You are making two statements that are mutually incompatible: that file sharing is "not a crime" and that it would be very difficult to prove. If it were not a crime then there would be nothing to prove. File sharing is, I think, potentially a crime. As you identify what is important is the extent. I don't see any reason that what is going on would stop being distribution - so long as the extent is great enough - because a peer-to-peer protocol is used rather than a server-to-peer protocol. That would be a very artificial distinction. I do not, however, expect to see any prosecutions of individual file-sharers.
Personally I am not inclined to read very much into the message put on the rnbxclusive website. I very much doubt that it was put there or decided on by the people leading this investigation. If individuals were being investigated I would have expected to see them being arrested at the same time as the site owners - anything else is asking for evidence to be destroyed. That has not happened. My feeling therefore (with obviously no intimate knowledge of the internal operations of SOCA) is that the target of the investigation was the website owners and not the individual users. I don't think that there is any misdirection of public resources into investigating individuals. The only suggestion that there was was the message left on the site, which has now been removed and which for the reasons given above I am not inclined to rely on.
"Prejudice" is a very common word in legal drafting. It means nothing more than a detrimental effect.
If a person was going to buy an album but doesn't because I give them all the tracks for free then that has very clearly prejudiced the interests of the copyright holder. Importantly it is not any single act (e.g. sharing one song once) that must amount to prejudice, it is the distribution as a whole. If I distribute a copyrighted song to 1000 people and as a result fewer copies of it are sold then I have prejudiced the interests of the copyright holder. It is not important that some, many or the majority of those people would not have bought it anyway. There is a potential difficulty in proving beyond reasonable doubt that the distribution caused prejudice - i.e. in the example above that the lower sales were in fact a result of the distribution. It is clearly not going to be possible to prove it by asking the downloaders whether they intended to buy a copy before they got it for free. I wouldn't get too excited though as I expect the court would approach this in a common-sense way: if your website is responsible for the distribution of millions of copyrighted works it is not plausible to suggest that no prejudice at all was caused by that. The extent of the prejudice would go to sentencing and to the question of whether bringing a prosecution is in the public interest.
This of course has no impact on whether there was potentially a crime to investigate. The investigation comes before the decision as to whether or not to prosecute and whether sufficient evidence exists.
I'm not sure how to respond to this comment. On the one hand I don't want to be impolite. I have no interest in online feuding and so when I post I am normally trying to give information (or request it) and not score points or get angry.
On the other hand though, I can't help but get frustrated with people who have - and I don't mean to cause any offence but I think it's fair to say - no idea what they are talking about weighing in as though they were experts. This is SOCA, a massive part of the UK police force, with over 4,000 employees; the specific department - the e-crime division - are experts on computer crime. It's not a random constable from a rural force getting confused. And if that wasn't enough, before they went ahead with this they will have gone to court, which brings in lawyers and the judiciary.
If there was not a criminal offence here do you really not think they would have noticed?
Which brings me to what I probably should just have posted instead of all that: distributing copyrighted materials is a criminal offence when it is done in the course of business (s. 107(1)(d)(iv) Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988) or when it is of a sufficient extent to prejudicially affect the copyright holder (s. 107(1)(e)). Set up a download site to make money off adverts and you fall under the former; offer downloads to the public and you fall under the latter. Torrent sites are not immune because they don't actually offer the downloads - I can't see how running a torrent site run along the lines of Pirate Bay could fail to be aiding and abetting the commission of the offence.
Apologies if I sounded overly harsh or patronising (as I'm sure I did). It's not that your post was particularly awful. I just get irritated by the sheer number of people who make claims as to what is or is not the law with no real understanding themselves.
I've posted about this above but I'll repeat it here.
The fact that SOCA is investigating is not because music sharing is the most serious type of crime. It's because the e-crime unit is under the auspices of SOCA (rather than a local police force). A lot of online crime is referred to SOCA for this reason despite the fact that it would not normally be of the type they investigate. Frankly I think that in a lot of cases this makes sense rather than each local force maintaining a cyber-crime division, although it might prevent misunderstandings if they didn't use the SOCA 'branding'.
Regarding the idea that "[t]hese cretins ought to be dealing with people traffickers, gang crime and other actual Serious Organised Crime", the people who deal with people trafficking and gangs are not the same as the people who investigate online crime. There are specialist departments for each of those.
SOCA will be investigating it because the computer crime division is under the auspices of SOCA. The alternative would be investigation by a local force, and that would be undesirable both because piracy is not local and because they do not have the same expertise in online crime. I accept that the name is slightly misleading here but it's a practical choice not one based on how serious the crime is.
This isn't detracting from the investigation of gangs or killers. The people who investigate money laundering, the people who investigate shootings and the people who investigate piracy rings are all different.
Has there? I certainly haven't heard anything. Wikipedia doesn't list anything, and searching for "SOCA allegations" and "SOCA committing crimes" turns up nothing.
An anonymous user posting vague allegations with no evidence or corroboration? I'm very skeptical.
The police in the UK are not allowed to lie to you in an interview. Lying to a suspect in order to elicit information is an example of "oppression" and is grounds for the evidence obtained to be struck out.
And before someone responds with "ah, but that doesn't stop them doing it before the interview" - interview, in this context, is defined very widely in UK law. I don't think you could engineer a situation in which you could lie to the suspect without it becoming part of the interview.
This wouldn't fly in the UK (under Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA)). You forgot? Tough. You used some honey-pot ruse like this? Tough. Either you give the key/passphrase to decrypt the file when requested or go to jail. End of discussion.
Sounds like the USA is trying to bring in similar measures via precedent.
That is not the case. If you forget the password to your encryption before you are ordered to decrypt it you have a defence under s. 53(2) RIPA.
The honey-pot ruse I agree is pointless. As far as I can see all it is is a complicated way to make yourself look guilty when you might not be.
'Legally speaking' the judge can hold you in civil contempt if they believe you know the password and refuse to disclose it.
Exactly. Judges have almost no oversight in their ability to use civil contempt. If he doesn't like you, he can throw you in jail for as long as he likes and you have no recourse.
This is a problem, whether we're talking about encryption or baggy pants in court. Jugdes have way too much power. Civil contempt is an end run around our constitutional protections and should be abolished.
This is completely wrong. -A judge cannot simply throw you in jail for as long as he likes because "he doesn't like you" - there has to be proof of contempt first. -You do have a recourse - contempt findings are appealable. -You can't be held in contempt for wearing baggy pants - or for encryption. You can be held in contempt for refusing to produce a document that the court is satisfied that you possess and that you have been lawfully ordered to produce - and that is true whether it is encrypted or hidden under your floorboards. -How does contempt avoid constitutional protections? It operates within the constitution, just like the rest of the state. -If you abolish contempt how are judicial orders enforced? What is to stop someone refusing to obey court orders if the court cannot sanction them for doing so?
There are two considerations, one legal, one practical. I suspect it is the practical consideration that is most important.
The legal consideration is that the court's primary power in these circumstances is to compel the disclosure of documents. If the court is convinced that you have a document that is disclosable then they will make an order for you to produce it, and possibly to allow its inspection. Whether you have encrypted it is only relevant to the question of whether you actually have it, which will depend on whether they think they know what the encrypted document is and whether they think you have the encryption key. That said, the court can make all sorts of ancillary orders to manage the case, and they could certainly order you to divulge a password - that's probably what they would do if you sent the required documents to the other side but password protected them all yourself to stop them actually using them.
The practical consideration is that the court wants to make an order that is easy to supervise and easy to enforce. Whether or not you have produced a document is easy on both fronts: you just ask the lawyers for both sides whether a document has been produced and they will tell you. Whether you have produced a password is more difficult - what if you produce the wrong password? Or one that produces a different, innocuous document? Or what if you don't produce the password but do produce the document? Judges always want orders that can be supervised via a 2-minute conference call, not an hour-long hearing - "produce document x" is simply a better order.
I don't understand why refusal to disclose information is a justification for contempt of court. It appears it would violate the 4th amendment? A judge shouldn't have completely unrestricted ability to make demands or judge a person in contempt. Not that it's a practical example, but could a judge demand that a person commit a crime such as assault? Would his refusal be a legal justification for finding him in contempt? If that's possible, that would appear to legally demonstrate the contempt system violates one's rights in court?
Judges don't have completely unrestricted ability to either make demands or hold a person in contempt.
At its heart contempt is very simple and obviously necessary: a court has the power to order certain things, and that power is worthless without some enforcement power where a person refuses. There are three notable safeguards that arise out of the nature of contempt: 1. Disobedience of a court order will only amount to contempt where the order was lawfully made; and 2. Contempt must be proven (albeit only on balance of probabilities), so if the person has not deliberately disobeyed the order - say if they were ordered to allow visiting rights to a child, but did not because the child was quarantined, making it unlawful to allow visitors - they are not in contempt. 3. Sanctions are discretionary, so if a person is technically in contempt of a valid order but they have a good reason the judge can give them another chance to obey.
The first two are engaged here. There are claims that ordering disclosure of the password violates the right not to incriminate oneself, which would make the order unlawful - personally I find the argument rather tenuous, but it might succeed. The woman seems to be claiming that she is not deliberately violating an order, but that it is impossible to comply with, which would fit in (2).
If it is found, however, that the order did not violate her rights (as it was previously) and the court is satisfied that she has not forgotten the password and instead is lying to try to avoid being convicted then the court has every reason to take coercive action. I know this example sounds harsh - a woman potentially being imprisoned for forgetting a password - but judges don't take these decisions lightly. The possibility of an unsafe finding of contempt is just an application of the general point that if you put yourself in a position where it looks like you have committed a crime you can be convicted even if you didn't. Here if she now says she has forgotten the password then you have a woman who is charged with mortgage fraud, evidence of which is thought to be in an encrypted file on her laptop; when asked to decrypt it she mounted a legal challenge to try to avoid that; and when her challenge failed she announced that she had forgotten the password. If she is innocent then her and her legal team seem to be going to a lot of trouble to make her seem guilty.
Because attacks like this make the opponents of ACTA look like something in between children having a tantrum and bullies trying to force their will on everyone. Yes, there are people who think these hackers are heroes of virtue - just like there are those who will cheer on the freedom-fighters who loot shops during protest marches. Most people, though, expect opposition to political decisions to be shown by words not by vandalism. If you want to show how sensible your position is it helps if your supporters seem like reasonable and constructive people, not destructive hard-liners.
There are times when more than words are necessary, because there is no way to have your words heard without attracting attention. Now, though, opposition to ACTA is widespread and heavily reported in the news. The best way to make sure the opposition comes to nothing is to make the opponents of the treaty look like petulant children spraying graffiti and breaking windows.
I was going to post something very similar to this. The great irony of this publication is that none of the essays or stories are of the same standard as their copyrighted, for-profit alternatives.
The strongest argument, I think, that is tendered against copyright reform that would legalise sharing is that making it more difficult to make money from content creation would lead to an impoverishment of content. Creating good content is expensive, both in terms of time spent creating it and money spent on copy-editors and the like. The counter-argument is generally that these things are unnecessary - content-creators are not mainly motivated by money and copy-editors are either unnecessary or can be replaced by free or cheap alternatives. Obviously one publication does not definitively demonstrate anything. But when the flagship publication of the major anti-copyright organisation is so comprehensively outclassed by commercial publishing it would seem to call into question the hardline pro-file-sharing stance.
I don't want to focus too much on the particular first aid/CPR example. My layman's understanding was that CPR is actually most valuable if the paramedics will arrive quickly - but I don't know and it was just an example. My point was intended to be general, and is roughly this:
If you want to protect your loved ones from harm there are a lot of things you can do. If you arranged them from most-likely to protect your family to least-likely there would be a lot of things above carrying a gun.
A lot of people claim that they carry a gun out of the purest motives - they just want to protect those that they love. I just wonder whether those people also do the items that are higher up the list. If they don't it seems to me that they probably have another reason to want a gun.
I personally don't like the idea of general gun ownership - but I'm from a country where guns are currently banned. I can accept that if your part of the world has a lot of gun-crime it might be sensible and responsible to carry a gun. But even then I suspect that having a safe-room, good locks on your doors and a monitored alarm (not to mention the non-violence-related things like learning CPR, taking advanced-driving classes or getting health checkups) are more likely to keep your family alive than packing heat. I wonder though how many people do those and how many buy a gun because they want one and then use the protect-the-innocent line to justify it. (Just to be clear I'm not saying that the safe-room and a gun scenario is unreasonable - they're clearly not mutually exclusive. It's the number of people who claim to carry a gun because they need to protect their family - but don't seem to have any interest in any form of protection that doesn't involve shooting bad-guys - that strikes me as odd).
As I said in one of my other replies I didn't mean to call you out in particular - it's just something I wonder about rather than a response to you particularly. It was actually your comment about guns being like fire extinguishers that prompted me to comment: how many people carry a fire extinguisher, even in their car?
I'm from the UK and I'm generally fairly skeptical of gun ownership - I've so far got through my life without ever seeing a gun except carried by police or soldiers and I hope to keep it that way. But I'd be a lot less concerned about people who carry a gun as one of many tools - along with first-aid, fire-extinguisher and so on in their car - than by those who carry a gun "to protect their family" but do nothing else, and many of whom I suspect are secretly hoping for an excuse to shoot someone.
I don't carry a concealed weapon (yet?) but I do have first aid and CPR training including child/infant. (I'm not currently certified for that last bit, though.) And frankly I think your argument is silly, the implication being that since A is more useful than B which is useful, anyone who doesn't do A that does B is some kind of hypocrite? But that doesn't hold up to logic... Also, since you mention empowerment, that's important. People do sometimes stand around and watch someone die for lack of courage to get involved.
I wasn't looking to call anyone out or criticize anyone in particular - it's just something I wonder rather than an attack on gun-ownership. I had originally included words to that effect in my post but it made me sound enormously pompous so I removed them - perhaps a mistake in retrospect.
That said I'm not sure I see where the logic is unsound. I'm not just saying that first-aid training is more useful than gun-ownership so it's hypocritical to carry a gun. What I'm saying is: if, as they claim, a lot of gun-owners only carry a weapon because they want to protect their family and those around them it would be very odd if those people don't also get first-aid training. If you really want to protect your family maybe you do get a gun - but surely you also get CPR training and carry a first-aid kit since that is much more likely to actually save someone's life.
If a lot of the people who say they are carrying a weapon to keep people safe don't bother with any other way to keep them safe it seems like that probably isn't the whole reason for them carrying a weapon. The other reasons will vary from person to person but I suspect that less noble reasons - like feeling powerful, 'coolness' or just hoping to have an excuse to shoot someone - will be fairly common.
It's not a dilemma at all, not even a false one. Of course you can do both. In fact, the most consistent response might well be to do both. But there are a lot of people who claim that they arm themselves because protecting those around them is the responsible thing to do, and I just wonder how many of them also do the less conspicuous, less flashy, less 'cool' things that are much more likely to actually save someone.
I have no idea what the answer is, but my personal suspicion is that a lot of people who carry guns "to protect innocent people" also speed down the highway without a first-aid kit or a fire extinguisher in their car.
Whenever people say that they carry a weapon not because they want to but because it's the only sensible thing to do, and because they just want to protect innocent life, I always wonder: Do you also carry a first aid kit? Do you take first aid and CPR training?
Because those may not be as cool or as empowering as carrying a gun around but they're more likely to save your life or someone else's life.
I may have misunderstood your post - if so, my apologies. If not though I don't think I agree with your point because I think you are looking at art with mass-market appeal and extrapolating. So that it's clear what I mean let me explain.
If I have understood you correctly you are saying that content-producers (I am going to avoid the term 'artists' because I'm not sure that that would cover the authors of, for example, reference books) do not need income from selling copies because there are other ways to make money - among others concerts, tours, book-signings, merchandise and lecturing. Secondly you say that even if they can't make a real living that is fine, because content-producers are motivated by a desire for self-expression and not by money. I disagree with both of these suggestions.
Taking first the idea that there are ample other revenue sources, the question here I think is for whom? I would argue that the alternative sources of revenue are generally only available to mass-market content-producers. To make my point clear let me give you the example of three books from my bookshelf: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1104 pages, fiction) Snuff by Terry Pratchett (384 pages, fiction) Defending Possession Proceedings by Nic Madge et al (840 pages, non-fiction)
Of these three authors Pratchett is, I think, the only one who could have derived any real revenue from the alternative streams you propose. His work (and I don't mean to criticise it at all) has a large 'cult' and mass-market following that lends itself to conventions, signings and merchandise. Infinite Jest is an excellent book - it was ranked as one of the best books of the 20th Century - but it's a weighty piece of post-modern literature and, with the best will in the world, isn't going to sell a lot of merchandise. DPP is a bit of an odd-one out. It's a practitioner's text for housing lawyers so merchandise and signings are out of the question(!), but equally it is very unlikely to have brought in any particular income for its authors (at least compared to their salaries as judges and lawyers). The difference with DPP is that as a practitioner's text it has to be scrupulously accurate and comprehensive, meaning that a significant expense will have been editing and fact- and reference-checking. The editors need to be paid and can hardly sign copies or lecture off the back of their role. My point is this: while there is a subset of content that lends itself to alternative revenue streams there is a lot of content that does not. Reasoning that some content producers have found a different way to make money and so all could is fallacious.
This doesn't matter at all, of course, if your second point holds true: if people don't need to make money from their content then it doesn't matter if they can't. Again, though, I don't think that this is a true statement outside a subset of content-production. The dichotomy here I would suggest is between professional and non-professional content production. There are some forms of content or art that can be produced non-professionally. Content that requires mastery of your subject or instrument, however, generally cannot - not because professional statute confers some sort of magic ability but because the time that is needed to master something is more than you can commit on a non-professional basis. As before, this doesn't always matter. There are genres of music where charisma or style matter more than technical ability, just as in fiction a good plot can be enjoyable even if the writing isn't the most refined. But what you can't do is reason from that that technical mastery never matters. There is a lot of music that requires enormous technical brilliance; there is fiction that relies on exceptionally refined prose. The fact that hobbyists can develop flash games in their spare time - and that those games can be good - does not mean that the same is true of GTA: IV, with its hundreds of coders and $100m development budget.
I hope I've managed to make my point clearly (if not succinctly).
But music, movies, photos, paintings, etc are not ideas, but a combination of ideas. [just nitpicking]. And I personally don't see copyright infringement as complete loss of that control, since one of the features built in is the ability to go after those who infringe on that right... hope those thoughts make sense. I'm not a morning person.
Sorry, I should perhaps have included the GGP as a quote in my post to make it clear to what I was referring. The GGP wasn't advocating copyright infringement, they were claiming that the existence of copyright was in itself morally wrong, and that no intellectual property rights can be justified.
What is it that is immoral about owning rights in ideas, words or pictures? And why is it that this only applies to intangible goods and not to physical ones?
After all, if a person cannot access literature or music they might be starved culturally; but if they cannot access food they will literally starve, and if they cannot access clothes they will freeze. Even sticking to words and pictures why is it that it is immoral to prevent someone from benefiting by copying your masterpiece digitally, but not immoral to prevent them from taking the reproductions sitting in the gallery shop?
One answer might be that taking something physical like food deprives the owner of something, whereas copying doesn't. But is that really true? If you take half of a farmer's grain because you want to eat it the loss that he feels is really the loss of his property rights: the loss of the ability to control who can take the grain, to choose a price for it and receive money in exchange for it. If there were no property rights in grain he would not suffer at all, because he would not be able to turn it into money - having a warehouse full of grain has no intrinsic value if you already have enough to feed yourself. You might respond that no farmer would grow crops if he could not turn them into money - but the same is true of the flautist or the author.
Copying itself is not magical, nor a quantum leap in civilisation. Copying is only a tool. Its value depends entirely on what there is to copy.
In every form of entertainment or scholarship that I use I see the value of paying for content. If people don't have to pay, and consequently don't pay, it seems to me that something will be lost.
Paying for recordings is what allows (or unfortunately, increasingly what allowed) professional musicians to practice for 8 hours a day. Yes, some musicians can make a living from huge concerts; yes, musicians can reach a reasonable level practicing only weekends. But I like orchestras as well as rock bands, Elman as well as Eminem. If we have neither patronage nor music sales how do they survive?
Paying for books is what allows professional authors and professional editors. Books that can be sold very cheaply (and survive piracy) are, by necessity, almost invariably short and with mass-market appeal. I like those but I also like long, challenging fiction and well-researched reference books. Quick thrillers can survive by selling thousands of copies for pennies each; can difficult works? Can specialist works of reference?
I'm all for making culture and education available to everyone, but if what that means is making available to everyone only what appeals to almost everyone, and losing the rest because it can't pay for itself that doesn't seem such a big step forward.
If a university is willing to take people who are not deemed qualified enough to gain entry to a different law school, does it really indicate that the university is "awful" if a high percentage of those do not pass?
Er, sorry - that should say "in Europe" not "in the EU" - the law comes from the European Convention on Human Rights so it's wider than the EU (or Europe, really).
Is there really no constitutional protection against arbitrary surveillance in the US? In the EU the state photographing a particular person is unlawful without a good reason.
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You are making two statements that are mutually incompatible: that file sharing is "not a crime" and that it would be very difficult to prove. If it were not a crime then there would be nothing to prove.
File sharing is, I think, potentially a crime. As you identify what is important is the extent. I don't see any reason that what is going on would stop being distribution - so long as the extent is great enough - because a peer-to-peer protocol is used rather than a server-to-peer protocol. That would be a very artificial distinction.
I do not, however, expect to see any prosecutions of individual file-sharers.
Personally I am not inclined to read very much into the message put on the rnbxclusive website. I very much doubt that it was put there or decided on by the people leading this investigation. If individuals were being investigated I would have expected to see them being arrested at the same time as the site owners - anything else is asking for evidence to be destroyed. That has not happened.
My feeling therefore (with obviously no intimate knowledge of the internal operations of SOCA) is that the target of the investigation was the website owners and not the individual users. I don't think that there is any misdirection of public resources into investigating individuals. The only suggestion that there was was the message left on the site, which has now been removed and which for the reasons given above I am not inclined to rely on.
"Prejudice" is a very common word in legal drafting. It means nothing more than a detrimental effect.
If a person was going to buy an album but doesn't because I give them all the tracks for free then that has very clearly prejudiced the interests of the copyright holder. Importantly it is not any single act (e.g. sharing one song once) that must amount to prejudice, it is the distribution as a whole. If I distribute a copyrighted song to 1000 people and as a result fewer copies of it are sold then I have prejudiced the interests of the copyright holder. It is not important that some, many or the majority of those people would not have bought it anyway.
There is a potential difficulty in proving beyond reasonable doubt that the distribution caused prejudice - i.e. in the example above that the lower sales were in fact a result of the distribution. It is clearly not going to be possible to prove it by asking the downloaders whether they intended to buy a copy before they got it for free. I wouldn't get too excited though as I expect the court would approach this in a common-sense way: if your website is responsible for the distribution of millions of copyrighted works it is not plausible to suggest that no prejudice at all was caused by that. The extent of the prejudice would go to sentencing and to the question of whether bringing a prosecution is in the public interest.
This of course has no impact on whether there was potentially a crime to investigate. The investigation comes before the decision as to whether or not to prosecute and whether sufficient evidence exists.
I'm not sure how to respond to this comment. On the one hand I don't want to be impolite. I have no interest in online feuding and so when I post I am normally trying to give information (or request it) and not score points or get angry.
On the other hand though, I can't help but get frustrated with people who have - and I don't mean to cause any offence but I think it's fair to say - no idea what they are talking about weighing in as though they were experts. This is SOCA, a massive part of the UK police force, with over 4,000 employees; the specific department - the e-crime division - are experts on computer crime. It's not a random constable from a rural force getting confused. And if that wasn't enough, before they went ahead with this they will have gone to court, which brings in lawyers and the judiciary.
If there was not a criminal offence here do you really not think they would have noticed?
Which brings me to what I probably should just have posted instead of all that: distributing copyrighted materials is a criminal offence when it is done in the course of business (s. 107(1)(d)(iv) Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988) or when it is of a sufficient extent to prejudicially affect the copyright holder (s. 107(1)(e)). Set up a download site to make money off adverts and you fall under the former; offer downloads to the public and you fall under the latter. Torrent sites are not immune because they don't actually offer the downloads - I can't see how running a torrent site run along the lines of Pirate Bay could fail to be aiding and abetting the commission of the offence.
Apologies if I sounded overly harsh or patronising (as I'm sure I did). It's not that your post was particularly awful. I just get irritated by the sheer number of people who make claims as to what is or is not the law with no real understanding themselves.
I've posted about this above but I'll repeat it here.
The fact that SOCA is investigating is not because music sharing is the most serious type of crime. It's because the e-crime unit is under the auspices of SOCA (rather than a local police force). A lot of online crime is referred to SOCA for this reason despite the fact that it would not normally be of the type they investigate. Frankly I think that in a lot of cases this makes sense rather than each local force maintaining a cyber-crime division, although it might prevent misunderstandings if they didn't use the SOCA 'branding'.
Regarding the idea that "[t]hese cretins ought to be dealing with people traffickers, gang crime and other actual Serious Organised Crime", the people who deal with people trafficking and gangs are not the same as the people who investigate online crime. There are specialist departments for each of those.
Best wishes.
SOCA will be investigating it because the computer crime division is under the auspices of SOCA. The alternative would be investigation by a local force, and that would be undesirable both because piracy is not local and because they do not have the same expertise in online crime. I accept that the name is slightly misleading here but it's a practical choice not one based on how serious the crime is.
This isn't detracting from the investigation of gangs or killers. The people who investigate money laundering, the people who investigate shootings and the people who investigate piracy rings are all different.
Has there? I certainly haven't heard anything. Wikipedia doesn't list anything, and searching for "SOCA allegations" and "SOCA committing crimes" turns up nothing.
An anonymous user posting vague allegations with no evidence or corroboration? I'm very skeptical.
No - do not remember that because it isn't true.
The police in the UK are not allowed to lie to you in an interview. Lying to a suspect in order to elicit information is an example of "oppression" and is grounds for the evidence obtained to be struck out.
And before someone responds with "ah, but that doesn't stop them doing it before the interview" - interview, in this context, is defined very widely in UK law. I don't think you could engineer a situation in which you could lie to the suspect without it becoming part of the interview.
This wouldn't fly in the UK (under Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA)).
You forgot? Tough.
You used some honey-pot ruse like this? Tough.
Either you give the key/passphrase to decrypt the file when requested or go to jail. End of discussion.
Sounds like the USA is trying to bring in similar measures via precedent.
That is not the case. If you forget the password to your encryption before you are ordered to decrypt it you have a defence under s. 53(2) RIPA.
The honey-pot ruse I agree is pointless. As far as I can see all it is is a complicated way to make yourself look guilty when you might not be.
'Legally speaking' the judge can hold you in civil contempt if they believe you know the password and refuse to disclose it.
Exactly. Judges have almost no oversight in their ability to use civil contempt. If he doesn't like you, he can throw you in jail for as long as he likes and you have no recourse.
This is a problem, whether we're talking about encryption or baggy pants in court. Jugdes have way too much power. Civil contempt is an end run around our constitutional protections and should be abolished.
This is completely wrong.
-A judge cannot simply throw you in jail for as long as he likes because "he doesn't like you" - there has to be proof of contempt first.
-You do have a recourse - contempt findings are appealable.
-You can't be held in contempt for wearing baggy pants - or for encryption. You can be held in contempt for refusing to produce a document that the court is satisfied that you possess and that you have been lawfully ordered to produce - and that is true whether it is encrypted or hidden under your floorboards.
-How does contempt avoid constitutional protections? It operates within the constitution, just like the rest of the state.
-If you abolish contempt how are judicial orders enforced? What is to stop someone refusing to obey court orders if the court cannot sanction them for doing so?
There are two considerations, one legal, one practical. I suspect it is the practical consideration that is most important.
The legal consideration is that the court's primary power in these circumstances is to compel the disclosure of documents. If the court is convinced that you have a document that is disclosable then they will make an order for you to produce it, and possibly to allow its inspection. Whether you have encrypted it is only relevant to the question of whether you actually have it, which will depend on whether they think they know what the encrypted document is and whether they think you have the encryption key. That said, the court can make all sorts of ancillary orders to manage the case, and they could certainly order you to divulge a password - that's probably what they would do if you sent the required documents to the other side but password protected them all yourself to stop them actually using them.
The practical consideration is that the court wants to make an order that is easy to supervise and easy to enforce. Whether or not you have produced a document is easy on both fronts: you just ask the lawyers for both sides whether a document has been produced and they will tell you. Whether you have produced a password is more difficult - what if you produce the wrong password? Or one that produces a different, innocuous document? Or what if you don't produce the password but do produce the document? Judges always want orders that can be supervised via a 2-minute conference call, not an hour-long hearing - "produce document x" is simply a better order.
I don't understand why refusal to disclose information is a justification for contempt of court. It appears it would violate the 4th amendment? A judge shouldn't have completely unrestricted ability to make demands or judge a person in contempt. Not that it's a practical example, but could a judge demand that a person commit a crime such as assault? Would his refusal be a legal justification for finding him in contempt? If that's possible, that would appear to legally demonstrate the contempt system violates one's rights in court?
Judges don't have completely unrestricted ability to either make demands or hold a person in contempt.
At its heart contempt is very simple and obviously necessary: a court has the power to order certain things, and that power is worthless without some enforcement power where a person refuses. There are three notable safeguards that arise out of the nature of contempt:
1. Disobedience of a court order will only amount to contempt where the order was lawfully made; and
2. Contempt must be proven (albeit only on balance of probabilities), so if the person has not deliberately disobeyed the order - say if they were ordered to allow visiting rights to a child, but did not because the child was quarantined, making it unlawful to allow visitors - they are not in contempt.
3. Sanctions are discretionary, so if a person is technically in contempt of a valid order but they have a good reason the judge can give them another chance to obey.
The first two are engaged here. There are claims that ordering disclosure of the password violates the right not to incriminate oneself, which would make the order unlawful - personally I find the argument rather tenuous, but it might succeed. The woman seems to be claiming that she is not deliberately violating an order, but that it is impossible to comply with, which would fit in (2).
If it is found, however, that the order did not violate her rights (as it was previously) and the court is satisfied that she has not forgotten the password and instead is lying to try to avoid being convicted then the court has every reason to take coercive action.
I know this example sounds harsh - a woman potentially being imprisoned for forgetting a password - but judges don't take these decisions lightly. The possibility of an unsafe finding of contempt is just an application of the general point that if you put yourself in a position where it looks like you have committed a crime you can be convicted even if you didn't. Here if she now says she has forgotten the password then you have a woman who is charged with mortgage fraud, evidence of which is thought to be in an encrypted file on her laptop; when asked to decrypt it she mounted a legal challenge to try to avoid that; and when her challenge failed she announced that she had forgotten the password. If she is innocent then her and her legal team seem to be going to a lot of trouble to make her seem guilty.
Why stop?
Because attacks like this make the opponents of ACTA look like something in between children having a tantrum and bullies trying to force their will on everyone. Yes, there are people who think these hackers are heroes of virtue - just like there are those who will cheer on the freedom-fighters who loot shops during protest marches. Most people, though, expect opposition to political decisions to be shown by words not by vandalism. If you want to show how sensible your position is it helps if your supporters seem like reasonable and constructive people, not destructive hard-liners.
There are times when more than words are necessary, because there is no way to have your words heard without attracting attention. Now, though, opposition to ACTA is widespread and heavily reported in the news. The best way to make sure the opposition comes to nothing is to make the opponents of the treaty look like petulant children spraying graffiti and breaking windows.
I was going to post something very similar to this. The great irony of this publication is that none of the essays or stories are of the same standard as their copyrighted, for-profit alternatives.
The strongest argument, I think, that is tendered against copyright reform that would legalise sharing is that making it more difficult to make money from content creation would lead to an impoverishment of content. Creating good content is expensive, both in terms of time spent creating it and money spent on copy-editors and the like. The counter-argument is generally that these things are unnecessary - content-creators are not mainly motivated by money and copy-editors are either unnecessary or can be replaced by free or cheap alternatives.
Obviously one publication does not definitively demonstrate anything. But when the flagship publication of the major anti-copyright organisation is so comprehensively outclassed by commercial publishing it would seem to call into question the hardline pro-file-sharing stance.
I don't want to focus too much on the particular first aid/CPR example. My layman's understanding was that CPR is actually most valuable if the paramedics will arrive quickly - but I don't know and it was just an example. My point was intended to be general, and is roughly this:
If you want to protect your loved ones from harm there are a lot of things you can do. If you arranged them from most-likely to protect your family to least-likely there would be a lot of things above carrying a gun.
A lot of people claim that they carry a gun out of the purest motives - they just want to protect those that they love. I just wonder whether those people also do the items that are higher up the list. If they don't it seems to me that they probably have another reason to want a gun.
I personally don't like the idea of general gun ownership - but I'm from a country where guns are currently banned. I can accept that if your part of the world has a lot of gun-crime it might be sensible and responsible to carry a gun. But even then I suspect that having a safe-room, good locks on your doors and a monitored alarm (not to mention the non-violence-related things like learning CPR, taking advanced-driving classes or getting health checkups) are more likely to keep your family alive than packing heat. I wonder though how many people do those and how many buy a gun because they want one and then use the protect-the-innocent line to justify it.
(Just to be clear I'm not saying that the safe-room and a gun scenario is unreasonable - they're clearly not mutually exclusive. It's the number of people who claim to carry a gun because they need to protect their family - but don't seem to have any interest in any form of protection that doesn't involve shooting bad-guys - that strikes me as odd).
As I said in one of my other replies I didn't mean to call you out in particular - it's just something I wonder about rather than a response to you particularly. It was actually your comment about guns being like fire extinguishers that prompted me to comment: how many people carry a fire extinguisher, even in their car?
I'm from the UK and I'm generally fairly skeptical of gun ownership - I've so far got through my life without ever seeing a gun except carried by police or soldiers and I hope to keep it that way. But I'd be a lot less concerned about people who carry a gun as one of many tools - along with first-aid, fire-extinguisher and so on in their car - than by those who carry a gun "to protect their family" but do nothing else, and many of whom I suspect are secretly hoping for an excuse to shoot someone.
I don't carry a concealed weapon (yet?) but I do have first aid and CPR training including child/infant. (I'm not currently certified for that last bit, though.) And frankly I think your argument is silly, the implication being that since A is more useful than B which is useful, anyone who doesn't do A that does B is some kind of hypocrite? But that doesn't hold up to logic... Also, since you mention empowerment, that's important. People do sometimes stand around and watch someone die for lack of courage to get involved.
I wasn't looking to call anyone out or criticize anyone in particular - it's just something I wonder rather than an attack on gun-ownership. I had originally included words to that effect in my post but it made me sound enormously pompous so I removed them - perhaps a mistake in retrospect.
That said I'm not sure I see where the logic is unsound. I'm not just saying that first-aid training is more useful than gun-ownership so it's hypocritical to carry a gun. What I'm saying is: if, as they claim, a lot of gun-owners only carry a weapon because they want to protect their family and those around them it would be very odd if those people don't also get first-aid training. If you really want to protect your family maybe you do get a gun - but surely you also get CPR training and carry a first-aid kit since that is much more likely to actually save someone's life.
If a lot of the people who say they are carrying a weapon to keep people safe don't bother with any other way to keep them safe it seems like that probably isn't the whole reason for them carrying a weapon. The other reasons will vary from person to person but I suspect that less noble reasons - like feeling powerful, 'coolness' or just hoping to have an excuse to shoot someone - will be fairly common.
It's not a dilemma at all, not even a false one. Of course you can do both. In fact, the most consistent response might well be to do both. But there are a lot of people who claim that they arm themselves because protecting those around them is the responsible thing to do, and I just wonder how many of them also do the less conspicuous, less flashy, less 'cool' things that are much more likely to actually save someone.
I have no idea what the answer is, but my personal suspicion is that a lot of people who carry guns "to protect innocent people" also speed down the highway without a first-aid kit or a fire extinguisher in their car.
Whenever people say that they carry a weapon not because they want to but because it's the only sensible thing to do, and because they just want to protect innocent life, I always wonder:
Do you also carry a first aid kit?
Do you take first aid and CPR training?
Because those may not be as cool or as empowering as carrying a gun around but they're more likely to save your life or someone else's life.
I may have misunderstood your post - if so, my apologies. If not though I don't think I agree with your point because I think you are looking at art with mass-market appeal and extrapolating. So that it's clear what I mean let me explain.
If I have understood you correctly you are saying that content-producers (I am going to avoid the term 'artists' because I'm not sure that that would cover the authors of, for example, reference books) do not need income from selling copies because there are other ways to make money - among others concerts, tours, book-signings, merchandise and lecturing. Secondly you say that even if they can't make a real living that is fine, because content-producers are motivated by a desire for self-expression and not by money. I disagree with both of these suggestions.
Taking first the idea that there are ample other revenue sources, the question here I think is for whom? I would argue that the alternative sources of revenue are generally only available to mass-market content-producers. To make my point clear let me give you the example of three books from my bookshelf:
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1104 pages, fiction)
Snuff by Terry Pratchett (384 pages, fiction)
Defending Possession Proceedings by Nic Madge et al (840 pages, non-fiction)
Of these three authors Pratchett is, I think, the only one who could have derived any real revenue from the alternative streams you propose. His work (and I don't mean to criticise it at all) has a large 'cult' and mass-market following that lends itself to conventions, signings and merchandise. Infinite Jest is an excellent book - it was ranked as one of the best books of the 20th Century - but it's a weighty piece of post-modern literature and, with the best will in the world, isn't going to sell a lot of merchandise. DPP is a bit of an odd-one out. It's a practitioner's text for housing lawyers so merchandise and signings are out of the question(!), but equally it is very unlikely to have brought in any particular income for its authors (at least compared to their salaries as judges and lawyers). The difference with DPP is that as a practitioner's text it has to be scrupulously accurate and comprehensive, meaning that a significant expense will have been editing and fact- and reference-checking. The editors need to be paid and can hardly sign copies or lecture off the back of their role.
My point is this: while there is a subset of content that lends itself to alternative revenue streams there is a lot of content that does not. Reasoning that some content producers have found a different way to make money and so all could is fallacious.
This doesn't matter at all, of course, if your second point holds true: if people don't need to make money from their content then it doesn't matter if they can't. Again, though, I don't think that this is a true statement outside a subset of content-production. The dichotomy here I would suggest is between professional and non-professional content production.
There are some forms of content or art that can be produced non-professionally. Content that requires mastery of your subject or instrument, however, generally cannot - not because professional statute confers some sort of magic ability but because the time that is needed to master something is more than you can commit on a non-professional basis. As before, this doesn't always matter. There are genres of music where charisma or style matter more than technical ability, just as in fiction a good plot can be enjoyable even if the writing isn't the most refined. But what you can't do is reason from that that technical mastery never matters. There is a lot of music that requires enormous technical brilliance; there is fiction that relies on exceptionally refined prose. The fact that hobbyists can develop flash games in their spare time - and that those games can be good - does not mean that the same is true of GTA: IV, with its hundreds of coders and $100m development budget.
I hope I've managed to make my point clearly (if not succinctly).
But music, movies, photos, paintings, etc are not ideas, but a combination of ideas. [just nitpicking]. And I personally don't see copyright infringement as complete loss of that control, since one of the features built in is the ability to go after those who infringe on that right... hope those thoughts make sense. I'm not a morning person.
Sorry, I should perhaps have included the GGP as a quote in my post to make it clear to what I was referring. The GGP wasn't advocating copyright infringement, they were claiming that the existence of copyright was in itself morally wrong, and that no intellectual property rights can be justified.
What is it that is immoral about owning rights in ideas, words or pictures? And why is it that this only applies to intangible goods and not to physical ones?
After all, if a person cannot access literature or music they might be starved culturally; but if they cannot access food they will literally starve, and if they cannot access clothes they will freeze. Even sticking to words and pictures why is it that it is immoral to prevent someone from benefiting by copying your masterpiece digitally, but not immoral to prevent them from taking the reproductions sitting in the gallery shop?
One answer might be that taking something physical like food deprives the owner of something, whereas copying doesn't. But is that really true? If you take half of a farmer's grain because you want to eat it the loss that he feels is really the loss of his property rights: the loss of the ability to control who can take the grain, to choose a price for it and receive money in exchange for it. If there were no property rights in grain he would not suffer at all, because he would not be able to turn it into money - having a warehouse full of grain has no intrinsic value if you already have enough to feed yourself. You might respond that no farmer would grow crops if he could not turn them into money - but the same is true of the flautist or the author.
Copying itself is not magical, nor a quantum leap in civilisation. Copying is only a tool. Its value depends entirely on what there is to copy.
In every form of entertainment or scholarship that I use I see the value of paying for content. If people don't have to pay, and consequently don't pay, it seems to me that something will be lost.
Paying for recordings is what allows (or unfortunately, increasingly what allowed) professional musicians to practice for 8 hours a day. Yes, some musicians can make a living from huge concerts; yes, musicians can reach a reasonable level practicing only weekends. But I like orchestras as well as rock bands, Elman as well as Eminem. If we have neither patronage nor music sales how do they survive?
Paying for books is what allows professional authors and professional editors. Books that can be sold very cheaply (and survive piracy) are, by necessity, almost invariably short and with mass-market appeal. I like those but I also like long, challenging fiction and well-researched reference books. Quick thrillers can survive by selling thousands of copies for pennies each; can difficult works? Can specialist works of reference?
I'm all for making culture and education available to everyone, but if what that means is making available to everyone only what appeals to almost everyone, and losing the rest because it can't pay for itself that doesn't seem such a big step forward.
If a university is willing to take people who are not deemed qualified enough to gain entry to a different law school, does it really indicate that the university is "awful" if a high percentage of those do not pass?
Er, sorry - that should say "in Europe" not "in the EU" - the law comes from the European Convention on Human Rights so it's wider than the EU (or Europe, really).
Is there really no constitutional protection against arbitrary surveillance in the US? In the EU the state photographing a particular person is unlawful without a good reason.