Who star Pete Townshend was "misguided at best" to view child porn on the internet, charities have said - although rock industry figures have supported him. Mr Townshend admitted he had paid to see a child porn website, but insisted he had done so for research and was emphatically not a paedophile.
But the Internet Watch Foundation - whose aim is to eliminate child porn on the net - said Townshend was "incredibly foolhardy, naive and misguided" to enter such a website.
"It is wrong-headed, misguided and illegal to look at, or download, or even to pay to download paedophiliac material and if you do so, you are likely to go to prison," said vice chairman Mark Stephens.
He said Mr Townshend had admitted a criminal offence, and if he was prosecuted it would be for the court to decide his motives in doing so.
"What he has done is incredible naivety at best."
He said there were many authorities trying to combat porn on the internet, so individuals did not have to do "something illegal". to do so
"There are proper places to go, including the police. It is not something for people to undertake themselves," he said.
Children's charity NCH also warned people not to carry out their own research into child pornography on the internet.
No English court had ever accepted research as an excuse for possessing pornographic images, it pointed out.
[I have snipped the remainder of the article, as it is a verbatim reproduction of the above cited BBC article, to avoid unnecessary duplication]