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Blogger Fined €3,000 for 'Publicizing' Files Found Through Google Search
mpicpp points out an article detailing the case of French blogger Olivier Laurelli, who had the misfortune to click links from search results. Laurelli stumbled upon a public link leading to documents from the French National Agency for Food Safety, Environment, and Labor. He downloaded them — over 7 Gb worth — and looked through them, eventually publishing a few slides to his website. When one of France's intelligence agencies found out, they took Laurelli into custody and indicted him, referring to him as a 'hacker.' In their own investigation, they said, "we then found that it was sufficient to have the full URL to access to the resource on the extranet in order to bypass the authentication rules on this server." The first court acquitted Laurelli of the charges against him. An appeals court affirmed part of the decision, but convicted him of "theft of documents and fraudulent retention of information." He was fined €3,000 (about $4,000).
In this case, when a PUBLIC agency violates their own security protocol,
What the fuck has its being "PUBLIC" got to do with it? Maybe you're making parochial assumptions about licensing of government documents.
He did not break.
Straw man - "unlocked office"
He did not illegally enter.
Straw man - It's not the entering that's relevant - in many countries, trespass isn't illegal anyway.
It's about the duplicating of the documents located in a private place, and the republishing.
He didn't deprive them of anything.
Straw man - nobody mentioned theft.
The documents might as well have been stacked neatly in the public park,
False analogy - they weren't located in a public place.
with signs and arrows pointing to the juicy bits.
False analogy - signs and arrows are explicitly created and would imply an intent to draw attention to "the juicy bits". A search engine link merely implies that the spider crawled to or (in rare cares) guesstimated a particular location accessible to the spider.
And not even signs and arrows would imply permission to republish.
It's fundamental to all of Europe, and a huge freaking problem. Look at Amanda Knox – interrogated without a lawyer, tried twice for the same crime, and convicted without being present in court. Thank goodness we have the Bill of Rights! Those founders really thinking something good two hundred years ago.
In the USA, Obama's DOJ would have given him 50 life sentences and pressured him until he killed himself. €3000 seems cheap by comparison.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...