The term 'felony' isn't really used here. However, operating a proxy may or may not be illegal, depending on circumstances.
Offering a proxy to TPB shouldn't be illegal, but certain companies are obliged by court order not to provide direct access to that site. Whether the proxy can be deemed contempt of court (for subverting that order) would be an interesting challenge, but probably not.
Expansion of the court order to include the Pirate Party is more likely, but hasn't yet happened.
Suing the members of the party could have serious fallout, including within the more mainstream parties. Even so, it could be difficult to prove that there is a justification for that action, or that losses have resulted.
People who will want to know if you they have invested in you wisely.
That your grades are living up to expectations. That you are making reasonable progress towards a degree.
This is why there are exams and coursework. This is why you hand in assignments that test your knowledge of the subject, ability to research and ability to present cogent arguments.
None of this requires you to attend lectures.
The campus is not your private playground.
Indeed. It's a playground you share with other young attractive people with similar interests and the same sense of adventure.
There's a reason people get an education at University, and it's rarely the lectures.
I mean, the British people attending the university will be from multiple race and the International students will be from multiple races too. There will be a strong (potentially 100%) overlap in the races from each group.
So checking the International students wouldn't even be racism by circumstance, let alone intentional racism.
Yeah, I never had any trouble for skipping lectures at Uni.
One lecturer hated me because I skipped her lectures. They bored me. She was pissed off when I passed her course with ease anyway.
One lecturer was so used to me turning up at the start of the lecture, taking his handouts (his handouts were basically an entire book, over the course of the year) and leaving again before he started the lecture, that he'd just hand the notes to me on his way in. One day he did stop and ask me to stay for a couple of minutes, in which time he told everybody that the next lecture was mandatory, because it would be the students giving the lecture. I went to that one; he failed everybody that didn't turn up. Basically he didn't mind us getting an education our own way, but wouldn't tolerate us disrespecting each other.
I skipped over half the lectures in over half the courses I did. Of the few lectures I attended, I slept through many. One (actually very good) lecturer woke me up mid-lecture once by giving grief to the guy sat behind me. She threw him out because he was chatting instead of listening. Guess it was a good job I wasn't snoring.
Another lecturer did spot me sleeping, so asked me a question about the subject. I struggled awake, asked her to repeat the question and gave an answer that wasn't just not wrong, but took the conversation in a direction she hadn't expected. I went back to sleep.
Even when awake, I often didn't pay attention. I'm not good at that. In one lecture I was challenged to tell the room what I was discussing with a friend. So I told the truth: "We were wondering, if you take that metal plate just there out, will the roof fall down?" Cue 40 students and a lecturer looking up at the ceiling, all going, "hmm" and disagreeing on the answer.
But yeah, attending lectures isn't what University is about. Turning up and being a good little child has fuck all to do with learning, academic capability or knowledge.
It's not illegal to own a gun in the UK. I know someone that owns and shoots in public a rifle. I know people that own and shoot in public shotguns. Shit, I know someone that owns and shoots a 4" bore cannon.
All legal.
Meanwhile, catching a tube train while being Brazilian gets you shot by the police, forgive me if I don't rely on them.
I hate our gun laws. It means that when I want to shoot something these days, I have to pull out a large unwieldy bow that can only send a missile sixteen times the weight of a bullet a mere 700m.
I _like_ shooting guns. Must be something to do with growing up in military surroundings.
Oh, I agree. Giving guns to six year olds would be so much better an option. Letting their teachers loose in the classroom with automatic weapons could never go wrong.
Think of the savings for the education system. You wouldn't even need to make teachers redundant!
So stop with the knee-jerk attempts to shout down civilised debate. Shit, I just handed you several compelling reasons to disarm Americans, you really shouldn't need to resort to appeals to emotion.
The big fucking irony is the name of that blog. From your linked site:
The international comparisons show conclusively that fewer gun owners per capita produce not only fewer murders by firearm, but fewer murders per capita over all.
No, it doesn't. Otherwise the murder rates and Canada and Switzerland would match those in the US.
Anyway, UK gun crime has gone up since the firearm ban. Hardly the exemplar case study for fuckwits demanding that no civilians are permitted to keep or use them.
When I'm dancing and do a move in which either my or my partner's arm is folded behind our backs, it's very easy to accidentally strain a muscle, cause pain and risk damage.
That's when two people are actively trying to work together.
You expect me to believe that police suspects have none of those problems, and would never instinctively twist, try to free their arms or otherwise move to try and avoid perceived damage?
I don't believe you. I've had the inadvertently caused injuries from dancing to prove it.
If I'm dead, my reputation and dignity are kind of irrelevant. Sure, they may matter to people that aren't dead, but I wont even notice, let alone care.
Some of us are mentally less stable than others. I'm probably going to kill myself; it's not certain when. It's not that I want to die, I just haven't got any real reasons to keep going.
With that in context, taking away everything I've worked towards would very much give me a "nothing to lose" attitude.
While I don't condone violence and would urge everybody to try and avoid it, there are people out there with even less to lose than me.
I would hope that someone making it difficult to cuff them isn't guilty of "Resisting arrest". There's a fine line between "The policeman was hurting my arm and shoulder by trying to force it behind me, so I was trying to move to prevent him breaking my arm" and "The suspect was struggling violently to avoid arrest". Trying to escape permanent damage as part of an arrest is not resisting arrest.
I'm not saying that's what happened, but I do think it's a pretty standard scenario when arresting someone, and I really do not think it's an appropriate time to be using a taser. The individual was already on the floor, was already unable to harm the police officers, and the use of the taser looked pretty unjustifiable to me.
Earlier use of a taser may have been justified, but we haven't seen any evidence on that and I'm not commenting on the prior activities.
Her motivations very much do matter. The scale of her activities very much do matter. The fact that she didn't engage in commercial activities, that she didn't attempt to profit from her activities, that she was sharing a few files on the internet.. that means that trying to charge her a commercial distribution fee is fucking asinine.
If someone torches my house, I'll claim on the insurance, they'll get prosecuted, the Government may well give me some cash to cover any insurance shortfall.
Someone burns a hole in my trousers, I may ask them to pay for a new pair or I may just shrug and deal with it.
I'm not going to charge someone for a fucking trouser factory.
Why do you think Jammie Thomas should buy a trouser factory for someone, after setting fire to their trousers. While they weren't even wearing them? Without actually preventing them from getting dressed and staying warm?
Sorry, but if you make stupid analogies, you have to accept them being reduced to the absurd - you were almost there to start with.
Michael Jackson made a business transaction that gave him an expected revenue stream associated with his outlay.
Jammie Thomas shared some files.
If you can't see the difference, and don't realise how stupid it is to compare one to the other, then I can understand why you aren't sympathetic to her. However, you should be.
How is the award against her remotely proportionate? Where exactly did Capitol Records lose $220k as a result of her minor transgression? At which point did she realise hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue as a result of distributing those files?
I haven't even started to challenge you on the stupidity of the current IP laws, we're still merely discussing the punitive nature of this award. Because I don't care what the legal definition is, this is excessively punitive.
If I run over you with my car, causing you to rack up several hundred thousand in medical bills, should I be able to get out of paying it by saying that it's pretty cruel punishment for me to lose several years of income?
Yes, that's why car insurance is compulsory in this country. It's also why we have a national health service. It's also why there's an "uninsured drivers fund" to cover the losses caused to someone by an (illegally) uninsured driver.
Statutory damages in copyright are compensatory in nature, and are to compensate the copyright owner for their lost distribution licensing revenue. They're not punitive, even though they may be painful.
As I said, loss of 4-5 years' gross income feels pretty fucking punitive. That may not be intended, but it's the bitter reality.
Anyway...
to compensate the copyright owner for their lost distribution licensing revenue
Their lost revenue was somewhere between $0 and $1000, depending how many people received the distributed material. Proven losses are at the lower end of that scale. A proportionate award for damages would likely have have been paid; a $220,000 one probably never will.
If the situation justifies a gun, the officer should use a gun, not a Taser.
When an officer has both, that's implicitly true. However, the threshold of when a gun is justified needs to be higher, with the Taser replacing use of a gun for lesser justifications.
E.g. if I pull a knife and refuse to drop it but fail to make threatening moves, then drawing a firearm is justified.
If you have a taser, then that's a more appropriate response than the firearm.
(In that situation I'd expect a pair of police officers to draw a tazer and a firearm between them, in case the situation escalates. I'd also expect any actual intervention to be initially with the tazer).
the person is resistant to any other methods to get them to comply with the law
Which shouldn't include failing to comply with a shouted order, when no physical harm is being threatened by that person.
Why is it so hard for some police officers to show restraint and proportionality?
You don't know their departmental protocols, so why are you picking apart their actions?
I don't need to know the departmental protocols to challenge the use of potentially lethal weaponry on someone lying on the floor with two trained police officers leaning on them.
Either they broke protocol or the protocols are wrong. Either way had I been present there at the time, I would have intervened.
Let them have their own IP based networks. Nothing's stopping them now. The technology's freely available.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will use the interconnected networks on which we can largely do as we please. When we can't, we'll switch to other interconnected networks.
The cat's out of the bag. Either you allow connected networks or you don't, and you can already make that choice.
Slashdot Mirror
The term 'felony' isn't really used here. However, operating a proxy may or may not be illegal, depending on circumstances.
Offering a proxy to TPB shouldn't be illegal, but certain companies are obliged by court order not to provide direct access to that site. Whether the proxy can be deemed contempt of court (for subverting that order) would be an interesting challenge, but probably not.
Expansion of the court order to include the Pirate Party is more likely, but hasn't yet happened.
Suing the members of the party could have serious fallout, including within the more mainstream parties. Even so, it could be difficult to prove that there is a justification for that action, or that losses have resulted.
People who will want to know if you they have invested in you wisely.
That your grades are living up to expectations. That you are making reasonable progress towards a degree.
This is why there are exams and coursework. This is why you hand in assignments that test your knowledge of the subject, ability to research and ability to present cogent arguments.
None of this requires you to attend lectures.
The campus is not your private playground.
Indeed. It's a playground you share with other young attractive people with similar interests and the same sense of adventure.
There's a reason people get an education at University, and it's rarely the lectures.
How so?
I mean, the British people attending the university will be from multiple race and the International students will be from multiple races too. There will be a strong (potentially 100%) overlap in the races from each group.
So checking the International students wouldn't even be racism by circumstance, let alone intentional racism.
Yeah, I never had any trouble for skipping lectures at Uni.
One lecturer hated me because I skipped her lectures. They bored me. She was pissed off when I passed her course with ease anyway.
One lecturer was so used to me turning up at the start of the lecture, taking his handouts (his handouts were basically an entire book, over the course of the year) and leaving again before he started the lecture, that he'd just hand the notes to me on his way in. One day he did stop and ask me to stay for a couple of minutes, in which time he told everybody that the next lecture was mandatory, because it would be the students giving the lecture. I went to that one; he failed everybody that didn't turn up. Basically he didn't mind us getting an education our own way, but wouldn't tolerate us disrespecting each other.
I skipped over half the lectures in over half the courses I did. Of the few lectures I attended, I slept through many. One (actually very good) lecturer woke me up mid-lecture once by giving grief to the guy sat behind me. She threw him out because he was chatting instead of listening. Guess it was a good job I wasn't snoring.
Another lecturer did spot me sleeping, so asked me a question about the subject. I struggled awake, asked her to repeat the question and gave an answer that wasn't just not wrong, but took the conversation in a direction she hadn't expected. I went back to sleep.
Even when awake, I often didn't pay attention. I'm not good at that. In one lecture I was challenged to tell the room what I was discussing with a friend. So I told the truth: "We were wondering, if you take that metal plate just there out, will the roof fall down?" Cue 40 students and a lecturer looking up at the ceiling, all going, "hmm" and disagreeing on the answer.
But yeah, attending lectures isn't what University is about. Turning up and being a good little child has fuck all to do with learning, academic capability or knowledge.
It's not illegal to own a gun in the UK. I know someone that owns and shoots in public a rifle. I know people that own and shoot in public shotguns. Shit, I know someone that owns and shoots a 4" bore cannon.
All legal.
Meanwhile, catching a tube train while being Brazilian gets you shot by the police, forgive me if I don't rely on them.
Oh, ok. So if I kill no more than one child every three weeks then I'm fine to continue?
What a fucking stupid argument.
I hate our gun laws. It means that when I want to shoot something these days, I have to pull out a large unwieldy bow that can only send a missile sixteen times the weight of a bullet a mere 700m.
I _like_ shooting guns. Must be something to do with growing up in military surroundings.
I disagree. Find out why. Understand. Deal with it.
Pretending it didn't happen, that the person didn't exist? You're just encouraging it to happen again.
Oh, I agree. Giving guns to six year olds would be so much better an option. Letting their teachers loose in the classroom with automatic weapons could never go wrong.
Think of the savings for the education system. You wouldn't even need to make teachers redundant!
Just bury them.
WHY ARE YOU SO FUCKING STUPID?
Ah, another idiot. See my response above.
Grenades, baby, I'm telling you.
Fuck you. Children die all the fucking time. Want some examples?
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/oct2012/afgh-o24.shtml
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/24/3-killed-kids-hurt-as-fury-grows-over-u-s-drone-strikes-in-pakistan/
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/177737.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/how-team-obama-justifies-the-killing-of-a-16-year-old-american/264028/
So stop with the knee-jerk attempts to shout down civilised debate. Shit, I just handed you several compelling reasons to disarm Americans, you really shouldn't need to resort to appeals to emotion.
If we allowed those kids at school to carry guns they would have been able to stop this before so many people got killed.
Oh wow, you're my new personal internet hero.
After we've armed all the six year olds, can we give grenades to infants? Can we? Please?
The big fucking irony is the name of that blog. From your linked site:
The international comparisons show conclusively that fewer gun owners per capita produce not only fewer murders by firearm, but fewer murders per capita over all.
No, it doesn't. Otherwise the murder rates and Canada and Switzerland would match those in the US.
Anyway, UK gun crime has gone up since the firearm ban. Hardly the exemplar case study for fuckwits demanding that no civilians are permitted to keep or use them.
When I'm dancing and do a move in which either my or my partner's arm is folded behind our backs, it's very easy to accidentally strain a muscle, cause pain and risk damage.
That's when two people are actively trying to work together.
You expect me to believe that police suspects have none of those problems, and would never instinctively twist, try to free their arms or otherwise move to try and avoid perceived damage?
I don't believe you. I've had the inadvertently caused injuries from dancing to prove it.
Calling that 'resisting arrest' is asinine.
If I'm dead, my reputation and dignity are kind of irrelevant. Sure, they may matter to people that aren't dead, but I wont even notice, let alone care.
Some of us are mentally less stable than others. I'm probably going to kill myself; it's not certain when. It's not that I want to die, I just haven't got any real reasons to keep going.
With that in context, taking away everything I've worked towards would very much give me a "nothing to lose" attitude.
While I don't condone violence and would urge everybody to try and avoid it, there are people out there with even less to lose than me.
I would hope that someone making it difficult to cuff them isn't guilty of "Resisting arrest". There's a fine line between "The policeman was hurting my arm and shoulder by trying to force it behind me, so I was trying to move to prevent him breaking my arm" and "The suspect was struggling violently to avoid arrest". Trying to escape permanent damage as part of an arrest is not resisting arrest.
I'm not saying that's what happened, but I do think it's a pretty standard scenario when arresting someone, and I really do not think it's an appropriate time to be using a taser. The individual was already on the floor, was already unable to harm the police officers, and the use of the taser looked pretty unjustifiable to me.
Earlier use of a taser may have been justified, but we haven't seen any evidence on that and I'm not commenting on the prior activities.
Her motivations very much do matter. The scale of her activities very much do matter. The fact that she didn't engage in commercial activities, that she didn't attempt to profit from her activities, that she was sharing a few files on the internet.. that means that trying to charge her a commercial distribution fee is fucking asinine.
If someone torches my house, I'll claim on the insurance, they'll get prosecuted, the Government may well give me some cash to cover any insurance shortfall.
Someone burns a hole in my trousers, I may ask them to pay for a new pair or I may just shrug and deal with it.
I'm not going to charge someone for a fucking trouser factory.
Why do you think Jammie Thomas should buy a trouser factory for someone, after setting fire to their trousers. While they weren't even wearing them? Without actually preventing them from getting dressed and staying warm?
Sorry, but if you make stupid analogies, you have to accept them being reduced to the absurd - you were almost there to start with.
Its hard for any sane person to fault the cops when she was in complete control of her fate. Leaving would have solved the issue.
How exactly was she able to leave, or indeed in control of her own fate, when lying face down with two policemen on top of her?
I ask only because that's the situation when she was tasered.
Sorry, remind me again how this is possibly acceptable in a democratic society?
Michael Jackson made a business transaction that gave him an expected revenue stream associated with his outlay.
Jammie Thomas shared some files.
If you can't see the difference, and don't realise how stupid it is to compare one to the other, then I can understand why you aren't sympathetic to her. However, you should be.
How is the award against her remotely proportionate? Where exactly did Capitol Records lose $220k as a result of her minor transgression? At which point did she realise hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue as a result of distributing those files?
I haven't even started to challenge you on the stupidity of the current IP laws, we're still merely discussing the punitive nature of this award. Because I don't care what the legal definition is, this is excessively punitive.
If I run over you with my car, causing you to rack up several hundred thousand in medical bills, should I be able to get out of paying it by saying that it's pretty cruel punishment for me to lose several years of income?
Yes, that's why car insurance is compulsory in this country. It's also why we have a national health service. It's also why there's an "uninsured drivers fund" to cover the losses caused to someone by an (illegally) uninsured driver.
Statutory damages in copyright are compensatory in nature, and are to compensate the copyright owner for their lost distribution licensing revenue. They're not punitive, even though they may be painful.
As I said, loss of 4-5 years' gross income feels pretty fucking punitive. That may not be intended, but it's the bitter reality.
Anyway...
to compensate the copyright owner for their lost distribution licensing revenue
Their lost revenue was somewhere between $0 and $1000, depending how many people received the distributed material. Proven losses are at the lower end of that scale. A proportionate award for damages would likely have have been paid; a $220,000 one probably never will.
If the situation justifies a gun, the officer should use a gun, not a Taser.
When an officer has both, that's implicitly true. However, the threshold of when a gun is justified needs to be higher, with the Taser replacing use of a gun for lesser justifications.
E.g. if I pull a knife and refuse to drop it but fail to make threatening moves, then drawing a firearm is justified.
If you have a taser, then that's a more appropriate response than the firearm.
(In that situation I'd expect a pair of police officers to draw a tazer and a firearm between them, in case the situation escalates. I'd also expect any actual intervention to be initially with the tazer).
the person is resistant to any other methods to get them to comply with the law
Which shouldn't include failing to comply with a shouted order, when no physical harm is being threatened by that person.
Why is it so hard for some police officers to show restraint and proportionality?
You don't know their departmental protocols, so why are you picking apart their actions?
I don't need to know the departmental protocols to challenge the use of potentially lethal weaponry on someone lying on the floor with two trained police officers leaning on them.
Either they broke protocol or the protocols are wrong. Either way had I been present there at the time, I would have intervened.
Except that the statutory damages are compensatory in nature, not punitive.
Loss of four or five years' gross income feels like a pretty cruel punishment to me.
Lets face it, Jammie has nothing to lose. Either the Supreme Court takes her case or she buys a gun and gets good value for her enforced poverty.
There comes a point at which any person has to say "enough", and multi-year poverty for sharing a dozen songs would trigger it for me.
Which is fine, they can already do this.
Let them have their own IP based networks. Nothing's stopping them now. The technology's freely available.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will use the interconnected networks on which we can largely do as we please. When we can't, we'll switch to other interconnected networks.
The cat's out of the bag. Either you allow connected networks or you don't, and you can already make that choice.