Protecting State Secrets Through Copyright

An anonymous reader writes "The United States has pursued Bradley Manning with full force for his role in supplying classified documents to WikiLeaks, in part because of the substantial difficulty in going after the organization directly. Criminal statutes generally deployed against those who leak classified government documents — such as the Espionage Act of 1917 — are ill-equipped to prosecute third-party international distribution organizations like WikiLeaks. One potential tool that could be used to prosecute WikiLeaks is copyright law. The use of copyright law in this context has rarely been mentioned, and when it has, the approach has been largely derided by experts, who decry it as contrary to the purposes of copyright. But a paper just published in the Stanford Journal of International Law describes one novel way the U.S. could use copyright to go after WikiLeaks and similar leaking organizations directly--by bringing suit in foreign jurisdictions."

Comments

Re:Not Sure Which is Worse:

[BlueStrat]

[Not Sure Which Is Worse} The government's constant attempts to end-run the Constitution, or the fact that American citizens are helping them.

This.

That's the problem right there. If it wasn't for that, Bradley Manning would have had nothing to leak, and no reason to leak it.

The fools who cheer-lead the government effort to cover it's blatant violation of, and disregard for, the Constitution and the Rule of Law are allowing emotions and emotion-based propaganda to do their thinking for them.

They don't seem to understand or even care that this way lies a US authoritarian police state.

The US government has already gone so far towards a police state that I'm surprised the US hasn't sent in SEAL teams to kill Assange and destroy the Wikileaks facilities and caused Manning to have an "accident" while in custody.

Heck, that may all still happen.

It's sad when otherwise patriotic US citizens who love their country and freedom start to truly believe that some nation or terrorist group nuking the entirety of Washington D.C. and the surrounding area into a very deep, smoking, miles-wide, radioactive crater would be the best thing to happen to the country in almost a century.

Sic semper tyrannis.

Strat