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Canadian Court Reverses Net Publication Ruling
An anonymous reader writes "A Canadian appellate court has reversed
an earlier ruling that had media companies worldwide fearing an
Internet publication chill. A lower court had asserted
jurisdiction over the Washington Post based solely on an article
published years earlier that was available on the Post's website. That decision attracted the attention of companies such as Reuters and Yahoo!, who appealed what was viewed as a dangerous Internet jurisdiction case."
You have to wonder whether local laws can in any way be applied to the Internet.
What if I, in England, publish something that breaks a law in Germany where my webhost resides? Who gets prosecuted, if at all?
Argh.
Not even if your webhost is there. I think just the fact that someone in Germany can access your article was the problem here.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Overqualified.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Every spring, when our igloos melt, we gather to decide who should be banished. Those too old, and the infirm, and anyone with extreme radical opinions, is put on one of the melting ice floes and cast adrift.
Its far more humaine than jail, or letting them die of their illnesses, since we don't have much in the way of medical care. Our socialized medicine consists of the local shaman or priest (we're okay with either) offering prayers and sacrifices.
This is one reason why Canadians are so much against global warming. Its getting harder and harder to live the traditional life. I have to leave the AC on all the time during the spring months, or my igloo will melt prematurely.
this will also threaten our ability to render legal judgements. You see, we really believe that justice should be blind, so we put a pine cone and an acorn in a bag, and the defendant has to pick one while blindfolded. If he draws the acorn (a nut) we say that the Great Manitou has spoken, and that he or she must have been nuts at the time. If they get the pine cone, again the Great Manitou has spoken, and we say he is guilty.
Either way, he is not fit to stay with the rest of us, so off to the ice floes he goes. However, in a final act of mercy, we club the insane ones to death, just like baby seals, though we rarely sell their pelts, even though tourists have offered lots of money - up to $5 - per human pelt. We do accept beer in trade though. Good Canadian beer, eh! A couple of two-fours will go a long way, buddy :-)
Of course Quebec has a different system, just to be different. Most quebecers spend the winter months in Florida (where the locals call them "los tabernacos", because they're always complaining about how the local Americans and Cubans refuse to speak french to them).
The system of justice is also different, based on the French Code Civile rather than English Common Law. What this means in practice is that the judges, rather than wearing white powdered wigs, wear a tricorner cap and must make their pronouncements of guilt (as you know, there are no other judgments allowed under French law) with their hand concealed in their vest.
Medecine is also different in Quebec. Pea soup is the miracle cure for everything. If that doesn't work, the evil demons that are causing illness can be cast out with a large plate of "poutine" - cheese curds over french fries, drenched in hot chicken sauce. A side order of mayonaise for dipping the fries is used in extreme cases.
When that doesn't work, or in the case of demon possession, Quebecers used to drive the demons out by forcing them to listen to Celine Dion. That was banned as likely to provoke an international outcry, so they've switched to Tom Cruise or George Bush and, in extreme cases, Jean Chretien.
After which they are put on an ice floe and drift out to sea ... after all, "plus ca change, plus ca reste la meme", which is french (sort of) for "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
Tourism is our big industry up here, but a word of warning - don't bring too much money, or you're likely to end up drifting away on an ice floe.
*joke*
Seriously, if you don't hold US citizenship and don't mind being banned from the good ol' USA, try anti-American countries like Cuba and countries that couldn't give a rats ass what Washington thinks, like China or sometimes France. Obviously not France for certain trademark-violating or pro-Nazi sites of course. On the other hand I hear Germany and a few other European countries are great places to post anti-Church-of-Scientology stuff that's (c) by them in the USA.
Actually, what you want is a country whose laws protect the very activity you want to engage in, like the CoS example above. Unfortunately, I'm not the right person to ask.
I'm pretty sure that if you are an American or have assets in the USA, if the companies track you down they will find a way to make your life miserable nonetheless, corporate veil or no corporate veil.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
IIRC, ThePirateBay, probably the biggest Bittorrent "dark grey" tracker network, is hosted in Sweeden, and, well, they openly mock US companies that send them threatening letters.
0 a.htm
http://thepiratebay.org/legal.php
Also, IIRC, Sealand, which is a floating fortress that was abandoned in international waters, apparently has a hosting company. They make it a point to host things that might be illegal in other countries (the exception being child pornogrpahy and spam).
http://thewhir.com/marketwatch/sealand.cfm
http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa08110
I'd rather have judges making bad decisions that can be fixed on appeal than the government having the power to arbitrarily remove judges they disagree with.
> perfectly legal in Russia, but got arrested when he visited the U.S.
> because it was claimed he broke the U.S. DMCA.
By offering ebook-cracking software for sale to Americans in America, he was breaking American law[1]. That someone who was breaking American law was arrested when he came to America is not entirely surprising.
Now, I'll grant you that it's not a good law, but at the time of his arrest, selling this kind of circumvention software was a crime in the US, and offering it for sale to Americans inside America---regardless of whether that selling was over the web or not---meant that he was breaking an American law.
Sklyarov's case isn't about over-reaching jurisdiction---he was arrested in the US for breaking a US law in the US---it's about bad laws . Muddying the waters by confusing the two just helps divert attention away from (possible or real) problems due to each of these (different) phenomena.
[1] It's questionable whether Dmitry was actually in violation of any US laws, since it is claimed that he had nothing to do with the distribution of the program inside the US. Nevertheless, that is what he was arrested for and charged with, so he was indeed arrested for and charged with committing a crime (distribution of circumvention software) against US law in the US (Washington State-based server, US clients). That he may well have been innocent of those charges does not make them "overreaching their jurisdiction" any more than any other innocent man in the US being charged with a crime involves overreaching jurisdiction.
I think it was even a lot more complicated than that. In this case, the Washington Post slandered a person. That it was slander was not in question, and slander is illegal in both Washington and Ontario. The problem is slander is a law of circumstances, in which reputation is harmed. The person in question was not harmed in Washington has he had no reputation there, not having any friends, family, or colleagues. Even by Washington law, the harm happened in Ontario. There were a bunch of other contributing factors as well such as availability of witnesses. In essense, neither Washington nor Ontario seemed the right venue, yet that would allow the Post to get away with it.
This is not so much a internet jurisdiction problem as it is a general problem with laws in which the act happens in one location but the harm happens in another. This isn't new, and there's plenty of case law from telephone, mail, and so forth. It is an interesting problem with no easy answers though. The internet just makes it all the more common and visible.