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Johansen Prosecutors Appeal
kmitnick writes "Jon Johansen will be back in court, tried again in an appeals court, because Hollywood knows better than the Norwegian legal system." Norway's legal system is different than the U.S.; the government can appeal a loss in a criminal case.
This article makes me glad to live in a country where the government can't try you more than once for the same crime(if found not guilty).
Just imagine if special interest groups could put pressure on politicians to keep appealing cases that they lost. Scary.
e.g. You're prosecute for LS XYZ in Louisiana, then acquitted, you can then be prosecuted under US ABC in federal court. So yeah, you can experience double jeopardy in the good ole US of A.
From the article:
The group estimates that piracy costs the U.S. motion picture industry $3.0 billion annually in lost sales
I'd honestly like to just take a statistics University Class and have them look over the methodology of it, and get them to report any breaks in logic. Where in god's name did this team get their figures from? How do you measure something like this...
I know it's not in sales drops, because I know that last year MPAA reports that they've had excellent sales lately...
I've never seen any kind of study that actually reports how much piracy is going on around the internet, so I can only really assume that they're going on estimations. Which is ludicrous... that's like counting the number of people in Russia and estimating the world's population based on those results... It's bloody insane!
The only way I think they can possibly justify this amount of money that's being lost is
a) When the MPAA pays money to hire people to do silly estimations like this.
b) When these companies' stock goes down because they lose some court case in which they were trying to sue some guy who wrote a program for ripping DVDs.... not to mention the lawyer costs behind these lawsuits.... how much do you think they put per year into prosecuting people like this?
Would it kill people to think a little critically when reading blind statistics like this?
Karma: Non-Heinous
I have a hard time with the notion that a legal system that allows double jeopardy is "sane." How many times does the Norwegian government get to try to fry Jon? As many as it takes? (Can someone who understands Norway's system provide a real answer to this question?)
As a prosecutor, I have no problem with the *general* lack of ability to appeal. There are limited circumstances in which we do get another bite, but it requires special circumstances. For me, trials are fun, but for a criminal defendant the uncertainty, the court appearances, and the stigma must be quite unpleasant. I don't think I'd like to be part of a process which just beats a defendant down with government appeals until he's all out of fight, money, or both.
With the resources available to us, we (the State) can usually convict the guilty if we do our jobs right. Sometimes they get away, but that's how our justice system is set up -- the Framers wanted to have a system where we risk a few guilty individuals going free, but we minimize the risk of convicting the innocent.
In France, I believe, there is no Miranda as we know it. The police can question a suspect for 48 hours with no right to counsel. It would make my job easier, but it doesn't make it a system that I want to live under or be a part of. If it works in Norway, that's their business, but we don't need to pick up all of the bad habits of the "Old Country," just because it works for them.
We /.ers are one of, if not the most connected community on earth. We have, what, 375,000 people who read /. every day and come from just about every nation in the world? Why then do we not take a page from actual grass roots groups and become a proactive in writing to law makers to change this garbage?
/. community. Maybe we can stop just complaining and start trying to fix these laws.
For now take a look at this letter writing guide. Over the weekend I will post a new one specific to the