wait wait so it would be totally cool for me, an American, to upload literal teen porn to a Spanish tube site, where the age of consent is only 13?
k
Uh, from Spain's perspective, yes. (Assuming age of consent is equal to age of pornography appearance - they can be two different things.)
You can however be arrested in the United States for possession, acquisition, and distribution of child porn.
Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
Note that copyright holders in the US are getting more and more egregious by the year.
For example, there's this citizen of the UK who administers a website that provides links to copyrighted material. Note that he doesn't distribute any copyright material, only provides links to it in his website. Neither he nor the server itself are in the US. Also note that just linking to copyrighted material is not illegal in the UK.
Now the copyright holders are trying to make the UK extradite this guy to the US so that he can be put in jail (in the US) for up to 10 years. That's right, copyright holders are now demanding foreign countries to extradite foreign citizens to the US so that they can be put in jail for 10 years in there. And not for distributing copyrighted material, just for linking, which isn't illegal in that foreign country.
(Reference.)
Then we ARE gonna get in trouble if they're THAT strict about it. :O
We don't link to ROMs, only YouTube videos of playthroughs. Get back to TASing.
Warp wrote:
Note that copyright holders in the US are getting more and more egregious by the year.
For example, there's this citizen of the UK who administers a website that provides links to copyrighted material. Note that he doesn't distribute any copyright material, only provides links to it in his website. Neither he nor the server itself are in the US. Also note that just linking to copyrighted material is not illegal in the UK.
Now the copyright holders are trying to make the UK extradite this guy to the US so that he can be put in jail (in the US) for up to 10 years. That's right, copyright holders are now demanding foreign countries to extradite foreign citizens to the US so that they can be put in jail for 10 years in there. And not for distributing copyrighted material, just for linking, which isn't illegal in that foreign country.
I checked your reference and I find your defense of this guy ludicrous. While you may be able to defend him on technical legal grounds, I think what he was doing was clearly immoral.
Yes, we should be concerned about cases like this and I am troubled (though not panicked) by SOPA because it cannot be enforced in any consistent manner, but we must be very careful about how we protest it. "I dislike SOPA because thepiratebay might be shut down!" is not a valid protest. "Richard O'Dwyer merely provided dozens of links to websites where movies and TV shows can be illegally downloaded!" is not a complaint that will be taken seriously. The threat of extradition is interesting, but the legality of it is so convoluted, I wouldn't pretend to understand it (and neither should you, unless you have a law degree).
Everyone here, on a website devoted to speedruns on illegal copies of games, is familiar with piracy. I even support piracy to the extent that it is a protest against monopolistic corporations such as the MPAA and RIAA. However, those who link to websites with pirated content en masse must be prepared to pay the consequences and we should not be quick to defend them. If we do, we become our own worst enemies.
Joined: 6/25/2007
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Bobo the King wrote:
The threat of extradition is interesting, but the legality of it is so convoluted, I wouldn't pretend to understand it (and neither should you, unless you have a law degree).
So nobody can understand the law except those with law degrees? That's ridiculous. Don't give up before you even try. The law is freely available to the people for a reason.
The threat of extradition is interesting, but the legality of it is so convoluted, I wouldn't pretend to understand it (and neither should you, unless you have a law degree).
So nobody can understand the law except those with law degrees? That's ridiculous. Don't give up before you even try. The law is freely available to the people for a reason.
That's why he has lawyers (or "solicitors", more appropriately). All your impotent rage does nothing for him. You want to study international laws and extradition treaties and get back to me? Be my guest.
As someone with a background in science, I'm bothered when people who clearly don't know what they're talking about try to tell me how the world works. I try to extend the same respect to others.
Joined: 6/25/2007
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As a scientist, you should have a healthy skepticism even regarding your own learnings. New theories don't come about if old theories (example: Earth-centric universe) are considered absolute truth. In the same way, it should be considered that what a lawyer tells you to be true about the law may not be true. Research is productive. The law is something written to be interpreted, just as nature is something which exists to be understood.
As a scientist, you should have a healthy skepticism even regarding your own learnings. New theories don't come about if old theories (example: Earth-centric universe) are considered absolute truth. In the same way, it should be considered that what a lawyer tells you to be true about the law may not be true. Research is productive. The law is something written to be interpreted, just as nature is something which exists to be understood.
No disagreement there, but I fail to see how that helps your argument in particular as you're the one who seems to have preconceived notions about what the law says in this situation. "I don't know the laws, but my gut says extradition shouldn't apply," won't cut it.
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Where did you get that idea? I never said anything like that.
Edit: To clarify, the only thing I'm objecting here is your statement that the law should only be understood by those with law degrees. I have not taken any "side" in any of the previous discussion. I read that line and felt like it would be useful to broaden your mind in regard to who can interpret law. Also, I'm not Warp, in case you got mixed up.
Where did you get that idea? I never said anything like that.
Edit: To clarify, the only thing I'm objecting here is your statement that the law should only be understood by those with law degrees. I have not taken any "side" in any of the previous discussion. I read that line and felt like it would be useful to broaden your mind in regard to who can interpret law. Also, I'm not Warp, in case you got mixed up.
People who don't major in a subject and are still qualified to profess on it are the exception, not the rule. Yeah, they can be right, but they almost never are.
As a simple example, I found myself arguing with someone on economics. They made it clear that their background was in YouTube videos that push a specific narrative. I mentioned my modest but formal background in economics in college. They mocked me and told me to, "Open [my] eyes and get a real education." I gave up.
Put another way, so-called "experts" can be and often are wrong (varying wildly, depending on the field). I know firsthand because I make mistakes constantly. Yet the layperson is wrong almost all the time. If, statistically speaking, experts are wrong half the time and those without a formal background are wrong 95 percent of the time, do you really want to boil it down to one person's word against another's?
The real litmus test, I think we can agree, is a person's claims standing up to your own skepticism and a thorough vetting of their sources, regardless of their background in the subject.
Joined: 6/25/2007
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Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Yes, it's good to establish a basis of understanding by hearing an expert's opinion. However, it's not good to consider that expert's opinion to be absolute truth without investigating the source material yourself, especially if you are wishing that expert's opinion is wrong. This means that one should read the law oneself before giving in and considering the legality of an action to be "too convoluted". Discouragement from research is not productive.
Of course, if, after research, you verify the expert's opinion to be true, then it's practical to consider it true yourself until proven otherwise.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
arflech wrote:
wait wait so it would be totally cool for me, an American, to upload literal teen porn to a Spanish tube site, where the age of consent is only 13
No, because that means personally possessing illegal material. (I also strongly doubt that this is legal in Spain despite the age of consent. That's not the only applicable law.)
However, hosted content only has the law of the country in which the servers are located applied to it. That's separate from personal law violations by individuals who aren't legally allowed to download that content.
Yes, it's good to establish a basis of understanding by hearing an expert's opinion. However, it's not good to consider that expert's opinion to be absolute truth without investigating the source material yourself, especially if you are wishing that expert's opinion is wrong. This means that one should read the law oneself before giving in and considering the legality of an action to be "too convoluted". Discouragement from research is not productive.
Of course, if, after research, you verify the expert's opinion to be true, then it's practical to consider it true yourself until proven otherwise.
One of the problems with modern society (at least in the USA) is that we've gotten the first half (don't blindly believe experts) and not the second half (spot-check their validity). Instead most of us just blindly believe demagogues instead. Why go to all the effort of acquiring a research doctorate and spending years collecting data when you can just learn to manipulate people instead?
(Another problem is that in many domains you can't spot-check things without being an expert yourself. Legal language is a big offender here; who out there besides the lawyers really understands everything in the contracts they sign?)
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I checked your reference and I find your defense of this guy ludicrous. While you may be able to defend him on technical legal grounds, I think what he was doing was clearly immoral.
You don't understand. It's not a question of whether it's technically illegal or not. It's a question of disproportionate punishment.
If someone is fined 2 million dollars for copying 24 songs, or demanded to be extradited to a foreign country to be put in jail for up to 10 years for linking to other websites, that's what I call disproportionate punishment and immoral. (Especially since there have been cases where corporate executives have committed fraud worth of hundreds of millions of dollars, and got laughably small sentences for it.)
I checked your reference and I find your defense of this guy ludicrous. While you may be able to defend him on technical legal grounds, I think what he was doing was clearly immoral.
You don't understand. It's not a question of whether it's technically illegal or not. It's a question of disproportionate punishment.
If someone is fined 2 million dollars for copying 24 songs, or demanded to be extradited to a foreign country to be put in jail for up to 10 years for linking to other websites, that's what I call disproportionate punishment and immoral. (Especially since there have been cases where corporate executives have committed fraud worth of hundreds of millions of dollars, and got laughably small sentences for it.)
"Copying 24 songs" is an entirely different matter. My stance is that they shouldn't vigorously prosecute people who pirate content. In this case, however, the guy was distributing pirated material. When you are a distributor, you have to know you're playing with fire.
How many hits did his website get? Everyone who went to his website to view shows illegally cost advertisers and distributors untold revenue. For example, I may have used his website to watch an NBA game (I can't recall). NBA League Pass's broadband service costs $30 per month. I'm unwilling to pay that, especially for one game, but I will not deny that I cost the NBA significant revenue. Multiply that by 10,000 or 100,000 viewers and suddenly a $2 million fine and significant jail time don't sound so unreasonable. I will not address the legality of extradition except to point out that much of the distributed content seems to have come from America, which may be the legal grounds for extradition.
And no one is arguing in favor of the disparity in sentences between corporate criminals and petty thieves. There are some very sad stories in that regard.
In this case, however, the guy was distributing pirated material. When you are a distributor, you have to know you're playing with fire.
No, he wasn't. He was linking to copyrighted material, not distributing it. Read the damn article.
Wikipedia wrote:
In February 2010 charges for fraud and copyright infringement in relation to the website TV-Links were dismissed by a UK court which ruled that linking alone did not amount to copyright infringement.
Prosecuting people for linking to other websites is irrational. No wonder it's not illegal in most countries (including the UK). It's those other websites that should be prosecuted for distributing illegal material, not people linking to them.
Criminalizing linking creates tons of problems:
- What if you link to a website that contains illegal material, but you don't know that? (For example the illegal material might be in a subpage you haven't visited. Are you required to browse the entirety of a web site and assess its legality before you can legally link to it? How would you even know if some material is illegal?)
- What if you link to a website that contains no illegal material, but afterwards illegal material is added to it? Can you be prosecuted retrospectively?
- What if instead of a direct link to the illegal material, you give a link to a page containing links to illegal material? Should that be illegal as well? What if you add one more step (give a link to a page having a link to a page having a link to illegal material)? How many indirection steps are necessary before it becomes legal? There has to be some physical limit because else every single link in the internet would be illegal.
- What if instead of a link, you provide textual instructions on how to get to the page where the illegal material is hosted? (For example "write this and this into google and click the link that says that and that".) How obscure must these instructions be before they become legal?
Those are just some of the problems with criminalizing linking.
Nevertheless, even if linking to illegal material was stupidly criminalized, the punishment should be proportionate to the severity of the crime. Simply linking should not be as punishable as directly distributing the material using your own hardware and network resources.
In this case, however, the guy was distributing pirated material. When you are a distributor, you have to know you're playing with fire.
No, he wasn't. He was linking to copyrighted material, not distributing it. Read the damn article.
Wikipedia wrote:
In February 2010 charges for fraud and copyright infringement in relation to the website TV-Links were dismissed by a UK court which ruled that linking alone did not amount to copyright infringement.
Prosecuting people for linking to other websites is irrational. No wonder it's not illegal in most countries (including the UK). It's those other websites that should be prosecuted for distributing illegal material, not people linking to them.
Criminalizing linking creates tons of problems:
- What if you link to a website that contains illegal material, but you don't know that? (For example the illegal material might be in a subpage you haven't visited. Are you required to browse the entirety of a web site and assess its legality before you can legally link to it? How would you even know if some material is illegal?)
- What if you link to a website that contains no illegal material, but afterwards illegal material is added to it? Can you be prosecuted retrospectively?
- What if instead of a direct link to the illegal material, you give a link to a page containing links to illegal material? Should that be illegal as well? What if you add one more step (give a link to a page having a link to a page having a link to illegal material)? How many indirection steps are necessary before it becomes legal? There has to be some physical limit because else every single link in the internet would be illegal.
- What if instead of a link, you provide textual instructions on how to get to the page where the illegal material is hosted? (For example "write this and this into google and click the link that says that and that".) How obscure must these instructions be before they become legal?
Those are just some of the problems with criminalizing linking.
Nevertheless, even if linking to illegal material was stupidly criminalized, the punishment should be proportionate to the severity of the crime. Simply linking should not be as punishable as directly distributing the material using your own hardware and network resources.
If you'll reread my first reply to you, you'll notice I share your concerns about the criminalization of linking to pirated material. That's not the point.
I said that you could defend this guy on technical legal grounds. That is what you are doing. But I want to re-emphasize, what he did was immoral. This wasn't a social media site or forum where people happened to submit links to pirated material, this was a central hub for finding illegally distributed TV shows and movies.
People like this guy are what SOPA was made for and if I were more confident that SOPA would be used only to prosecute his kind, I would have no objections to it.
I said that you could defend this guy on technical legal grounds. That is what you are doing. But I want to re-emphasize, what he did was immoral.
We don't put people in jail because they did something immoral. We put them in jail if they break a law severe enough to deserve it. And that's how it should be. In many cases what is immoral coincides with the law, but in many cases it doesn't, and it shouldn't.
If I lie to you, that could be considered immoral. However, I should not deserve jailtime for that. (Even in the rare cases where lying results in severe emotional trauma deserving compensation, the punishment should still be proportional to the severity of the crime. Jailtime is still out of question.)
This wasn't a social media site or forum where people happened to submit links to pirated material, this was a central hub for finding illegally distributed TV shows and movies.
The law is a blunt instrument. If you give the lawyers permission to prosecute high-profile linkers, they will abuse that power to prosecute low-profile ones too. Thinking that such laws will only be used to prosecute the big-time pirates is naive and utopistic.
The law is a blunt instrument. If you give the lawyers permission to prosecute high-profile linkers, they will abuse that power to prosecute low-profile ones too. Thinking that such laws will only be used to prosecute the big-time pirates is naive and utopistic.
Bobo the King wrote:
Yes, we should be concerned about cases like this and I am troubled (though not panicked) by SOPA because it cannot be enforced in any consistent manner, but we must be very careful about how we protest it.
Bobo the King wrote:
If you'll reread my first reply to you, you'll notice I share your concerns about the criminalization of linking to pirated material.
Bobo the King wrote:
People like this guy are what SOPA was made for and if I were more confident that SOPA would be used only to prosecute his kind, I would have no objections to it.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Warp wrote:
If someone is fined 2 million dollars for copying 24 songs, or demanded to be extradited to a foreign country to be put in jail for up to 10 years for linking to other websites, that's what I call disproportionate punishment and immoral. (Especially since there have been cases where corporate executives have committed fraud worth of hundreds of millions of dollars, and got laughably small sentences for it.)
Yeah, exactly. It really shows who's in charge of things, and that there are two legal systems: one for the rich, and one for the rest.
Under a fair system of law, the prosecution of people who distribute illegal material would probably barely occur at all because the industry has never been able to prove it actually suffers as a result. Maybe in some egregious cases, but it's not exactly a high priority. In my own country, for example, 2011 was a year of record profits for the movie theaters. Despite copyright organizations decrying the "destruction of the industry" as a result of illegal copying.
Under a fair system of law, the prosecution of people who distribute illegal material would probably barely occur at all because the industry has never been able to prove it actually suffers as a result.
Personally I do not oppose the concept of intellectual property nor outlawing its distribution without permission. However, what I do oppose is excessive punishment for breaking these laws. Punishment should always be proportional to the seriousness of the crime.
If you get a parking ticket, you get a fine of a few tens of euros/dollars. This is fair.
If you get a speeding ticket, the fine will be higher, probably in the hundreds of euros/dollars (or, as in some countries, it depends on your income). This is also fair, as speeding is more dangerous than parking where you shouldn't, but the fine is not blown out of proportion.
If you republish, for example, a newspaper article in your website without permission, in most countries if the newspaper decides to pursue legal action, they will demand royalties and some modest amount of money as compensation (which might be in the few hundreds of euros/dollars, depending on the magnitude of the article). Usually this is relatively fair.
However, if you copy a few songs in the US you might get a fine of millions of dollars and/or years of jailtime. This is not proportionate punishment. This is extortion.
But I want to re-emphasize, what he did was immoral.
Morality is subjective and people have so many different opinions about what is moral and not. For some people's viewpoint, copyright is immoral. So I'd just say that what he did was illegal, or rather, it was considered to be illegal by some people.
Usually, a law is basically a piece of garbage that people in power invent when they don't know how to solve a "problem" with reason and research, so they try to force people to behave in a certain way, but after thousands of years, the problem of crime hasn't been solved, and criminals continue to be born unless the root cause is solved.
If we imagine that we wanted to get rid of some grass, and we imagine the criminals to be grass that is growing, punishments are temporary solutions that cut the grass, but the grass will always be growing back unless the roots are destroyed that create the "criminals". (maybe a strange analogy, but it gets the point across)
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If that Billy kid is GiraffeCheetah/generalmarioz/12 other aliases used to support himself and two friends*, this entire thread is a pointless joke. He's just a troll. I'm willing to bet he didn't even call NOA Customer Service. He's been banned from the SM64 forum multiple times for tons of stupid reasons. Keep in mind this is the same kid that "stole" his own videos, uploaded them onto a different account, and claimed someone else was stealing them. The kid just wants attention. Please feel free to see what I'm talkingabout.
*"friends" are more than likely him using even more usernames
If that Billy kid is GiraffeCheetah/generalmarioz/12 other aliases used to support himself and two friends*, this entire thread is a pointless joke. He's just a troll. I'm willing to bet he didn't even call NOA Customer Service. He's been banned from the SM64 forum multiple times for tons of stupid reasons. Keep in mind this is the same kid that "stole" his own videos, uploaded them onto a different account, and claimed someone else was stealing them. The kid just wants attention. Please feel free to see what I'm talkingabout.
*"friends" are more than likely him using even more usernames
