What the hell? I don't see how he broke the law? Kind of bad taste, but there's a million other videos on youtube they might as well bang people up for as well if they're going to do it for that one...
I found the text of it earlier, and the law he plead guilty to he almost certainly violated. However, given the breadth of the law, I suspect it'll see it's fair share of challenges. In this climate, however, there's no telling how that'll turn out. It used to be that laws which were overly broad or vague tended to get shot down, but nowadays we're expected to be good Homelandians and have faith that prosecutors will be reasonable in how they choose to interpret and act upon them. A premise that's as stupid as it is fucking dangerous.
As for the child pornography charge they bludgeoned him with, that was pretty flimsy, but the whole aspect of simulated kiddy porn is a huge gray area. I suppose a fairly weak argument could have been made that he manufactured a video that simulated kids in an explicit sexual situation, which might have been in violation of the PROTECT Act of 2003, but it'd be a real stretch, and the only way it would have mattered under the best interpretation of that clusterfuck of a law is if the content would have also violated the Miller test, and I don't think that it would have.
Honestly, it seems pretty unlikely that they would have gone forward with the child pornography charge. He probably would have been fine if he had told them to fuck off, but that's a lot easier to suggest from my vantage point 2000 miles away. They could have dragged the thing along just out of spite and ruined the kid's life.