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'If KickassTorrents is a Criminal Operation, Google Should Start Worrying' (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Polish authorities have extended the arrest of Artem Vaulin, the alleged owner of KickassTorrents. His defense team is currently preparing to fight the U.S. extradition request, which will start next month. According to Artem's U.S. lawyer, operating a torrent site is not a criminal offense. "In fact, in my opinion operating an index search engine cannot constitute a crime in the United States because secondary infringement is not criminalized under US law. If KickassTorrents is a criminal operation, then Google should start worrying," Gurvits says
You think all companies are equal under U.S. law?
Contrary to the belief of nerds everywhere, intent matters a lot in court.
So does the law. If his lawyers claim that secondary infringement is not a criminal offense in the US is true, why is he being extradited to the US? What crime will he be accused of? How many years will he spend getting raped in prison for the facilitation of moving ones and zeros? What fundamental harm to our society has he done that warrants that?
When a citizen (in the least polite terms) of a two bit third world country where corruption is open and rampant thinks he has a better chance of a fair trial in his native land than the United States, we really need to start asking some hard questions about our government.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
All the copyrighted movies and music you want! All free! It's way better than Mega ever was.
If we can gather anything from the CIA black camps in Poland, it's that unless you're Roman Polansky (or probably any actual Polish citizen), the Polish are perfectly ready to sell you out.
He doesn't *want* a fair trial, he wants to be declared innocent and able to continue doing what he's doing. Whether it's "fair" or "unfair" isn't really relevant to him.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
How do you provably establish someone's intent?
Well you see, we have these people called judges, whose job it is to, y'know, judge these sorts of things.
We regularly convict people on circumstantial evidence, by the way. You've watched too many cop shows.
Geeks treat the law as computer code with no allowance for nuance or subjectivity.
There's the whole "reasonable man" test in law.
Using Google, looking at the nature of search results and the way people actually use it; and their attitude towards copyright infringement notices; as well as the quantity of material indexed, it is quite clear to most reasonable people that Google is a search engine.
Kickass Torrents is used almost exclusively to find material that is obviously not being shared by a legitimate copyright holder. Most of the material being indexed infringes copyright. A reasonable person would conclude that the purpose and intent of the site is to facilitate copyright infringement.