Well, I don't see how we're going to get anywhere in debating this point except to say this: the government has an uncontroversial (as far as I know...feel free to surprise me) legitimate interest in regulating economic behavior. This means, ultimately, incenting some behaviors while disincenting others. It's easy to disincentivize a behavior by criminalizing it, so lets' set that aside. (Though I'm not saying that I think that's always, or even usually the best approach.) How, then, to affirmatively incentivize? The only obvious approach other than tax breaks is for the government to cut checks. But, at that point, it would've been more efficient to never have collected that revenue in the first place if you're just ging to give it back. So what, exactly, is the argument for raising the money and then giving it back as grants instead of just allowing the policy to be built into the tax regime in the first place?
And how exactly do taxes become less a civic duty when tax policy is used for policy making? Your duty is to pay the taxes that the government needs to affect it's policy goals. Who cares if the policy goal is affected in tax policy or through subsequent spending? The same argument can be run against your assertion that the notion of "paying your fair share" is undermined. If the tax policy is structured to achieve legitimate policy goals, what's "unfair" about it?
A concrete example: say that the government wants to help people start small businesses by boosting spending power of new small business owners by 10%. There are two ways we could do that: (1) use monies raised by other taxes to fund a grant paid to small business owner X in the amount of 10% of his income (with all the paperwork and verification that would be required to make that happen) or (2) we could just reduce X's tax liability by 10% in the first place. So, if we agree for the sake of argument that the policy of boosting spending power for small business owners is legitimate, then you have to answer the following questions:
1. Why is it that, if we go with option 2 instead of option 1, it is somehow no longer everyone's civic duty to pay taxes? 2. How is X paying his fair share in scenario 1 but not 2?
All the while bearing in mind that option 2 is clearly more efficient than option 1.
And I suppose you don't care that the Fair Tax is a ridiculously regressive tax? Because it taxes buying power, it disproportionately effects those who do not save or invest but, instead, live paycheck to paycheck. So, if you're poor and you have to spend all your income on rent and food, the fair tax hits you hardest. If you're rich, and you are able to invest half your income, and you spend the rest, you're only taxed on half your income. Thus, the rich pay a lower real tax rate than the poor. (Add to this the fact that the marginal value of $1 is far less to a rich person than to a poor person to begin with and the system starts to look downright dystopian.)
The obvious way to fix this that I've heard some propose, is to allow exemptions for the poor, etc. But now you're getting back where we are now, where individuals have to keep track of their finances and report to uncle sam for their rebates. Except now individuals have to keep track of every single purchase, rather than just their annual income from their employer.
And this gets at the broader point: taxation is a powerful and legitimate tool for achieving public policy goals. But if you use a national sales tax, you either are robbed of those tools for the sake of keeping taxation simple, or you and up with the worst of both worlds: a highly regressive taxation system that is still a nightmare to administer.
I'm pretty sure it does... If Apple had a monopoly like Microsoft's, consumers would have no ready way to evade Apple's restrictions. Thus, the market would no longer function properly, in that Apple could get away with diminishing the value of their product to end users without having to worry about pricing in a corresponding drop in demand. As it is, if you don't like Apple's practices, you can buy a different phone or write apps for a different platform. So, no, I think that if Apple had a monopoly like Microsoft's it would obviously be much worse, both morally and legally.
Paranoid disclaimer: I am a law student, not a lawyer, and I am in no way certain that what I'm saying below is true. You certainly should get yourself a real lawyer and not rely on anything I've written.
I don't know about UK law, but in the US, largely due to our federal system, the situation is quite complicated.
In the U.S., the law is inconsistent in a variety of ways: the 7th and 8th circuits have held that the licensing of software is different from the sale of a good. But this is a minority view in the federal courts. State law also muddies the issue. Many states have specifically amended their implementations of the Uniform Commercial Code (USS) (sort of the U.S. equivalent of the UK's Sale of Goods Act) to specifically define licensed software as a good. Other states (so far, IIRC, only VA and MD) have adopted the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) which is a law, analogous to the UCC, that is specially designed to cover things like software licensing. So, in these states you wouldn't say that a software license is a "good" but, for many purposes, the UCITA might impose analogous requirements. (Though, in many cases, it might not; the UCITA is widely criticized for being anti-consumer in ways the UCC is not.) In other jurisdictions, I imagine, a great deal on uncertainty remains.
and did anyone else envision him poking at various keyboards with a stick?
Yes. I had no idea what that "pointing stick" keyboard business was about. I thought it was, perhaps, for users with some sort of disability that somehow made poking a keyboard with a stick easier than typing.
Though in retrospect, I suppose I should've known that such a thing would never be called a "pointing stick" keyboard even if it did exist. It's not exactly a politically correct name.
Right...and AC's post pointed out that the scenario explained by parent was only necessary because of Soviet mismanagement of the armed forces. (The purges, he's saying, were a part of that.) Seems on point to me.
Put another way: GP ridiculed soviets for massive loss of life, parent replied saying that Soviets had no choice but to incur massive casualties, AC replies to this saying that parent is incorrect, the Soviets only had to incur such massive losses because they were incompetent.
I don't know if this is true, but I don't see how it's a non-sequitur.
That's an interesting question. As I gather you know, TransOcean built the rig and leased it to BP.
I don't know much at all about this area of law, so I don't really know. But I can apply standard principles of tort/property law which would probably come out like this:
BP was, at the time of the accident, the "Possessor" of the property and, thus, the party best in a position to have prevented it. TransOcean wasn't there, so it would be both unfair and economically inefficient to pin the liability on them. So, on this analysis, BP is liable, not TransOcean.
Then again if, as some are suggesting, the accident was caused by a fundamental construction defect in the rig that BP couldn't have prevented, TransOcean (or even Halliburton, as they poured the said-to-be-defective concrete) starts looking like the company you should be suing.
Of course, this is really all just speculation; in reality, there are probably contractual indemnifications all over the place between these guys.
The liability fight will probably not be quite what most expect. By statute, a rig owner's out-of-pocket liability for a spill is capped at around $75 million. In exchange, they pay a tax of about $0.08/barrel into a common fund which will be used to pay for claims beyond the cap. At the moment, the fund stands at about $1.6 billion. (Though the per incident payout from this fund is capped at $1 billion.)
The benefit of this system is, of course, that oil companies aren't exposed to devastating liability; instead, the liability is spread across he entire oil industry. This is also the problem: no individual oil company has an adequate economic incentive to avoid risky behavior.
I'm not seeing any Slashdotters that are quoting a policy they found on the internet but, regardless, Childs' defense had three months to present this policy in court if it existed and if it was helpful to their cause.
Reading the juror's interview, and knowing a little about criminal law, I really cannot see any basis at all for your suggestion that this is somehow a travesty borne of the jurors' technological illiteracy.
The law asks two questions of the jurors. 1 - did Childs know he was withholding service? The answer to this seems clearly to be "yes." 2 - Did Childs know that the person he was withholding service from was an authorized user? Again, the answer seems clearly to be "yes" because, as the juror points out, Childs had emailed passwords to other similar accounts to the user (COO, Richard Robinson) only a week before.
I don't see what one's level of technical expertise could possibly have to do with answering either of those questions.
Even better: I misread this as an obituary for obituaries of newspapers. There has to be some contrarian out there who is writing that newspapers are here to stay...
This is why it's actually pretty hard to put together a class action. For a class like this there is a lot of judicial management. It has to be found that the class representative has a claim that is, just that, representative of the class as a whole so they will be a reasonable proxy for the vigor with which individuals would prosecute the suit. (As well as a number of other requirements, such as experienced counsel, etc.).
The real point of the class action system is to create an incentive for small claims to be brought that would not otherwise be brought at all. I don't happen to think that $16 is actually such a bad deal (because the actual damages were what, exactly?) but even if you postulate that the real damages were $500, who is going to bring that suit individually? What lawyer is going to represent them on the promise of being paid 1/3*$500? It seems to me that is letting the corporations off the hook.
This is why, contrary to what you suppose, defendants almost always fight class certification vigorously: because they know that if the plaintiffs can't put a class together, they'll be off the hook.
Then you might be interested to know the actual rationale: requiring related suits to be lumped together avoids needless duplication in evidence gathering and case management and, thus, tends to lower the burden on the judicial system over all.
Who's at the helm? In this case, the Rules Advisory Committee of the Judicial Conference, acting pursuant to authority granted them by Congress in the Rules Enabling Act (28 U.S.C. 2072).
And why should it be the government responsibility to dictate morals?
Because that is a huge part of what the criminal law does. Why does the government get to decide that murder is wrong? That is clearly simply a moral judgement. Or how about banning gambling?
This, philosophically, is what makes criminal law different from civil law. If I'm careless and run into your car the government allows you to sue me. If I run into your car intentionally then you have all the civil rights to compensation that you had before plus I can be prosecuted for a crime. The diference that makes the latter a crime is the moral culpability of my mental state.
Generally, of course, we require a concrete harm before we punish anyone (and it's interesting, by the way, to really think hard about why this is). The impulse to avoid prosecuting thoughtcrime is particularly strong in the U.S. But it isn't always so: You can, for example, be put in jail for attempting (but failing) to commit a crime. Many crimes also have special-circumstance modifiers that will bump them up to more severe crimes based sole upon the mental state of the perpetrator.
Now, all this being said, I actually agree that it is very strange that possession of cartoon child-pornography is a crime.Whenever we punish someone based upon mental state alone it is to further a strong policy goal (with attempt, for example, we want the police to be able to stop a crime by arresting the would-be perpetrator and still be able to punish them). Here, it is hard to see what those are (except maybe the thought that fans of "lolicon" are also likely to consume real child porn? I don't know.)
I don't really have anything to say about the merits of all this. But I thought it might shape your views to know that in a situation like this (assuming the case is in federal court, or a court using something like the federal rules), Activision has to bring any countersuit that arose from the same set of circumstances that form the basis of the plaintiffs' original suit; they won't be allowed to bring it later. So, it may well be that Activision had never really intended to sue the execs, but was forced to bring the counterclaim now to keep its options open.
Solving just this problem is what projects like the X-51 are for; a delivery system capable of delivering a conventional payload anywhere in the world without being mistaken for a nuclear strike.
I have bad news for you. This very law (the Chicago handgun ban) is at issue in the Heller follow-on McDonald v. Chicago currently being considered by the Supreme Court. Consensus in constitutional law circles, as far as I can read it, is that the law is about to be struck down.
This makes sense considering that the only real issue, after the Heller decision that a handgun ban is in fact a 2nd-amendment violation, is whether states can abridge their citizens' 2nd amendment rights any more than D.C. can. So it's not really even a 2nd-amendment case any more so much as it is really just another in a string of so-called 14th amendment "incorporation" cases where the Supreme Court decides, one by one, that rights created in the Bill of Rights can be enforced against the states under the 14th amendment due process clause.
Well, the most compelling reasons, it seems to me, are pragmatic. If you're a movie studio bringing these suits, you are doing so on the premise that individual home users are the infringers. So it makes sense to not waste time suing the ISP only to get your suit tossed. That's just a big waste of billable hours. Similarly (though probably only secondarily), the ISP will have big scary lawyers of its own to make your life difficult and run up the bills.
There is nothing in the law that I know of* that would forbid the suing of the ISP on the theory that they are presumed to be the infringer. But that would just be a waste of everyone's time, and the studios know it.
The economics are different once they get to the subscriber. The presumption that the subscriber is also probably the infringer is probably a pretty good one. The occasional house like yours (and mine) where the connection is shared between many people will be a minority, and dealing with those misunderstandings in court will be worth the added expense if the remaining majority of defendants are settling the way they want.
* There may be safe harbor laws that protect ISPs from being liable for the infringement of their subscribers. I'm not an expert in this area of law, so I'm not sure. But, if there is such a law, it is probably based on the pragmatic principles I've outlined above in addition to the fact that it is poor public policy to render someone liable for something over which they have little or no control. (The ISP can't control whether their users download Use Boll movies willy nilly.)
That would probably be you, the holder of the account. You and your lawyer would then lay out these facts during the pre-trial process and force the plaintiff to provide convincing evidence to contradict them. If they can't, you win. If they can, you lose.
If all this sounds like a pain in the ass, it is. Consider it an incentive to make some effort to monitor who is doing what in your name on the internet.
I'm not saying this is right, I'm just trying to answer your question. (Although I'm also not sure it's wrong.)
(I am not a lawyer, but I am a law student. Either way, I hope it's clear that I'm not your lawyer and that this is not professional legal advice. End of annoying disclosure.)
This is not actually true. Canada and the U.S. (like most/all other British common law countries) actually do have the same common law mens rea requirements for conviction of most crimes. State laws, of course, can vary in a multitude of ways but take, for example, the Model Penal Code's treatment of possession (adopted in many states):
Possession is an act, within the meaning of this Section, if the possessor knowingly procured or received the thing possessed or was aware of his control thereof for a sufficient period to have been able to terminate his possession.
In an MPC state, therefore, there would have to be evidence presented that you knew that the drugs were there in order to be convicted in the scenario you lay out. Of course, that doesn't always stop an overzealous cop from arresting you under those circumstances, but that is not so much a commentary on the content of our laws as on the training of our police force.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I don't see how we're going to get anywhere in debating this point except to say this: the government has an uncontroversial (as far as I know...feel free to surprise me) legitimate interest in regulating economic behavior. This means, ultimately, incenting some behaviors while disincenting others. It's easy to disincentivize a behavior by criminalizing it, so lets' set that aside. (Though I'm not saying that I think that's always, or even usually the best approach.) How, then, to affirmatively incentivize? The only obvious approach other than tax breaks is for the government to cut checks. But, at that point, it would've been more efficient to never have collected that revenue in the first place if you're just ging to give it back. So what, exactly, is the argument for raising the money and then giving it back as grants instead of just allowing the policy to be built into the tax regime in the first place?
And how exactly do taxes become less a civic duty when tax policy is used for policy making? Your duty is to pay the taxes that the government needs to affect it's policy goals. Who cares if the policy goal is affected in tax policy or through subsequent spending? The same argument can be run against your assertion that the notion of "paying your fair share" is undermined. If the tax policy is structured to achieve legitimate policy goals, what's "unfair" about it?
A concrete example: say that the government wants to help people start small businesses by boosting spending power of new small business owners by 10%. There are two ways we could do that: (1) use monies raised by other taxes to fund a grant paid to small business owner X in the amount of 10% of his income (with all the paperwork and verification that would be required to make that happen) or (2) we could just reduce X's tax liability by 10% in the first place. So, if we agree for the sake of argument that the policy of boosting spending power for small business owners is legitimate, then you have to answer the following questions:
1. Why is it that, if we go with option 2 instead of option 1, it is somehow no longer everyone's civic duty to pay taxes?
2. How is X paying his fair share in scenario 1 but not 2?
All the while bearing in mind that option 2 is clearly more efficient than option 1.
And I suppose you don't care that the Fair Tax is a ridiculously regressive tax? Because it taxes buying power, it disproportionately effects those who do not save or invest but, instead, live paycheck to paycheck. So, if you're poor and you have to spend all your income on rent and food, the fair tax hits you hardest. If you're rich, and you are able to invest half your income, and you spend the rest, you're only taxed on half your income. Thus, the rich pay a lower real tax rate than the poor. (Add to this the fact that the marginal value of $1 is far less to a rich person than to a poor person to begin with and the system starts to look downright dystopian.)
The obvious way to fix this that I've heard some propose, is to allow exemptions for the poor, etc. But now you're getting back where we are now, where individuals have to keep track of their finances and report to uncle sam for their rebates. Except now individuals have to keep track of every single purchase, rather than just their annual income from their employer.
And this gets at the broader point: taxation is a powerful and legitimate tool for achieving public policy goals. But if you use a national sales tax, you either are robbed of those tools for the sake of keeping taxation simple, or you and up with the worst of both worlds: a highly regressive taxation system that is still a nightmare to administer.
I'm pretty sure it does... If Apple had a monopoly like Microsoft's, consumers would have no ready way to evade Apple's restrictions. Thus, the market would no longer function properly, in that Apple could get away with diminishing the value of their product to end users without having to worry about pricing in a corresponding drop in demand. As it is, if you don't like Apple's practices, you can buy a different phone or write apps for a different platform. So, no, I think that if Apple had a monopoly like Microsoft's it would obviously be much worse, both morally and legally.
Paranoid disclaimer: I am a law student, not a lawyer, and I am in no way certain that what I'm saying below is true. You certainly should get yourself a real lawyer and not rely on anything I've written.
I don't know about UK law, but in the US, largely due to our federal system, the situation is quite complicated.
In the U.S., the law is inconsistent in a variety of ways: the 7th and 8th circuits have held that the licensing of software is different from the sale of a good. But this is a minority view in the federal courts. State law also muddies the issue. Many states have specifically amended their implementations of the Uniform Commercial Code (USS) (sort of the U.S. equivalent of the UK's Sale of Goods Act) to specifically define licensed software as a good. Other states (so far, IIRC, only VA and MD) have adopted the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) which is a law, analogous to the UCC, that is specially designed to cover things like software licensing. So, in these states you wouldn't say that a software license is a "good" but, for many purposes, the UCITA might impose analogous requirements. (Though, in many cases, it might not; the UCITA is widely criticized for being anti-consumer in ways the UCC is not.) In other jurisdictions, I imagine, a great deal on uncertainty remains.
and did anyone else envision him poking at various keyboards with a stick?
Yes. I had no idea what that "pointing stick" keyboard business was about. I thought it was, perhaps, for users with some sort of disability that somehow made poking a keyboard with a stick easier than typing.
Though in retrospect, I suppose I should've known that such a thing would never be called a "pointing stick" keyboard even if it did exist. It's not exactly a politically correct name.
Right...and AC's post pointed out that the scenario explained by parent was only necessary because of Soviet mismanagement of the armed forces. (The purges, he's saying, were a part of that.) Seems on point to me.
Put another way: GP ridiculed soviets for massive loss of life, parent replied saying that Soviets had no choice but to incur massive casualties, AC replies to this saying that parent is incorrect, the Soviets only had to incur such massive losses because they were incompetent.
I don't know if this is true, but I don't see how it's a non-sequitur.
But of course the whole point is that facts, taken in total, tend to point the way to the larger truth at issue. How else would you have us do it?
That's an interesting question. As I gather you know, TransOcean built the rig and leased it to BP.
I don't know much at all about this area of law, so I don't really know. But I can apply standard principles of tort/property law which would probably come out like this:
BP was, at the time of the accident, the "Possessor" of the property and, thus, the party best in a position to have prevented it. TransOcean wasn't there, so it would be both unfair and economically inefficient to pin the liability on them. So, on this analysis, BP is liable, not TransOcean.
Then again if, as some are suggesting, the accident was caused by a fundamental construction defect in the rig that BP couldn't have prevented, TransOcean (or even Halliburton, as they poured the said-to-be-defective concrete) starts looking like the company you should be suing.
Of course, this is really all just speculation; in reality, there are probably contractual indemnifications all over the place between these guys.
The liability fight will probably not be quite what most expect. By statute, a rig owner's out-of-pocket liability for a spill is capped at around $75 million. In exchange, they pay a tax of about $0.08/barrel into a common fund which will be used to pay for claims beyond the cap. At the moment, the fund stands at about $1.6 billion. (Though the per incident payout from this fund is capped at $1 billion.)
The benefit of this system is, of course, that oil companies aren't exposed to devastating liability; instead, the liability is spread across he entire oil industry. This is also the problem: no individual oil company has an adequate economic incentive to avoid risky behavior.
Apparently you can get a check if you request it by May 31.
I'm not seeing any Slashdotters that are quoting a policy they found on the internet but, regardless, Childs' defense had three months to present this policy in court if it existed and if it was helpful to their cause.
Reading the juror's interview, and knowing a little about criminal law, I really cannot see any basis at all for your suggestion that this is somehow a travesty borne of the jurors' technological illiteracy.
The law asks two questions of the jurors. 1 - did Childs know he was withholding service? The answer to this seems clearly to be "yes." 2 - Did Childs know that the person he was withholding service from was an authorized user? Again, the answer seems clearly to be "yes" because, as the juror points out, Childs had emailed passwords to other similar accounts to the user (COO, Richard Robinson) only a week before.
I don't see what one's level of technical expertise could possibly have to do with answering either of those questions.
Could you explain what about the jury instructions was faulty?
Even better: I misread this as an obituary for obituaries of newspapers. There has to be some contrarian out there who is writing that newspapers are here to stay...
This is why it's actually pretty hard to put together a class action. For a class like this there is a lot of judicial management. It has to be found that the class representative has a claim that is, just that, representative of the class as a whole so they will be a reasonable proxy for the vigor with which individuals would prosecute the suit. (As well as a number of other requirements, such as experienced counsel, etc.).
The real point of the class action system is to create an incentive for small claims to be brought that would not otherwise be brought at all. I don't happen to think that $16 is actually such a bad deal (because the actual damages were what, exactly?) but even if you postulate that the real damages were $500, who is going to bring that suit individually? What lawyer is going to represent them on the promise of being paid 1/3*$500? It seems to me that is letting the corporations off the hook.
This is why, contrary to what you suppose, defendants almost always fight class certification vigorously: because they know that if the plaintiffs can't put a class together, they'll be off the hook.
Then you might be interested to know the actual rationale: requiring related suits to be lumped together avoids needless duplication in evidence gathering and case management and, thus, tends to lower the burden on the judicial system over all.
Who's at the helm? In this case, the Rules Advisory Committee of the Judicial Conference, acting pursuant to authority granted them by Congress in the Rules Enabling Act (28 U.S.C. 2072).
And yes, I do parties.
And why should it be the government responsibility to dictate morals?
Because that is a huge part of what the criminal law does. Why does the government get to decide that murder is wrong? That is clearly simply a moral judgement. Or how about banning gambling?
This, philosophically, is what makes criminal law different from civil law. If I'm careless and run into your car the government allows you to sue me. If I run into your car intentionally then you have all the civil rights to compensation that you had before plus I can be prosecuted for a crime. The diference that makes the latter a crime is the moral culpability of my mental state.
Generally, of course, we require a concrete harm before we punish anyone (and it's interesting, by the way, to really think hard about why this is). The impulse to avoid prosecuting thoughtcrime is particularly strong in the U.S. But it isn't always so: You can, for example, be put in jail for attempting (but failing) to commit a crime. Many crimes also have special-circumstance modifiers that will bump them up to more severe crimes based sole upon the mental state of the perpetrator.
Now, all this being said, I actually agree that it is very strange that possession of cartoon child-pornography is a crime.Whenever we punish someone based upon mental state alone it is to further a strong policy goal (with attempt, for example, we want the police to be able to stop a crime by arresting the would-be perpetrator and still be able to punish them). Here, it is hard to see what those are (except maybe the thought that fans of "lolicon" are also likely to consume real child porn? I don't know.)
I don't really have anything to say about the merits of all this. But I thought it might shape your views to know that in a situation like this (assuming the case is in federal court, or a court using something like the federal rules), Activision has to bring any countersuit that arose from the same set of circumstances that form the basis of the plaintiffs' original suit; they won't be allowed to bring it later. So, it may well be that Activision had never really intended to sue the execs, but was forced to bring the counterclaim now to keep its options open.
Solving just this problem is what projects like the X-51 are for; a delivery system capable of delivering a conventional payload anywhere in the world without being mistaken for a nuclear strike.
I have bad news for you. This very law (the Chicago handgun ban) is at issue in the Heller follow-on McDonald v. Chicago currently being considered by the Supreme Court. Consensus in constitutional law circles, as far as I can read it, is that the law is about to be struck down.
This makes sense considering that the only real issue, after the Heller decision that a handgun ban is in fact a 2nd-amendment violation, is whether states can abridge their citizens' 2nd amendment rights any more than D.C. can. So it's not really even a 2nd-amendment case any more so much as it is really just another in a string of so-called 14th amendment "incorporation" cases where the Supreme Court decides, one by one, that rights created in the Bill of Rights can be enforced against the states under the 14th amendment due process clause.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
Well, the most compelling reasons, it seems to me, are pragmatic. If you're a movie studio bringing these suits, you are doing so on the premise that individual home users are the infringers. So it makes sense to not waste time suing the ISP only to get your suit tossed. That's just a big waste of billable hours. Similarly (though probably only secondarily), the ISP will have big scary lawyers of its own to make your life difficult and run up the bills.
There is nothing in the law that I know of* that would forbid the suing of the ISP on the theory that they are presumed to be the infringer. But that would just be a waste of everyone's time, and the studios know it.
The economics are different once they get to the subscriber. The presumption that the subscriber is also probably the infringer is probably a pretty good one. The occasional house like yours (and mine) where the connection is shared between many people will be a minority, and dealing with those misunderstandings in court will be worth the added expense if the remaining majority of defendants are settling the way they want.
* There may be safe harbor laws that protect ISPs from being liable for the infringement of their subscribers. I'm not an expert in this area of law, so I'm not sure. But, if there is such a law, it is probably based on the pragmatic principles I've outlined above in addition to the fact that it is poor public policy to render someone liable for something over which they have little or no control. (The ISP can't control whether their users download Use Boll movies willy nilly.)
That would probably be you, the holder of the account. You and your lawyer would then lay out these facts during the pre-trial process and force the plaintiff to provide convincing evidence to contradict them. If they can't, you win. If they can, you lose.
If all this sounds like a pain in the ass, it is. Consider it an incentive to make some effort to monitor who is doing what in your name on the internet.
I'm not saying this is right, I'm just trying to answer your question. (Although I'm also not sure it's wrong.)
(I am not a lawyer, but I am a law student. Either way, I hope it's clear that I'm not your lawyer and that this is not professional legal advice. End of annoying disclosure.)
Aah. I see what you did there.
Another approach would be to ban ridiculous gigantic .sig files, complete with...a giant block of text mandated by legal.
The problem with getting rid of things mandated by legal is that they're mandated. By legal. :(
Have you ever used a pen and paper?
This is not actually true. Canada and the U.S. (like most/all other British common law countries) actually do have the same common law mens rea requirements for conviction of most crimes. State laws, of course, can vary in a multitude of ways but take, for example, the Model Penal Code's treatment of possession (adopted in many states):
Possession is an act, within the meaning of this Section, if the possessor knowingly procured or received the thing possessed or was aware of his control thereof for a sufficient period to have been able to terminate his possession.
In an MPC state, therefore, there would have to be evidence presented that you knew that the drugs were there in order to be convicted in the scenario you lay out. Of course, that doesn't always stop an overzealous cop from arresting you under those circumstances, but that is not so much a commentary on the content of our laws as on the training of our police force.