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Manchester's Self-Described 'Internet Troll' Jailed For Offensive Web Posts
noob22 writes "According to BBC Online, 'An "internet troll" who posted obscene messages on Facebook sites set up in memory of dead people has been jailed. Colm Coss, of Ardwick, Manchester, posted on a memorial page for Big Brother star Jade Goody and a tribute site to John Paul Massey, a Liverpool boy mauled to death by a dog. The 36-year-old "preyed on bereaved families" for his "own pleasure," Manchester Magistrates Court heard.'" My favorite line: "Unemployed Coss was only caught when he sent residents on his street photos of himself saying he was an internet 'troll.'"
So if he'd used a megaphone and said to their faces they wouldn't have been able to charge him?
No, they would just charge him under a different law, such as disturbing the peace. They have thousands of laws, so in most cases the police can find something with which to charge you if they put their minds to it.
...it's just another example of how free-speech laws have diverged from today's technology.
How do you figure that? He was successfully convicted under the current laws when using new technology. It seems to me that the law coped quite happily with new technology. Your problem appears to be if he had used old technology.
I love how "computer crimes" are punished on an entirely different scale to regular crimes. You can go bottle someone (break a glass bottle over their head) and you get an average of zero days in jail (suspended for two years). You can go mug someone and get only a week of "hard time" with a year of parole. I mean heck you can go run someone down in your car and still get a lighter sentence than 18 weeks...
There is no level of rationality to computer crime sentences because the "old people" on both sides of the bench are simply too ignorant and out of touch to really know what the crime involved or how serious it was. This case should never have wasted the UK's courts time and public money let alone the cost of keeping him in jail for any period at all.
Frankly I have a VERY low opinion of the police, judge, and state for this one. I want a million pounds spent on arrested serious criminals and keeping them locked away. Give the mugger, violent thug, or drug dealers 18 week sentences instead of saving them for the "omg computer terrurist?! he uses microsoft and word to send deadly communications of doom!"
What's more - he wasn't even punished for threatening people. It is one thing to make threats and to scare people. It is another thing entirely to offend or upset them. While I think the things he said were extremely rude and offensive - nobody felt in fear for their security.
I don't understand it. It seems much worse to me to go to someones funeral or wake and say nasty things about them and yet that's fine.
The guy is a dick but this is ridiculous. It's not illegal to be a dick, nor should it be. Things like this make me worried for the future.
it's under construction
The guy is a dick but this is ridiculous. It's not illegal to be a dick, nor should it be.
Dickery is illegal when you cross a line which moves around a bit, but we call it "harassment" and it's definitely against the law. This is just another form of harassment and there's no moral reason not to convict him for it if that's what it takes to stop him. If you want to manipulate the mental state of others for personal gain, you must use advertising.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think the fact that the Westboro Baptist Church has been able to continue inflicting emotional pain against grieving families provides a counter example to such implementation in the US.
"Not harassment?"
Who decides what is offensive and what is not? I find it shocking how many people here seem to be against freedom of speech, or at least speech that offends them. In fact, your very post is offensive to me in and of itself. You need to be jailed, and fast!
"denying it happened is to disrespect the dead"
Freedom of speech. The dead can deal with it. Oh, wait, they already have!
"and an attempt to bring about conditions to repeat the atrocity"
Might as well arrest everyone in the world, then. Someone *might* kill another person. Just like this *might* (not a chance) bring about another holocaust!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
The offended parties voluntarily read his comments of their own free will, from a site which they do not own or administrate, which isn't even located in a country governed by the laws which you described.
The problem is that this sets a dangerous precedent. Pretty soon, you'll have to watch what you say on the internet for fear that it might offend someone and then the cops will come knocking. Everyone on 4chan will be screwed.
Just because the person offended was bereaved and the offense was directed at a deceased party does not mean there should be any sort of exceptional limit to what is legally acceptable. This is quickly spiraling into China-sized censorship.
Absolute rubbish.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
There is ethnic cleansing in Palestine which is far more ironic...
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
And yet, if I go around saying that MacGyver2210 kept me locked in his basement for three years while he raped me every night, I expect you will try to have me silenced. In most places, I'd even be subject to fines and possibly imprisonment if I'm vocal enough in my speech. If I shout outside your bedroom window through a megaphone all night, I expect you'll try to have me silenced.
Your quote refers specifically to political speech, especially the right to criticize government, corporation, and personal behavior. A society demands limits on speech, or it degenerates into anarchy. Prohibitions against telling lies and inciting violence are among the most common limits.
It's also stemming from sheer stubbornness and lack of contact with reality sometimes. I'm reminded of the bit in Douglas Hoffstadter's book "Godel, Escher, Bach", where the Tortoise character gets into an infinite regression: "So if I accept A, B, and C, then I have accepted your premise? Not so fast - lets call that statement D - don't I have to include A, B, C, and D to really accept your premise? Now lets call that claim statement E - Don't I now have to accept A, B, C, D, and E to accept your premise? We can see where this is going - How dare you demand I accept your infinite series of claims without inspection!".
Part of the frustration many of us feel over, say, the climate change or abortion debates seems to be the same sort of thing. There's always some person on the side we don't agree with, taking an 'obviously impossible, absurd' stance, and the possibly more reasonable people on that same side don't distance themselves from their own fanatics. One of the things I saw during my own involvement in the abortion debate was that on the Pro-Choice side, there were a few women who claimed all sex with males was rape, so the 'except in cases of rape and incest' clause always applied anyway. Some of these wanted to do away with all men and use cloning to copy human females only. There's an odd feeling when somebody casually advocates the genocide of 3 billion people and the use of a technology we don't actually have as the solution to all the world's problems, and nobody else in the room is willing to call them crazy. On the Pro-Life side I saw people (mostly Roman Catholic priests), who saw banning abortion as only the first step in passing laws banning all extramarital sex, then banning masturbation and all pornography including the bra section of the Sears catalog, bringing back the laws that required showing all married couples in movies as sleeping in twin beds, the ones dictating skirt lengths, and on and on.
I suspect many organisations would actually be stronger if they tossed out some people who claim to be part of their coalitions, even if their overall numbers of members dropped. Sometimes the smart thing to do is to say "He doesn't speak for me, even if he claims to.".
The real key is, whether somebody is lying (as you suggest), or insane (as I suggest here), doesn't really matter, and nobody ought to be given a free pass to disrupt discourse because we can't tell if they are one or the other. I don't know if Glenn Beck is insane or mendacious, and the people who say he is crazy like a fox may be the rightist of all, but what he does sheds more heat than light, either way. I don't have to decide if he is nuts or faking it to realise he isn't contributing anything useful. That goes in spades for the holocaust denialists. A specific statement of theirs may seem insane, or a deliberate lie, or sometimes a reasonable statement, but examining a whole series of statements they make, sooner or later you realise they are not adding anything constructive to any of the processes of debate, discussion or education.
Who is John Cabal?