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."

Comments

Jurisdiction

[HugePedlar]

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?

Re:Jurisdiction

[Guy_Warwick]

complex question - no simple answer - It depends on the offense / the jurisdiction of the parties etc etc - some legislation EU "hate crimes" have wider nets - the worrying trend is to limit speech and to recognise national laws as having Universal jurisdiction - this is a matter widely dealt with in many articles on the net.

Re:Jurisdiction

[g2devi]

Just ask Dmitry Sklyarov. He did something in Russia that was perfectly legal in Russia, but got arrested when he visited the U.S. because it was claimed he broke the U.S. DMCA.

If you do something that is illegal in another jurisdiction, then it's a really good idea to stay out of that other jurisdiction. If you're in a jurisdiction that has an extradition agreement the that other jurisdiction, you may be SOL.

Re:Jurisdiction

[badfish99]

It is usually a requirement of extradition that the offence be illegal in the country being extradited from, as well as the country being extradited to. Otherwise, everyone would get sent to Saudi Arabia for flogging every time they took a drink.

The tendency of powerful countries like the US to believe that their law should apply everywhere is more troubling. This not only leads to cases like Sklyarov's, but also to pressure on other countries to make them change their own laws to fall into line: the various European versions of the DMCA come to mind here.
The logical end of this process would be for all laws to be the same everywhere (and to be the worst common denominator of all the current laws). The present diversity of laws between different countries is an important source of our current freedoms.

Only North Korean ISPs offer this service

[davidwr]

*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.

Sweeden or Sealand

[_KiTA_]

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.

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/aa081100 a.htm

Re:Fire the Judge

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Jurisdiction vs. bad laws

[Dire Bonobo]

> Just ask Dmitry Sklyarov. He did something in Russia that was
> 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.