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Australian High Court To Decide Net Defamation Case
natslovR writes: "In a World first for a 'final' court, the defamation case against Dow Jones by an Australia businessman will go before Australia's High Court, allowing it to determine whether defamation laws apply across the Internet irrespective of geography.
The businessman claimed he was defamed by an article that Dow Jones published in a US based online magazine. Australia's High Court will now determine if a lower court erred when it ruled that the article was published in Melbourne, Australia and so defamation proceedings could be brought against Dow Jones under Victoria's strong anti-defamation laws, despite the webserver on which it was 'published' residing in the U.S, the writer residing there too, and the online magazine's primary audience being U.S. based."
Anything you do within the "sovereignty" of a country is governed over by the laws of a country. Since you americans have apparently decided that you fully control the DNS space, and thus the visible part of the internet, you should really not be surprised that antother country does the same
...". I really don't get the principles you live by. Then again, as the last round of elections proved, neither do you. "Have a nice day".
Europe does not want anything racist on it's wires, doesn't it have jurisdiction over those wires ? Certainly it does. How do you stop people from transmitting racist things ? Simple, you sue them. Is that legal ? Ofcourse because they willingly transmitted illegal stuff over Europe's wires. Are they going to get convicted ? Defineately.
In america you can say "Black people are the dumbest, most stupid assholes I've ever seen", but you cannot say "encryption X works like so
Is a tribunal necessary in order to determine the outcome of these international cases? International law is fickle, especially when it comes to the Internet...
Perhaps a court may cause more trouble than it fixes.
Some sort of greater arbiter should analyze such cases. It is the only true possible solution to such dilemmas. The question is: how?
Look, they can make a ruling against a US citizen all they want. The fact is, they can't enforce it. US citizens live in the US, and their banks are in the US. There's nothing an Australian court can do to touch a US citizen in the US. Our courts already ruled that we do NOT enforce decisions made by other courts in other nations, and that US citizens don't have to abide by other nations laws while in the US.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
The real problem, though, comes up should DJ have any significant assets in Oz. Those are definitely at risk, just as the U.S. freezes or takes the local assets of foreign organizations it doesn't like. I suspect an operation like DJ prints an Australian edition, and has local staff for reports on the Aussie stock market(s?), in which case they've definitely got something to lose.
We can only hope the Supreme Court can see what the country, and society, have to lose if they let this stand.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
There is a reall tit-for-tat nature to these Internet "criminal" proceedings that seems to have gone unnoticed. It reminds me of an old programming joke/definition:
Recursive: See Recursive
Would it be reasonable to assume that on some newspaper stand in Australia one could find a newspaper published and printed in the USA that's been imported into Australia? Who's liable the case of defamation under that scenario - the author, the importer, the newsstand, none of the above, or any/all of the above?
Others have pointed out attempts to enforce laws based on where the wires that carry the traffic are located. Yet in the USA at least, we've absolved the wire owners of liability for content.
Then there's the case of Dmitry Sklyarov, arrested in the USA for doing something in another country that is legal in that country.
Point being: Legislation is a horrendously (and in most cases, thankfully) slow process. It will be years, perhaps scores of years, before meaningful, cogent legislation addressing the global Internet is signed and passes legal scrutiny. Until then (and maybe even afterwards) if our litigious society continues to litigate these matters, it's quite possible that so many people will be under indictment in various countries as to start impacting world travel. Globalization will collapse and the world will start to look very isolationist.
mod this up
I think the only problem that we don't have such things is that states like Iran or China etc. would try to use them to silence any opposition located in different countries or even to silence negative press.
Note that this isn't unlikely, I remember the case of an Iranian author (?) who was arrested in Iran because he attended an converence in Berlin which a not viewed positive by the Iranian goverment. And btw the converence in Berlin was organized by one of the ruling parties in Germany, the Greens. So you can't count on these guys to "play fair".
The other question would be of course if any rulings could be enforced at all. International treaties are one thing, but enforcement often fails. That e.g. the treaties for returning abducted children after a divorce. The rules are pretty clear but the involved countries usually try to keep the children (cases from US, Germany, France well known).
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
I'm not clear about which position you don't understand, so I'll try to rehash my thoughts in a different way.
Many seem to feel that free speech in the USA means or should mean that you can say whatever you want. The grandparent to your post has noted that Europe is restricting speech over its wires by prohibiting the transmission of racist content. The poster then makes light of the priorities in America (which are indeed screwed up) because our legislators have seen fit to pass a bill that effectively restricts our speech in regards to certain technical content while racist content is still permitted to exist. The poster's comment also stated that because America runs the DNS system we shouldn't be surprised that other countries want jurisdiction over the Internet.
I don't know whether the poster is upset at our priorities because he/she feels that we should have the same restrictions and laws as Europe (which seems to be a common complaint from Europeans, though I don't know where the poster hails from) or because of the inherent hypocracy of touting free speech and indicting Skylarov with the same mouth. I wanted to address both possibilities, which is probably why my real position sounded conflicted. My position, which I didn't really mention in the post because I only wanted to address the technical side of things, is that hate crime legislation is redundant and unnecessary in the U.S. If someone murders someone else, does the race of the victim really matter in determining the severity of the crime? What about battery? Or repeated harassment? If we think the punishments are too weak in the cases where these crimes cross racial lines, they're too weak when they don't. Hate crime legislation categorizes people in a world where we need to think of each other as equals. It achieves what it is seeking to prevent.
Could hate crime statutes criminalize mere speech? Of course; we've got other laws on the books that do as well. For example, using speech as a mechanism to get someone fired from their job on false pretenses is and should be illegal because it is going from the realm of disseminating ideas and concepts to the realm of actively causing harm to someone in particular (think libel and slander). Both the DMCA and hate crime legislation dance on the line between these two realms. One might say that, however distasteful, a holocaust denial website should be permitted to exist because the creator has a right to speak his mind; that censorship in the past has proven to be a detriment to the sharing of culture and knowledge and that you have to take the bad with the good. On the other hand, someone else would state that such a site is a harassment to a group who have endured misery on a scale most of us can only imagine. My point is that the apparent lack of priorities in the American system is really a symptom of the complexity of resolving the conflict of interest between free speech and anti-racism/pro-corporate agendas (corporations are making more headway against the First Amendment because their lobbyists are better funded). My position is that we need to be a lot more careful about telling people what they can't think and what they can't say because while we're supposedly doing this to bolster freedom (irony, that) it paves the way towards having a naive and unopinionated population that is just as capable of supporting evil as it is of good because it doesn't know any better.
I agree with libel and slander laws, anti-stalking laws, anti-harrassment laws, and the spirit of the DMCA, provided that all would be so carefully worded that there can be no doubt about the intent to harm in the speech or actions of those who violate the laws, but when the legislation is so sloppily constructed as to threaten to ruin the lives of someone who gets careless with his insults (Idaho case, see below) or permit publishers to sidestep our fair use rights with legislation merely intended to protect their works from exploitation it's just wrong.
The First Amendment has been so important to the foundation of our society in the U.S. that we shouldn't start stripping it down now just because we're fat, dumb, and happy and don't think we need to be as free anymore. Many of the problems people have with just thinking for themselves nowadays is because they get information spoonfed from CNN or Fox and think that's the whole story. The flow of information and concepts are being restricted to a couple of chokepoints where everything judged to be unsavory or unnewsworthy is filtered out and no matter where you go you get the same four pieces of news for the day with slightly different spins on them. That's before we even get started with the speech-limiting laws.
I've always viewed the Internet as an excellent way of importing freedom. In my case, I can visit news sites and talk with citizens in foreign countries to find out what the hell is really going on out there. So when each country starts deciding the rules for the rest of us, I get a bit nervous. Yes, that applies to when the U.S. does it every bit as much as it does to when Germany, Australia, or France does it. You mentioned the DMCA, which by the way is largely a codification of international law (WIPO), but I'm even more worried about the potential impact of certain provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act on the rest of the world. International cooperation and a laissez-faire attitude is what helped build the Internet, and I think that the aggregation of unpalatable laws from every country involved in handling its traffic will only serve to tear it down.
I usually cite sources, BTW, but I got lazy in my last post. You can read more about the Idaho case involving Lonny Rae here. This is from August of this year, and while I'm sure there will be more to this story it hasn't happened yet. The latest thing I could find on it was a rethoric-packed plea from his lawyer for support in the beginning of September here saying that it was going to trial in three weeks, but I haven't seen anything about it since. My guess is that media attention to this case will pick up again either when it goes to trial or when a verdict is announced, but I don't think the law has been overturned yet.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
What's more important here is the bigger picture of the 'new world order'. A world under the rule of law, not the rule of the jungle, or some such bullshit rhetoric.
The United States Govt has been pushing for a world government, presumably with the US as it's head of state. What will be interesting to see is if this 'rule of law' is something that also applies to the United States and it's Korporations, or whether it is something that will be imposed by force on the rest of the world by the US, while the new 'Rome' remains exempt.
After all, intelligent well informed people did wonder when the 'war on terrorism', including 'any nation that trains or harbours terrorists' was going to extend to the CIA and US military, who have trained and harboured more genocidal despots and 'counter revolutionary' terrorists than any other nation on earth.
But no, it seems there is a double standard. It's OK for the US to train 'freedom fighters', but piss-poor nations can have the shit bombed out of them for harbouring 'terrorists' (ironically, the same people!)
So now we get to see if the double standard also applies to the rule of law. Will a US Korporation even ACCEPT or COMPLY to a ruling of an Australian court, or will you start bombing Australia as well?
Personally, I don't like the idea of a world government, but what is more frightening is the idea of a world government that is completely above the law.
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I am the director, and this is my movie
You are talking about Quebec, they are a little strange over there, adn also it's not a police force they're more like bylaw officers.