WASHINGTON -- A court ruling in Maryland is helping define a state law that deals with computers and child pornography.

The law makes it a crime to "use a computer to depict or describe a minor engaging in an obscene act." The court of appeals ruled this week that merely downloading child pornography from the Internet does not violate that law.

A man in St. Mary's County successfully argued that the word "depict" in the law means "create."

He said he didn't create the image, he just downloaded it. And he kept it to himself -- he didn't distribute it.