Imagine if you had a plumber in to do some work, and they warrantied the labor on their work, such that they would come back at no additional charge if there were any problems with the work that they did. Only a week or so later, the pipe starts leaking, leaving no doubt whatsoever that they did an incompetent job. You can get them to come back in to fix it, per their alleged warranty, but do you really want a plumber who evidently does that poor a job actually doing any more work on your place?
The reason I argue that what is legal for private citizens to freely do should not require a warrant for law enforcement (the contrapositive of this being that whatever requires law enforcement to obtain a warrant should not be legally permissible for private citizens to freely do without authorization either) is that there is otherwise absolutely nothing which can prevent a private citizen, perhaps entirely anonymously, turning in whatever data they collected to the authorities, where the latter would have needed a warrant, and the authorities then using that data. How can anyone else know that somebody who was collaborating with law enforcement did not simply collect the information themselves, and the authorities actually took unauthorized action without a warrant? The very accountability that a warrant is supposed to provide actually becomes completely meaningless in such a case. Taken to its effective conclusion, the only thing that makes any sense is to just not require law enforcement to get a warrant for doing the activity in question (in the same context) in the first place, since they could have obtained the data from anybody else in exactly the same context. The fact that they might represent the state would give them absolutely *zero* additional power in this regard. Assuming that it were the case that the laws were actually as I have been advocating, then the police couldn't just barge into somebody's private residence without a warrant, for example, unless any private citizen who was completely unknown to the person and otherwise completely unauthorized to have entered could have done exactly the same thing under the exact same circumstances. In general, the latter is not permissible, so, in turn, neither would the former be.
The example you gave of collecting attendance records at a church, I still would argue should reasonably fall under privacy laws, where I would suggest that in general, personal records about private individuals should only rightfully be used by other private citizens for purposes that the individuals have explicitly permitted, and that law enforcement should rightfully require a warrant to ever obtain the data in the first place. I would also suggest that private citizens *should* have the additional right to use to such personal data for purposes not explicitly permitted *if and only if* one of the two following cases applies: 1) Either the data itself exposes the truth about some crime; or 2) the person has an objectively valid cause to believe that the personal data will be of help in solving a crime that the police have asked the general public for assistance with. Of course, in either case, the police would still generally need a warrant to obtain the data themselves in the first place.
But I have not ever meant to propose that this kind equivalence between practices of citizens and the state should apply to absolutely any kind of activity that the government or a private person might undertake, which you keep appearing to try to generalize my comments to. I have *ONLY* ever been talking about data collecting or information gathering activities.
In New york, for instance, you'd be looking at most kids generally having to walk to school before the sun even comes up in the winter months, unless you also pushed all schools to start one hour later to compensate.
The distinction is that you are talking about general activities, I am only talking about data or information gathering activities that law enforcement may (or may not) need a warrant to do. It's my contention that things which require a warrant for law enforcement to do should not be legal for *ANYONE* to do without appropriate authorization.
The contrapositive of this, which is that if anyone can legitimately do it without authorization, then law enforcement should not require a warrant for it (which is not the same thing as saying that law enforcement could ever legally do it in the first place, only that assuming it were valid for them to do so at all, then they would not require a warrant) is 100% logically identical to that notion.
Example:
The police generally require a warrant to enter somebody's private residence, and a random person cannot generally legally enter another's private residence without permission The police can freely ask if they can enter somebody's home even if they do not actually have a warrant, and if they are given permission to enter, then they may do so. Of course, a person can legally enter another's home if they are given permission as well. In the event of some imminent emergency, however, a person *could* legally enter into somebody else's private residence even without their permission, and not necessarily be held directly accountable for that act (as long as the cause for believing an emergency to exist before they entered the home is objectively justifiable). Similarly, law enforcement or other officials should be (and in fact are) also allowed to enter someone's home even without a warrant if they have sufficient reason to believe an urgent situation requires immediate attention (for example, if there is a gunshot heard coming from inside the home).
So, on the matter of using passive IR to examine somebody's home from off of their property, I would maintain that it's an equal cause for concern when somebody is doing this who is completely unknown to the person whose home is being studied as it would be if somebody from law enforcement were doing the exact same thing without a warrant (again, only where the notion of a warrant could even begin to be construed to apply in the first place). My position is that if one is going to argue that the former should not be a problem, then neither should the latter, and if one is going to argue the latter is problematic, then the former must be also.
No... you keep generalizing when I am talking *specifically* about things which may require a warrant for the state to obtain, and things that the general public can freely obtain without any authorization whatsoever. The former does not make any sense for a private person to be able to do unrestricted either. I only maintain that the converse holds, which is that the state should not require a warrant to do what a private citizen can do (which necessitates the notion that the state could somehow ever legally do it in the first place even if they had warrant), because it does not appear that any additional powers the state might actually have would not necessarily grant them any special leeway with respect to obtaining such information.
In a nutshell... if it needs a warrant, then it seems that to me that nobody else should be able to generally do it either... and utilizing any information so obtained should reasonably subject the person to prosecution. If anybody can do it, then it shouldn't reasonably need a warrant, which is not the same thing as saying that the government should also always be able to do anything a private citizen can do, it only means the state would not need a warrant to, which in turn necessitates the notion that a warrant would have otherwise somehow provided the oversight that was required to have been legitimate..
To readdress the church example, I have never meant to suggest that the government tracking attendance at a church is not necessarily a big deal. I *AM*, however, suggesting that it should be considered exactly as big a deal when a private person does it who is completely unknown to the church. Personally, I think it borders on stalking, and I find the whole concept rather creepy. If it were happening at a church, the members there, assuming that they even realized he was tracking who was attending, would have no knowledge what this particular person's agenda is... and the fact that he may not apparently wield as much power as somebody who is acting on government authority is wholly meaningless, since not only do they know this unknown person's ulterior motives, but they do not necessarily know who else he might know.... he may very well have contacts in very high positions of power, and the net effect would absolutely be no different than if a representative of the state were to have done the exact same action. Certainly, if somebody who had no recognized authority to gather such information, and who was unknown to a church were to do something like that, if they were to ever try to utilize such information in any way, I should sincerely hope such a person would be prosecuted under laws protecting citizens' privacy. I realize that might not be the way things actually are, but it's how I think they ought to be.
So while I do maintain that things which a private person can do freely to gather information, the state should not require a warrant to do likewise, I am also equally firm on the premise that if the state should reasonably require a warrant for an action, then a private person has absolutely no business doing the exact same thing at all, unless they have received suitable authorization.
But you seem to keep thinking that I am somehow suggesting that the government should be able to do absolutely anything a private citizen can, and vice versa, when that's never been anything remotely like what I'm saying.
You've still been unable to show how a person who works for law enforcement collecting information without a warrant poses any greater danger to the population than permitting a private person without any authorization from doing the same. I addressed the example you gave of the government collecting church records without a warrant, suggesting it was just as concerning if a private person who had no affiliation with a church doing it without any previous authorization as it would be someone from the state. In either case, you obviously can't hold them accountable for the action until they try to utilize the data so gathered, unless you endorse 24/7 monitoring of the entire population.
Your example of firing employees for speech isn't really applicable, because that's not something that the state can get any permission to do it in the first place.
I'm not suggesting that *anything* a private person can do, the state should be similarly able to do.... I'm suggesting that anything that any private person can freely do which the state *CAN* also potentially legally do should not somehow require the state to obtain a warrant first. It really makes no sense since the state could just as easily collect such information from anybody who was willing to volunteer it.
Unless you *also* prohibit the state from accepting as evidence any information from any private citizen that law enforcement themselves would have needed a warrant to acquire. Of course, if that were the case, the value of having an eyewitness to many types of criminal activity ends up being rendered almost completely moot.
If it is somehow a violation of civil rights for law enforcement to do it without a warrant, then it follows that it should be an equal violation of civil rights if some other private person who is otherwise completely unknown to the individuals affected by it. In the case of the recording church meeting attendance example that you gave, for instance, I would think it's reasonable to consider the recording of such data by anyone who is neither a member, an adherent well known to at least one member, nor someone who was explicitly authorized by the an authority within the church to collect such information to be an invasion of their privacy, and so absolutely *nobody* who is unknown to the church should be able to ordinarily practice it anyways. Enforcement of such an issue would come into play if or whenever such information ever gets used.... just as it would if or when law enforcement obtains information that they ordinarily could not without a warrant... where usually the evidence is simply inadmissible in a court case, and those who collected the data (if known) can then be held liable for that act.
I like the actors, and while I do think it's a great continuity nod to get them involved, I can't help but feel like the fact that they are so much older than how they appeared in 1983 is going to introduce a disconnect where people who knew the characters are not going to be able to connect with those characters in any kind of meaningful way, because there haven't been any movies with those characters for 30 years. It feels like a continuity nod for its own sake rather than for the sake of making it a better story, because so much time has gone by that I see no real way that people are likely to feel like these are the characters that they were once familiar with.
I mean, maybe it'd be easier for people who were already well into their adulthood when those movies came out, but I know from personal experience that just meeting up with a friend you had as a teenager and you haven't seen in 20 years feels strange, because you feel like you should be able to reform a connection to that person, but the sheer quantity of time that has gone by without any contact has created such a large disconnect that simply seeing them again after so long has no real hope of re-establishing any sort of feeling of familiarity.
Seriously, I think that if they are using the original actors like this to involve those characters, they would be better off doing it it as an animated feature... perhaps with realistic computer graphics, than hoping that viewers will ever somehow have any sort of connection to these characters.
My point is that while I agree that a government is more powerful than a regular person, on the specific subject of practicing something that might some should say might reasonably need a warrant, while anybody else could ordinarily do it without any restriction whatsoever, I can't begin to see how any extra power that the state has would give them any particular advantage in that matter, nor how it would negatively impact citizenry in any more significant way, because I can perceive absolutely no net difference between somebody who works for the government collecting some data that supposedly anybody else could collect and a person who doesn't, and handing it over to somebody who works for the government.
Can you actually even a *SINGLE* example to me that actually meets that requirement, where it is somehow less of a violation on the citizenry if somebody from the government requires a warrant to do something, while anybody else (who may be equally unknown to the person or persons whose privacy or rights may be getting impacted as a representative from the government may be) is allowed to practice the exact same activity without any restriction whatsoever? I'm not arguing about general practices or whatnot.... I'm talking about things which allegedly should require a warrant for the government to do, while private citizens could somehow practice the exact same action without restriction. It's that specific notion which I am saying is asinine, because somebody from the government doing such a thing without actually getting a warrant has no actual net greater effect on people than private citizens, who would ordinarily be permitted to do it (and the latter doing it may sometimes already be illegal under stalking laws or peeping tom laws anyways, in which case it couldn't really be freely practiced legally by private citizens in the first place).
... now if they can only go after the people who seem to always spam me with text-message ads for "hookup" websites, which I am presuming are catering to people wanting to get lucky with somebody else local for them.
My wife has received 2 of these, and I've received 5 since the beginning of this year, each time from a different phone number, but always for the same website (each individual message claiming to be from a different person, however.)
Damn annoying, because we can't seem to do anything about it. At least we both have an unlimited text plan though, so it's not costing us any money. Still frustrating when you get a message and you think it's important and it turns out to be just spam, though.
Yep.... and the website owners are also entirely free to not transmit the text to browsers that have javascript disabled (doesn't appear to be the case here though).
As far as I can see, when it comes to things that private citizens are ordinarily allowed to do anyways, somebody who is law enforcement not needing a warrant to do *EXACTLY* the same thing does not grant the state any additional power whatsoever.
I firmly maintain that if law enforcement is not allowed to practice it without a warrant, then private citizens should not be permitted to practice it either, on the exact same privacy grounds that "peeping tom" laws exist on. If no justifiable reason can be found to consider a private individual to be invading anyone's privacy or rights by practicing something, then there is no possible reason I can imagine, at all (and you have yet to show an example of one) that somebody who is working for the government would somehow be.
The difference is that if it is a person deciding to do it, as a person they do not have the force of the state behind them.
Reasonably, neither would law enforcement... insomuch as this is restricted to things that private people would be permitted to practice anyways... they could, in effect, only gather whatever information they are seeking without a warrant to the exact same extent that a private person could likewise have accomplished the same thing. That information, in turn, may end up being grounds for a warrant in the future, just as it could be if a private person handed the same information.
There is no net difference between law enforcement using whatever information that it is given by people who were able to freely obtain it and hand it over to law enforcement gathering that information themselves. Therefore, it stands to reason that, in general, if something requires a warrant for law enforcement to do, then the general public should not be permitted to do it without receiving legally recognized authorization, and conversely, if the general public is permitted to freely practice it as they desire, then it should not require a warrant for law enforcement to do either... particularly since law enforcement consists of individual people who are actually *PART* of that general public.
In general, I'd agree with you... but for the issue of needing a warrant vs not ordinarily being a problem for an average citizen to do, there's a disconnect, because if it's legal for a private person to do, then that private person could just as easily submit what they happened to discover as evidence to law enforcement of something they believe to be suspicious, as law enforcement themselves could have obtained it. The only sane thing to do is, if law enforcement requires a warrant to do something, then private persons should not be legally allowed to do it at all without some sort of higher authorization.
In what way is it practical for something to require a warrant for law enforcement to do that anyone else could legally do without restriction and freely talk about anyways?
At the very least, if a private citizen were to have done such a thing and noticed something suspicious, then that suspicion alone could very easily be grounds for an actual warrant anyways.
It makes absolutely no sense to me to allow private citizens to legally do something without restriction that law enforcement can't do without a warrant.
Only *SELLING* copies of copyrighted works is illegal. Period
Incorrect.
Absolutely *ANY* unauthorized copying of a copyrighted work is illegal unless the actual context of copying qualifies under a specific exemption to infringement, such as personal use, fair use, etc. Distributing to other people, whether for profit or not, negates any notion of personal use, and even fair use does not permit unrestricted distribution, even if doing it entirely at one's own expense.
When you buy a book and give that book to somebody, you aren't making a copy of the book to do so. When libraries loan out books, they aren't loaning out copies that they made. When you personally use a photocopier in a library to copy something for yourself, you bear the risks of copyright infringement since it is *YOU* who is making the copy, and not the library. If what you copy is being used for something that qualifies as an exemption to copyright infringement, then it's not infringement.
I certainly have no appreciation for the DMCA (I honestly wish it would just get repealed entirely), but regarding the fact that the DMCA's prohibitions on unlocking works do not expire, it would only be actually illegal if there were any actual law that explicitly states that all copyrighted works *MUST* become publicly accessible without encryption once the copyright expires. There is no such law. Consider, though, that it is not a violation of the DMCA to break encryption on a work that was once copyrighted and has since fallen into public domain... although the durations on copyrighted works are so absurdly long right now that this might seem like small compensation.
If I share out a music file and five people download it, I've caused about $5 worth of damage
Except that penalties for breaking the law aren't always limited to immediate montary damages.
If you steal a chocolate bar valued at $1 from a store, the immediate damages are $1. The penalty for doing so, however, can be substantially higher. On the order of hundreds of dollars.
(Note that I'm not saying copyright infringement is theft here, only using theft as a simple example because it's obvious how much immediate financial impact it has).
Possibly... but not all crimes have equal punishment.
The penalty for going slightly over a speed limit (with otherwise no harm done), for example, although still certainly illegal, is not met with the same type of penalty as, say, kidnapping or murder.
So unless you can say exactly *what* the person did that was illegal, step 1, by itself, is inadequate.
Slashdot Mirror
[nt]
Imagine if you had a plumber in to do some work, and they warrantied the labor on their work, such that they would come back at no additional charge if there were any problems with the work that they did. Only a week or so later, the pipe starts leaking, leaving no doubt whatsoever that they did an incompetent job. You can get them to come back in to fix it, per their alleged warranty, but do you really want a plumber who evidently does that poor a job actually doing any more work on your place?
The reason I argue that what is legal for private citizens to freely do should not require a warrant for law enforcement (the contrapositive of this being that whatever requires law enforcement to obtain a warrant should not be legally permissible for private citizens to freely do without authorization either) is that there is otherwise absolutely nothing which can prevent a private citizen, perhaps entirely anonymously, turning in whatever data they collected to the authorities, where the latter would have needed a warrant, and the authorities then using that data. How can anyone else know that somebody who was collaborating with law enforcement did not simply collect the information themselves, and the authorities actually took unauthorized action without a warrant? The very accountability that a warrant is supposed to provide actually becomes completely meaningless in such a case. Taken to its effective conclusion, the only thing that makes any sense is to just not require law enforcement to get a warrant for doing the activity in question (in the same context) in the first place, since they could have obtained the data from anybody else in exactly the same context. The fact that they might represent the state would give them absolutely *zero* additional power in this regard. Assuming that it were the case that the laws were actually as I have been advocating, then the police couldn't just barge into somebody's private residence without a warrant, for example, unless any private citizen who was completely unknown to the person and otherwise completely unauthorized to have entered could have done exactly the same thing under the exact same circumstances. In general, the latter is not permissible, so, in turn, neither would the former be.
The example you gave of collecting attendance records at a church, I still would argue should reasonably fall under privacy laws, where I would suggest that in general, personal records about private individuals should only rightfully be used by other private citizens for purposes that the individuals have explicitly permitted, and that law enforcement should rightfully require a warrant to ever obtain the data in the first place. I would also suggest that private citizens *should* have the additional right to use to such personal data for purposes not explicitly permitted *if and only if* one of the two following cases applies: 1) Either the data itself exposes the truth about some crime; or 2) the person has an objectively valid cause to believe that the personal data will be of help in solving a crime that the police have asked the general public for assistance with. Of course, in either case, the police would still generally need a warrant to obtain the data themselves in the first place.
But I have not ever meant to propose that this kind equivalence between practices of citizens and the state should apply to absolutely any kind of activity that the government or a private person might undertake, which you keep appearing to try to generalize my comments to. I have *ONLY* ever been talking about data collecting or information gathering activities.
In New york, for instance, you'd be looking at most kids generally having to walk to school before the sun even comes up in the winter months, unless you also pushed all schools to start one hour later to compensate.
The distinction is that you are talking about general activities, I am only talking about data or information gathering activities that law enforcement may (or may not) need a warrant to do. It's my contention that things which require a warrant for law enforcement to do should not be legal for *ANYONE* to do without appropriate authorization.
The contrapositive of this, which is that if anyone can legitimately do it without authorization, then law enforcement should not require a warrant for it (which is not the same thing as saying that law enforcement could ever legally do it in the first place, only that assuming it were valid for them to do so at all, then they would not require a warrant) is 100% logically identical to that notion.
Example:
The police generally require a warrant to enter somebody's private residence, and a random person cannot generally legally enter another's private residence without permission The police can freely ask if they can enter somebody's home even if they do not actually have a warrant, and if they are given permission to enter, then they may do so. Of course, a person can legally enter another's home if they are given permission as well. In the event of some imminent emergency, however, a person *could* legally enter into somebody else's private residence even without their permission, and not necessarily be held directly accountable for that act (as long as the cause for believing an emergency to exist before they entered the home is objectively justifiable). Similarly, law enforcement or other officials should be (and in fact are) also allowed to enter someone's home even without a warrant if they have sufficient reason to believe an urgent situation requires immediate attention (for example, if there is a gunshot heard coming from inside the home).
So, on the matter of using passive IR to examine somebody's home from off of their property, I would maintain that it's an equal cause for concern when somebody is doing this who is completely unknown to the person whose home is being studied as it would be if somebody from law enforcement were doing the exact same thing without a warrant (again, only where the notion of a warrant could even begin to be construed to apply in the first place). My position is that if one is going to argue that the former should not be a problem, then neither should the latter, and if one is going to argue the latter is problematic, then the former must be also.
No... you keep generalizing when I am talking *specifically* about things which may require a warrant for the state to obtain, and things that the general public can freely obtain without any authorization whatsoever. The former does not make any sense for a private person to be able to do unrestricted either. I only maintain that the converse holds, which is that the state should not require a warrant to do what a private citizen can do (which necessitates the notion that the state could somehow ever legally do it in the first place even if they had warrant), because it does not appear that any additional powers the state might actually have would not necessarily grant them any special leeway with respect to obtaining such information.
In a nutshell... if it needs a warrant, then it seems that to me that nobody else should be able to generally do it either... and utilizing any information so obtained should reasonably subject the person to prosecution. If anybody can do it, then it shouldn't reasonably need a warrant, which is not the same thing as saying that the government should also always be able to do anything a private citizen can do, it only means the state would not need a warrant to, which in turn necessitates the notion that a warrant would have otherwise somehow provided the oversight that was required to have been legitimate..
To readdress the church example, I have never meant to suggest that the government tracking attendance at a church is not necessarily a big deal. I *AM*, however, suggesting that it should be considered exactly as big a deal when a private person does it who is completely unknown to the church. Personally, I think it borders on stalking, and I find the whole concept rather creepy. If it were happening at a church, the members there, assuming that they even realized he was tracking who was attending, would have no knowledge what this particular person's agenda is... and the fact that he may not apparently wield as much power as somebody who is acting on government authority is wholly meaningless, since not only do they know this unknown person's ulterior motives, but they do not necessarily know who else he might know.... he may very well have contacts in very high positions of power, and the net effect would absolutely be no different than if a representative of the state were to have done the exact same action. Certainly, if somebody who had no recognized authority to gather such information, and who was unknown to a church were to do something like that, if they were to ever try to utilize such information in any way, I should sincerely hope such a person would be prosecuted under laws protecting citizens' privacy. I realize that might not be the way things actually are, but it's how I think they ought to be.
So while I do maintain that things which a private person can do freely to gather information, the state should not require a warrant to do likewise, I am also equally firm on the premise that if the state should reasonably require a warrant for an action, then a private person has absolutely no business doing the exact same thing at all, unless they have received suitable authorization.
But you seem to keep thinking that I am somehow suggesting that the government should be able to do absolutely anything a private citizen can, and vice versa, when that's never been anything remotely like what I'm saying.
You've still been unable to show how a person who works for law enforcement collecting information without a warrant poses any greater danger to the population than permitting a private person without any authorization from doing the same. I addressed the example you gave of the government collecting church records without a warrant, suggesting it was just as concerning if a private person who had no affiliation with a church doing it without any previous authorization as it would be someone from the state. In either case, you obviously can't hold them accountable for the action until they try to utilize the data so gathered, unless you endorse 24/7 monitoring of the entire population.
Your example of firing employees for speech isn't really applicable, because that's not something that the state can get any permission to do it in the first place.
I'm not suggesting that *anything* a private person can do, the state should be similarly able to do.... I'm suggesting that anything that any private person can freely do which the state *CAN* also potentially legally do should not somehow require the state to obtain a warrant first. It really makes no sense since the state could just as easily collect such information from anybody who was willing to volunteer it.
Unless you *also* prohibit the state from accepting as evidence any information from any private citizen that law enforcement themselves would have needed a warrant to acquire. Of course, if that were the case, the value of having an eyewitness to many types of criminal activity ends up being rendered almost completely moot.
If it is somehow a violation of civil rights for law enforcement to do it without a warrant, then it follows that it should be an equal violation of civil rights if some other private person who is otherwise completely unknown to the individuals affected by it. In the case of the recording church meeting attendance example that you gave, for instance, I would think it's reasonable to consider the recording of such data by anyone who is neither a member, an adherent well known to at least one member, nor someone who was explicitly authorized by the an authority within the church to collect such information to be an invasion of their privacy, and so absolutely *nobody* who is unknown to the church should be able to ordinarily practice it anyways. Enforcement of such an issue would come into play if or whenever such information ever gets used.... just as it would if or when law enforcement obtains information that they ordinarily could not without a warrant... where usually the evidence is simply inadmissible in a court case, and those who collected the data (if known) can then be held liable for that act.
I like the actors, and while I do think it's a great continuity nod to get them involved, I can't help but feel like the fact that they are so much older than how they appeared in 1983 is going to introduce a disconnect where people who knew the characters are not going to be able to connect with those characters in any kind of meaningful way, because there haven't been any movies with those characters for 30 years. It feels like a continuity nod for its own sake rather than for the sake of making it a better story, because so much time has gone by that I see no real way that people are likely to feel like these are the characters that they were once familiar with.
I mean, maybe it'd be easier for people who were already well into their adulthood when those movies came out, but I know from personal experience that just meeting up with a friend you had as a teenager and you haven't seen in 20 years feels strange, because you feel like you should be able to reform a connection to that person, but the sheer quantity of time that has gone by without any contact has created such a large disconnect that simply seeing them again after so long has no real hope of re-establishing any sort of feeling of familiarity.
Seriously, I think that if they are using the original actors like this to involve those characters, they would be better off doing it it as an animated feature... perhaps with realistic computer graphics, than hoping that viewers will ever somehow have any sort of connection to these characters.
My point is that while I agree that a government is more powerful than a regular person, on the specific subject of practicing something that might some should say might reasonably need a warrant, while anybody else could ordinarily do it without any restriction whatsoever, I can't begin to see how any extra power that the state has would give them any particular advantage in that matter, nor how it would negatively impact citizenry in any more significant way, because I can perceive absolutely no net difference between somebody who works for the government collecting some data that supposedly anybody else could collect and a person who doesn't, and handing it over to somebody who works for the government.
Can you actually even a *SINGLE* example to me that actually meets that requirement, where it is somehow less of a violation on the citizenry if somebody from the government requires a warrant to do something, while anybody else (who may be equally unknown to the person or persons whose privacy or rights may be getting impacted as a representative from the government may be) is allowed to practice the exact same activity without any restriction whatsoever? I'm not arguing about general practices or whatnot.... I'm talking about things which allegedly should require a warrant for the government to do, while private citizens could somehow practice the exact same action without restriction. It's that specific notion which I am saying is asinine, because somebody from the government doing such a thing without actually getting a warrant has no actual net greater effect on people than private citizens, who would ordinarily be permitted to do it (and the latter doing it may sometimes already be illegal under stalking laws or peeping tom laws anyways, in which case it couldn't really be freely practiced legally by private citizens in the first place).
My wife has received 2 of these, and I've received 5 since the beginning of this year, each time from a different phone number, but always for the same website (each individual message claiming to be from a different person, however.)
Damn annoying, because we can't seem to do anything about it. At least we both have an unlimited text plan though, so it's not costing us any money. Still frustrating when you get a message and you think it's important and it turns out to be just spam, though.
Yep.... and the website owners are also entirely free to not transmit the text to browsers that have javascript disabled (doesn't appear to be the case here though).
As far as I can see, when it comes to things that private citizens are ordinarily allowed to do anyways, somebody who is law enforcement not needing a warrant to do *EXACTLY* the same thing does not grant the state any additional power whatsoever.
I firmly maintain that if law enforcement is not allowed to practice it without a warrant, then private citizens should not be permitted to practice it either, on the exact same privacy grounds that "peeping tom" laws exist on. If no justifiable reason can be found to consider a private individual to be invading anyone's privacy or rights by practicing something, then there is no possible reason I can imagine, at all (and you have yet to show an example of one) that somebody who is working for the government would somehow be.
Reasonably, neither would law enforcement... insomuch as this is restricted to things that private people would be permitted to practice anyways... they could, in effect, only gather whatever information they are seeking without a warrant to the exact same extent that a private person could likewise have accomplished the same thing. That information, in turn, may end up being grounds for a warrant in the future, just as it could be if a private person handed the same information.
There is no net difference between law enforcement using whatever information that it is given by people who were able to freely obtain it and hand it over to law enforcement gathering that information themselves. Therefore, it stands to reason that, in general, if something requires a warrant for law enforcement to do, then the general public should not be permitted to do it without receiving legally recognized authorization, and conversely, if the general public is permitted to freely practice it as they desire, then it should not require a warrant for law enforcement to do either... particularly since law enforcement consists of individual people who are actually *PART* of that general public.
In general, I'd agree with you... but for the issue of needing a warrant vs not ordinarily being a problem for an average citizen to do, there's a disconnect, because if it's legal for a private person to do, then that private person could just as easily submit what they happened to discover as evidence to law enforcement of something they believe to be suspicious, as law enforcement themselves could have obtained it. The only sane thing to do is, if law enforcement requires a warrant to do something, then private persons should not be legally allowed to do it at all without some sort of higher authorization.
In what way is it practical for something to require a warrant for law enforcement to do that anyone else could legally do without restriction and freely talk about anyways?
At the very least, if a private citizen were to have done such a thing and noticed something suspicious, then that suspicion alone could very easily be grounds for an actual warrant anyways.
It makes absolutely no sense to me to allow private citizens to legally do something without restriction that law enforcement can't do without a warrant.
The book doesn't say what these almost everybody, everyday, felonies are either.
Incorrect.
Absolutely *ANY* unauthorized copying of a copyrighted work is illegal unless the actual context of copying qualifies under a specific exemption to infringement, such as personal use, fair use, etc. Distributing to other people, whether for profit or not, negates any notion of personal use, and even fair use does not permit unrestricted distribution, even if doing it entirely at one's own expense.
When you buy a book and give that book to somebody, you aren't making a copy of the book to do so. When libraries loan out books, they aren't loaning out copies that they made. When you personally use a photocopier in a library to copy something for yourself, you bear the risks of copyright infringement since it is *YOU* who is making the copy, and not the library. If what you copy is being used for something that qualifies as an exemption to copyright infringement, then it's not infringement.
I certainly have no appreciation for the DMCA (I honestly wish it would just get repealed entirely), but regarding the fact that the DMCA's prohibitions on unlocking works do not expire, it would only be actually illegal if there were any actual law that explicitly states that all copyrighted works *MUST* become publicly accessible without encryption once the copyright expires. There is no such law. Consider, though, that it is not a violation of the DMCA to break encryption on a work that was once copyrighted and has since fallen into public domain... although the durations on copyrighted works are so absurdly long right now that this might seem like small compensation.
Except that penalties for breaking the law aren't always limited to immediate montary damages.
If you steal a chocolate bar valued at $1 from a store, the immediate damages are $1. The penalty for doing so, however, can be substantially higher. On the order of hundreds of dollars.
(Note that I'm not saying copyright infringement is theft here, only using theft as a simple example because it's obvious how much immediate financial impact it has).
Prove it.
Ah.... so sort of like saying that the average human being has approximately 1 testicle?
Possibly... but not all crimes have equal punishment.
The penalty for going slightly over a speed limit (with otherwise no harm done), for example, although still certainly illegal, is not met with the same type of penalty as, say, kidnapping or murder.
So unless you can say exactly *what* the person did that was illegal, step 1, by itself, is inadequate.
I've heard this statistic before, why have I never found any compiled list somewhere of which felonies are actually the most commonly broken.