Slashdot Mirror

A more realistic fake evidence was the Amateur Action pornography BBS. They were shipped, unsolicited, child porn from a postal inspector in another state. They never opened the box, since they hadn't even ordered it. There's a fairly good write-up of the event at http://www.loundy.com/CDLB/AABBS.html.

They got convicted for other charges, in another state with which they did not knowingly do business, with evidence gathered from this attempted entrapment for an original crime they did not, in fact, commit. Proper forensic analysis is demonstrably trumped by a prosecutor with an agenda and a willingness to bend or break the constitution to get whomever they see as 'the bad guy'.

"have never been" is not accurate.

At one point in time - they were, or atleast were able to successfully operate as so (pre-97/98 or so).
The onset of internet popularity in the late 90s coupled with the need for lawmakers to pin legal responsibility on *someone* resulted in common carrier rights (even if presumed) of some ISPs ending up being yanked from them.

This was a fairly known case:

http://www.loundy.com/CASES/RTC_v_Netcom.html

Legally, the definition of fraud usually involves some intent to harm or profit in some way. If I took you poems and placed them on the Internet because i liked them and claimed they were things I was thinking about during troubled time, Not legal fraud has been committed in most territories.

This wouldn't protect you in the way I think you were hoping it too. Fraud has a loose definition but when we are talking of legalities, we need to seek the narrow legal definition. I just looked and there is nothing in the US laws defining fraud without connections to other acts like scamming money, misusing a computer or something similar. I doubt it would cover something copyright already does. And in at least one case, It would look as if the government tried to use fraud for copyright violations but couldn't.

No pitchforks here. I agree with you - when the accusation includes anything at all similar to 'kiddie porn', the high moral ground has been occupied, and it seems like everything else goes out the windows

Glad to see the ex-judge busted, but wouldn't trust the kid as far as I can throw him. He weirds me out at least as much as the judge.

I mean, you can't argue the result here. But the method sure creeps me out. By focusing on child porn images, this dude gets to stalk 3000 people. And he does is by distributing a trojan, and manually reviewing the material on target computers.

The alt.comp.virus FAQ http://www.faqs.org/faqs/computer-virus/alt-faq/pa rt3/ references a backgrounder on the legalities of computer crime. It's venerable (1998), so I don't know to what extent the author's assertions are still accurate, but he is pretty clear: Distributing a virus affecting computers used substantially by the government or financial institutions is a federal crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. So if this had ended up on a qualifying computer, the kid would (should) have been busted. Furthermore, Most states have statutes that make it a crime to intentionally interfere with a computer system. These statutes will often cover viruses as well as other forms of computer crime.

The referenced document can be found at http://www.loundy.com/E-LAW/E-Law4-full.html#VII in Section D.

As well, if the judge hadn't admitted the journal in question was his, and disclaimed knowledge of the images, how far could they have gotten with this prosecution? The kid admits distributing a trojan, how far is it from there to distributing material? I think a defence lawyer could have a field day with this, but IANAL, just another guy with an opinion.

If you read Title 17, you will see it primarily uses the word "distribute". This is not a result of my "logic", that is what the words actually say.

Downloading and burning a copy of Windows is legal (with a huge number of complecated caveats and exceptions). Providing a copy for others to download and burn can sometimes also be legal, with more restrictions and exceptions.

If a corporation or business obtains a copy of windows without paying for it via any means, and uses it in the course of business or economic activity, I think we can be close to 100% sure they are violating some portion of the law. If an individual downloads a copy of Windows, and uses it to browse the web and not to run a business, they are probably within the law, and it would difficult to make a law that was constitutional that outlawed it ( which is why they attempted to make the act of circumventing "copy protection" illegal via the DMCA, rather than simply outlawing all unauthorized copying ).

For example, under your understanding of the law, how do you explain this court ruling, in which providing copies of sim city and word perfect and other copyrighten software to any and all downloaders was ruled legal ? (The judge did suggest that maybe it should be illegal, but said it was legal)

http://www.loundy.com/CASES/US_v_LaMacchia.html

You cannot accept as a starting point that everything Microsoft told you was illegal is in fact illegal, and go on from there to derive what the law is. Instead, you should start by reading the Constitution, which says that Congress may create copyright law, but lays down conditions the copyright law must meet. Then, read Title 17 of the US Code, keeping the Constitution in mind and noting the parts that exceed it. (If you skip all the parts about music and radio broadcasts and forced licensing, the part applying to ordinary computer code or writen works is reasonably short -- I was able to read the printout in bits and pieces a few pages at a time over the course of a week.) Then, you can examine the statements of Microsoft or the BSA and make up your own now educated mind.

You might also then get around to reading the GPL, I think you will find it refreshingly clear after all that.

Except that spamming isn't just an annoyance, it's outright theft. Sending spam is a relatively inexpensive thing to do because the majority of the cost of spam is borne by the recepient. Every time a spammer performs a spam run, they deprive the recepients of bandwidth, CPU cycles, disc space, and time. Such actions fall under a tort known as "trespass to chattels", which Compuserve sucessfully argued in its lawsuit against Cyber Promotions back in 1997. Most spammers don't bother with filtering out invalid e-mail addresses (or the e-mail addresses of people who didn't ask for their e-mail), which means that every time they send spam, it gets blasted to hundreds of thousands of e-mail addresses (many of which are users that do not exist), leaving thousands of other people's e-mail servers to process it, which means that whoever owns or runs that e-mail server is deprived of their bandwidth/CPU cycles/disc space, which they should be using for their own purposes.

Let's not forget the final recepient of the spam, either. They've got to sort through their inbox and seperate legitimated, desired e-mail from the unsolicited bulk e-mail. Their time is wasted, and if they're doing it at work, their employer loses money from lost productivity, etc etc. Spamming is such a great industry (for spammers) because the recipient (or their ISP) pays the costs.

Don't forget this is the same guy who owned "mtv.com" back in the day.

http://www.loundy.com/CASES/MTV_v_Curry.html/

Sic Tennessee on France?

The local community standards knife cuts both ways.

Been there. Got the t-shirt.

Just look around on google, you'll find that lots of "independant" porn sites, who use stolen images, get shut down all the time. It's just so easy to automate the process of setting up new servers on free-hosting services, that the porn people can keep ahead of playboy's lawyers...

It looks like KPMG has decided that its online presence represents part of its trademark image and therefore must be defended.

In the US, I believe that the Lanham Act protects registered marks from uses that are likely to confuse consumers. In addition, a trademark MUST be defended (unlike a copyright). In other words, when you become aware that any of your trademarks is being used without your permission, you must defend it, or risk losing that trademark (as it then becomes "common usage").

However, it is a moot point whether or not a domain name can represent a trademark. Here's a long, but useful article that explores some of the issues. The Lanham Act specifically referes to instances where the trademark of one company is used by another in a commercial context. If there is no commerce, trade or transaction context, then the mark can hardly be said to be confused. However, if you claimed on your Web site that "KPMG's financial success was based on the illegal trade of African monkey organs" and linked "KPMG" to their Web site, you might be on shaky ground.

Looking at the policy in more detail, it does attempt to distinguish situations where the use of a hyperlink could be used to confuse the reader (linking out of context, linking to deep URLs).

A policy cannot dictate a binding contract in the real world. The company can "request" that links be removed; I guess this is one step in the defence. I'm guessing that a suitable stage 2 would be to deny access from referring sites that have not complied with such a request. While they could disallow deep-linking quite easily, this would make it a PITA for sites with which they do have policy agreements.

DRM

That's already happened. A defendant was extradited to bum-fuck Tennessee for running a porn BBS back in the early 90's and convicted on obscenity charges.

Its all very well as Americans for us to think freedom of speech is an absolute. We are fortunate enough to have something called a 'Constitution' which guaruantees that we will always be free to say whatever we like, whereever we like, whenever we like.

This is bullshit. While your Constitution may speak in absolutes, your Courts do not. Americans have freedom of speech unless that speech offends enough people. In that case, the speech is "obscene" and you, as an American, can be arrested.

See, for example, U.S. v. Thomas.

"The electronics giant also claimed that Connectix tarnished the PlayStation trademark by selling the rival Virtual Game Station product."

"Dilution by tarnishment occurs when a famous mark is linked to poor quality or unwholesome products, or otherwise displayed in a derogatory manner.[46] If the use of the mark does not result in negative associations for the senior trademark user, then there is no dilution by tarnishment." - http://www.loundy.com/JMLS-Trademark.html

It sounds like Sony was really reaching to try and get Connectix on any of these kinds of accusations. I doubt that the dismissal of those charges were in any way a shock to Sony. I'm guessing they've been aiming to nail Connectix on the theft of a trade-secret all along, and these other trumped up charges are just for filler. As a result, I don't think the dismissal of these issues is really a positive sign for Connectix at all; rather, it probably bodes that the legal battle is going just as Sony has intended it to all along. With the verdict on the trade-secret theft pending, I wouldn't be popping marguaritas at Connectix any time soon....

See A Primer on Trademark Law and Internet Addresses

- the Boston Lunatic

Yes, you too can find this via Google, but here is a picking of more relevant material:

• Denial of Summary Judgement
• The John Marshall Law School Cyberspace Law Page.
• http://www.richmond.edu/~jolt/v3i1/burhugh.html> RTC v. Netcom article by Burcher & Hughes.
• EFF's own Scientology archive
• Netlaw's final judgement(?)
• netlitigation case summary

What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?