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Canadian Court Reverses Net Publication Ruling

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the bad-precedent-dismissal dept.

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."

3 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Jurisdiction by HugePedlar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Jurisdiction by badfish99 · · Score: 4, Insightful
      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.

  2. Jurisdiction vs. bad laws by Dire+Bonobo · · Score: 4, Informative
    > 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.