (for money or karma).
- the website is run by someone unconnected to the original
producer of the videos, who doesn't know the website exists?
- the person hosting the website got the content years in
the past?
- the original producer of the videos is no longer doing such
things, perhaps is dead or has a life sentence in jail?
Also, if we allow motivations like, say, getting high ratings and prominence on a website (and, to be sure, I haven't heard that this website supported user ratings and stuff), how about things like fame and getting your name in the headlines? Even if you're presented in a negative light, I'm sure there's a fair number of criminals who enjoy the thought that many people are disgusted and horrified by them, because it makes them feel powerful to have affected them so. Therefore, should newspapers that publish stories about horrible criminals be considered liable for encouraging criminal behavior?
I think anytime that question has come up, the answer has generally been "no". An example comes to mind: whether newspapers should publish the names of kids who have committed suicide, for fear that it would encourage copycat behavior. I think most newspapers do avoid that, but that's as a voluntary policy they adopt, and something that other newspapers would look down on you for if you did it--nothing like criminal liability. Likewise, some have suggested that widely publicizing terrorist attacks is helping the terrorists achieve their goals; but as far as I know, the media continue to publicize it extensively because it attracts a (paying?) audience. Laws criminalizing these things would probably be seen as a violation of the First Amendment.
Why are the media allowed to give criminals and terrorists nationwide infamy and attention, while a pervert is not allowed to give a CP site operator pageviews? I expect someone would argue that the media being allowed to report on everything is important, while anything pedophiles want is not important, even if it may give them a way to get their jollies without going out and doing things to real children. I have a feeling it's more about the political position of journalists vs that of perverts.
I think the arguments in favor of the prohibition of the possession or consumption of child pornography are rationalizations made up after the fact for the laws that already exist; that these arguments tend to fall apart under serious scrutiny, or to, if consistently applied, justify a much more authoritarian society than we have; that people make these arguments to defend their position, which they've chosen because of their emotions about pedophiles, which are generally unreasoned fear or hatred of a greater or lesser degree; that you see such intense hate against pedophiles because they're a convenient, safe target for hate, and some people love to hate, especially if they're contemptible themselves[1];
that this is so unreasoned that both laws and actual prosecution have fallen upon (a) drawn art of non-real minors [the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a law of this sort; other countries like Australia have not] and (b) minors sexting pictures of themselves [so now the laws are harming children, whom the law was allegedly meant to protect]; that people have probably been slower to propose and pass laws that don't charge sexting teenagers with CP because that goes against the unreasoning-hatred flow; and that authoritarians find the irrationally anti-pedophile mob useful for achieving their political ends, be it passing laws requiring ISPs to start filtering their traffic, passing over-broad censorship laws that happen to cover adult pornography or other things they dislike as well, justifying more extensive surveillance, or smearing anyone who opposes the above as being "pro-pedophile".
In short, I have a bad feeling about anyone who advocates measures against anyone who has not been specifically shown to have either abused children or knowingly encouraged anyone else to do it.
In my 7 year experience in Federal prison, only one sex offender I knew of got jumped and injured near to death. However, it wasn't because he was a sex offender. It was because 1) he lied about what crime he had been convicted of, 2) he started hanging out with a white supremacist gang. Another guy I knew who was researching his own appeal case came across the sex offender's case in the law books and put out the word to the gang.
Because the idiot had chummed up with the gang, the gang was responsible for recovering their "respect" among the prison society by trying to kill the sex offender.
As long as a sex offender was an "independent" (not gang affiliated) and extremely respectful of everyone, most everyone would leave him alone.
Two exceptions to this rule (that I observed): Blacks and Hispanics. Black guys (and therefore gangs) tended to not see a sex charge as that big of a deal. Hispanics stuck together no matter what.
For all we know, the "operator" was just showing a dump of things he found on an abandoned site five years ago, and was not involved at all in the production, and had no intention to be. Or perhaps he applied the principles of the MPAA and pirated for free as much material as he could, and put it on his website for free so as to try to get viewers to stop paying the producers and supporting their crimes.
(Which, by the way, is a strategy I would recommend law-enforcement pursue if they take their own arguments seriously. Spend federal money on servers hosting free, searchable torrents and direct downloads of CP; perhaps restrict it to material produced at least 20 years ago, and strip out or change any identifying metadata, so as to avoid any semblance of supporting or encouraging the producers of the materials.)
If you want to make the case that the viewers are liable for supporting the production of child abuse materials, that's a specific claim that you would have to prove in any individual case. By no means is it to be assumed.
What you mentioned was "encouraging its distribution", not "its production". Still, I can't imagine why the former would be rationally considered criminal except insofar as it contributes to the latter (notwithstanding rhetoric about "re-victimizing our children every time it is passed from one person to another"--which is completely absurd unless the viewers encounter the victims in real life and mistreat them in a way they wouldn't have if they didn't see the video, which seems outlandish--I doubt if it's even possible to track down the real-life identities of the victims most of the time).