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Filmmakers Ask 'Pirate' to Take Polygraph, Backtrack When He Agrees (torrentfreak.com)
The makers of Dallas Buyers Club (a 2014 movie, which won three Academy awards) are going to great lengths to crackdown on BitTorrent pirates. According to a report on piracy news blog TorrentFreak, the filmmakers challenged an accused pirate to submit a polygraph test to prove that he didn't download a copyright infringing copy of their movie. The accused pirate, California resident Michael Amhari, insists that he did not download any pirated copy of the Dallas Buyers Club and agreed to take the polygraph test. Upon hearing this, the filmmakers, who had imposed a $100,000 fine on Amhari, retracted the offer. "When plaintiff's counsel then agreed to take such a test with the proviso that defense costs and attorney fees be covered, plaintiff then refused to pay costs and revoked his offer to conduct a polygraph," said Amhari's counsel Clay Renick. TorrentFreak reports: "After receiving exculpatory evidence and the sworn declaration of defendant, Mr. Davis then refused to file a dismissal and proceeded to demand that defendant appear in the action or he would file a default." The defendant's counsel added: âoeThis behavior is galling and it should not be permitted by the court.â Because of these dubious tactics the court should set aside the default that was entered earlier this month. According to Renick, Dallas Buyer's Club has nothing more than an IP-address to back up their infringement claims, which is not enough to prove guilt.
"For now, although the idea of a lie detector may be comforting, the most practical advice is to remain skeptical about any conclusion wrung from a polygraph."
Source: The Truth About Lie Detectors (aka Polygraph Tests)
And their results cannot be used as evidence in court.
Criminal court. This is a civil case not a criminal one. It's very admissible.
I'm not even clear why a polygraph is even in the mix here. Frankly, I think the things should be outright outlawed, and it should lead to prison sentences for any officer of the court to try to use one. It's pseudo-scientific quackery whose only purpose is to bully the uninformed.
Leave the e-meters to the $cientologists.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
When did downloading a file become a copyright violation?
The relevant law in the US was enacted in 1947, so downloading a copyrighted file without the copyright holder granting the right would have been a copyright violation as soon as downloading was invented.
Well, that's somewhat misleading. In practice, before the internet, it was very rare for corporations (or individual artists/authors/creators) to attempt a copyright lawsuit unless there was proof that the infringer had monetary gain, usually through commercial distribution or something like that.
Keep in mind that this was only subject to a civil action before 1997, so you'd have to hire a lawyer. And then you'd also have to convince a court that downloading a file (which, by your own argument, was "just invented") was significantly different from things like time-shifting, which SCOTUS had ruled was legal in 1984. (That is, you can't be sued for copyright infringement for videotaping a TV broadcast on your VCR for personal use.) It's not readily apparent at the outset that downloading a file is not analogous to something like taping a TV show or movie for later use. In fact, there's a string of litigation in the 1990s that dealt with just these kinds of distinctions, until the "space-shifting" argument was ultimately rejected in court rulings around 2000.
Even if you could convince a court in the 1980s or early 1990s that downloading a file was "making an unauthorized copy," the actual damages for non-commercial infringement would be near zero. So, someone suing would have to go with statutory damages, and given the ambiguity of the situation in the early days, they'd probably only get the minimum in statutory damages... and be lucky to get away with a couple hundred dollars, maybe not even enough to cover court costs.
So, while it may have been a "copyright violation" to download "as soon as downloading was invented," it wouldn't have been pursued unless there was commercial gain involved or some other egregious copyright violation.
Also, while it was perhaps subject to civil penalties, downloading was NOT a criminal violation of copyright until 1997 with the NET Act. Before that, the LaMacchia loophole did not allow prosecution for downloading -- or even filesharing (which would include distribution) -- with no commercial gain. (Note that the "LaMacchia loophole" depended on a distinction between "theft" or "fraud" involving electronic transactions and stealing physical items, again bringing up problems in naively applying previous copyright law to the new electronic landscape.)
Polygraphs work. They're just graphing multiple biological signals (heart rate, skin conductivity, breathing, etc), hence the name, "poly" and "graph".
The real leap in logic is that a polygraph can be used to detect truthfulness (to which there is no causal link - while stress can be caused by lying, in general the exam itself overrides any possible stress indicators). The only real way they work is the interrogator catches the suspect in a contradiction (which is also non causal since the suspect may simply be tired or just wants to get it over).
There are lie detectors that DO work quite effectively (fMRIs, for example, are very effective since different areas of the brain are activated and easily detectable). They are, however, expensive to administer and fidgety since you need the suspect to stay relatively still.
If you read the defense's legal filing, it sounds as if the plaintiff was negotiating with the defense's lawyer for the polygraphy, the defense asked for 14 days and only got 7. When the defense agreed to the polygraph on the condition the plantiff pays for it, plaintiff immediately files for entry of default judgement.
Plaintiff also is accused of making bad faith verbal promises that they reneged on that they would dismiss the case if he tool the polygraph. That is why further filings weren't made initially as timely as they could have been.
If you read the whole thing, previous case law would seem like the defendant likely will get the default judgement set aside. Courts rather get things right and hear a case rather than just give the case to one side without good cause.
fMRI has not been proven to work as a lie detector.
As to your first point, it isn't reliable nine times out of ten. It's likely no more accurate than a placebo (i.e. having the suspect give testimony into a microphone hooked up to a computer and claiming the computer can determine whether he is lying or not).
As to the second point, it's just a prop.
As to the third point, yes, it has a psychological effect providing the suspect believes it is effective. But relying on the ignorance of suspects seems a pretty piss poor way to guarantee you're getting useful testimony.
The American Psychology Psychological Association has a pretty good writeup on it:
http://www.apa.org/research/ac...
In particular:
So we have is a machine built on a faulty set of assumptions about behavior that it is probably could never be verified, which utterly undermines your first point. It simply does not detect lies. Full stop.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.