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BayTSP Provides Automatic DMCA Notices
ruvreve sent in a pointer that BayTSP is promising to identify Bittorrent uploaders for the entertainment industry to file suit against. Slashdot has run numerous stories discussing what happens when you automate DMCA takedown notices - see also chillingeffects.org.
If you can use DMCA so force *GOOGLE* to remove a link to a *GPL* Firmware, it has to be seriously broken...
? NoticeID=1471
http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/notice.cgi
... that the cost of threatening legal action without any basis whatsoever is too low for these big corporations. The legal system has become a way for big corporations to push individuals and small companies around and basically create a parallel state were the punishment for any behavior big corporations doesn't like is litigation.
is that theres something wrong with society when society is breaking laws at such an extent that it requires an automated process to identify and punish those offenders
If anything it means that society doesn't like those laws.
But then again, why should it be costly for the 'victim' in these cases to bring offenders to justice?
Because otherwise the *AA can use scare tactics to simply file a John Doe lawsuit against anyone, forcing them to either pay ${X}000 dollars without a chance to defend themselves, or get sued into bankruptcy.
At first I thought you were saying something sensible. But it turns out you've got rectal-cranial inversion.
If society is breaking a law on a scale so massive that automated processes are required to file lawsuits against them all, then the proper attitude, at least in the U.S., is that the law is broken. The government and the marketplace must bend to the wishes of the people. It may take a few years for it to happen, but it will happen.
While I'm on a roll: I'm getting quite tired of law-worshipers like you. At one time it was illegal for women to vote. You would probably say it is therefore immoral for women to vote, because breaking the law is "wrong." Luckily, most people have more sense than that, and have a moral compass that goes beyond the way the government wants you to behave. Just because a law is on the books does not make it right. In fact it is nothing less than socially responsible to break bad laws.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Errrm.
Yes, automated processes catch innocents, especially as some on this page have suggested if they deliberately make themselves look guilty when they arent (if they carried around a white powder in a bag, they would expect to get arrested by the police if its discovered - wheres the difference?).
A few years ago when I was living in central Europe, I took some tie-dye chemicals back from the US to Slovakia to use at an art camp I was organizing.
For simplicity, I took all the chemicals out of the box they came in and packed them in my backpack. The 'activator' needed to make the dyes work (I cant remember exactly what chemical) was an unmarked plastic bag of white powder, about a kilogram of it.
Anyway, I was checked at the airport in Vienna, and the customs people were very curious about the bag.
I told them what it was, they opened it and figured out that it wasn't drugs, and let me go.
I was not much bothered by the whole process because the Austrian police were very polite and understanding, and the whole ordeal took less than 10 minutes.
In this case, the authorities did their jobs properly -- asking the right questions, listening to my answers, and never treating me as if I was guilty of anything. Afterwards, they even apologized for opening the bag. I told them I understood, and wished them a good day.
If this process had beeen automated the way this DMCA nonsense is, then I would have been tossed in jail until someone determined that the powder was not, in fact, illegal.
Remeber, I was not trying to make myself look guilty, nor did I expect to be arrested.
Contrast this with the situation of someone running into legal problems for sharing a perfectly legitimate file like X-Files1.21b.tar.gz.