They may mean "tortious," but they keep telling us it's "illegal."

And in the non-lawyer understanding of the term, meaning "against they law," they'd be correct. Civil laws are indeed laws; the fine distinctions used by lawyers are often ignored in casual conversation. And I *think* everyone involved knows you can't go to prison for copyright infringement. (I hope, anyway.)

And, of course, if it were clear-cut against any laws, civil or criminal, any lawyer could compose a single polite letter to FF.net, Yahoogroups, LiveJournal, or any other popular fic archive, saying "you are supporting lawbreaking; please to delete the accounts of these seven thousand users in accordance with your TOS." That this hasn't happened indicates that the laws in question are a lot more blurry than the anti-fanfic crowd wants to believe.

Certainly, if there were a widespread collection of communities that exchanged contact info and phone numbers and ages & pics of children not their own, for the purpose of contacting those children with the intent of seducing them--they'd damn well be shut down. Even if the groups insisted that they meant to seduce said kids after their 18th birthdays, which would hypothetically be legal.