law

October 26, 2009

Security vs. privacy

The Guardian ran a story showing a “spotter card” which the police use to “identify individuals they consider to be potential troublemakers because they have appeared at a number of demonstrations.”

Interesting piggy back on a NY Times article detailing the surveillance of a family because the school alleged that she falsified an address on a school application:

But the intrusions visited on Jenny Paton, a 40-year-old mother of three, were startling just the same. Suspecting Ms. Paton of falsifying her address to get her daughter into the neighborhood school, local officials here began a covert surveillance operation. They obtained her telephone billing records. And for more than three weeks in 2008, an officer from the Poole education department secretly followed her, noting on a log the movements of the “female and three children” and the “target vehicle” (that would be Ms. Paton, her daughters and their car).

And the cameras do not seem to help with crime. “Only one crime was solved by each 1,000 CCTV cameras in London last year, a report into the city’s surveillance network has claimed.” Apparently, the government has farmed out much of the actual watching, which is done by private security outfits, which in turn got the job “on behalf of companies, councils and transport operators.” If the watchers see a crime, then the video footage is taken and viewed by the police. The 7/7 London Transport bombing video is often brought up as an example of the cameras doing their job — but the bombers would have been identified even without the cameras. And it kind of works, until it doesn’t.

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law

October 13, 2009

SCOTUS today

Tags: law, SCOTUS, Supreme Court

The Supreme Court granted certiorari in four cases this morning. One of these cases will review a lower court decision that upheld 19 of former Enron executive’s convictions including conspiracy, securities fraud, insider trading and lying to auditors of the former energy company. At issues is the federal “honest services” fraud statute. From the same Washington Post article: the statute is “a favorite tool of federal prosecutors in white-collar crime and public corruption cases,” but “has been criticized as vague and unfair because the government need not prove, in some instances, that a defendant personally benefited from the alleged fraud.”

The other cases are:

United States v. Glenn, an appeals court’s handing of a criminal conviction.
Holland v. Florida, involving the conduct of a state-appointed defense attorney in a death penalty case.
Health Care Service Corp. v. Pollitt, federal preemption of health care services.

In other SCOTUS news, the Court is hearing oral argument in three cases today:

Padilla v. Kentucky, which deals with a defense attorney’s advice and its impact on his client’s plea.
Smith v. Spisak, asks if the Sixth Circuit exceed its authority under and contravene the directives of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.
South Carolina v. North Carolina, involving a dispute over river-sharing.

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journalism, law

October 5, 2009

Can using social media to facilitate a protest be a crime?

Tags: law

The New York Times reports that: “On Thursday, F.B.I. agents descended on a house in Jackson Heights, Queens, and spent 16 hours searching it. The most likely reason for the raid: a man who lived there had helped coordinate communications among protesters at the Group of 20 summit in Pittsburgh.”

He was charged with “hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime.” He had allegedly used police scanners and Twitter to inform protestors about police movement.

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geek, law

July 13, 2009

Recent copyright roundup

Tags: copyright, law

The Pirate Bay: A couple of weeks ago, The Pirate Bay announced that a software company, Global Gaming Factory X (GGF), was in the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay and file-sharing technology company Peerialism. GGF will acquire The Pirate Bay’s domain names and sites for SEK 60,000,000 ($7.8 million) - SEK 30,000,000 in cash and the rest in newly issued shares. The Pirate Bay said that “[t]he profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets.” GGF has said that there will be a mechanism for content providers and copyright owners to get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.

Recording Industry Association of America v. Usenet.com: The RIAA filed suit against Usenet.com in October 2007, saying that Usenet newsgroups contain “millions of copyrighted sound recordings” in violation of federal law and accusing the company of encouraging customers to pay up to $19 a month by enticing them with copyrighted music. U.S. District Judge Harold Baer of the Southern District of New York ruled in favor of the music industry on all its main theories: that Usenet.com is guilty of direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement; and that Usenet.com cannot claim protection under the Sony Betamax decision. In addition, Judge Baer found that there was egregious misconduct by Usenet.com, including the destruction of evidence and sending key witnesses to Europe. As a result, Judge Baer refused to allow Usenet.com to use the DMCA safe harbor provision. Expect an injunction and damages award sometime soon.

YouTube: U.S. District Judge Luis Stanton ruled that plaintiffs cannot request damages for videos posted on YouTube that do not have US copyrights attached to them. Judge Stanton wrote that the DMCA “bars statutory damages for all foreign and domestic works not timely registered.” Plaintiffs may seek damages for claims over live broadcast footage. This is being closely watched by Viacom, which is suing Google, YouTube’s parent company, for $1 billion, alleging that YouTube is liable for copyright infringement when its users publish clips and episodes from the Viacom library of television shows.

TheSciTechLawyer: The Section of Science & Technology Law of the American Bar Association has an article in its Summer 2009 edition titled: “Shifting Strategies for Protecting Music Online” by William Sloan Coats and Julieta L. Lerner. They point out that the navigational waters for content owners are fraught with possible dangers. On one hand, under the DMCA, in order for an ISP to take advantage of the DMCA safe harbor, the ISP must take down infringing materials. On the other hand, in Lenz v. Universal Music, the court held that content owners have the responsibility to to consider if the materials are fair use. If they are, then the ISP should not comply with the takedown notice. If the allegedly infringing material is taken down, the ISP must notify the subscriber and given them an opportunity to show that the material was wrongly removed. If the subscriber counters the original objection, then the ISP must notify the claiming party of this objection. If the claiming party does not bring a lawsuit in district court within 14 days, then the ISP must restore the material.

In the end, the article states:

The RIAA is ending its “broad-based end user litigation program,” an approach that often led it to be painted as a villain in the media.

…

By shifting its strategy, the RIAA may meet its goal of working together with ISPs in a way that will improve public perceptions, while increasing the recording industry’s ability to protect its content.

To the authors and to the RIAA, I believe that ship has sailed.

In June, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a 32-year-old woman from Brainerd, Minn., was ordered to pay recording companies $1.92 million in damages. This amounted to $80,000 a song for the 24 songs she was accused of downloading. Perhaps if the artists were actually seeing that money, it might possibly make sense. As it stands, the RIAA simply has shown that it is a big bully — willing to financially ruin a person for life — for the sake of a failed business model.

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miscellanea

June 23, 2009

No more “I before E, except after C”?

On the way home from work today I was listening to NPR and there was a small piece on the fact that in the UK, new government guidelines advise primary schools that the “I before E, except after C” is so irrelevant and confusing, it is “not worth teaching.”

On the radio Robert Siegel was joined by Ben Schott, who writes a blog on words and such for the NY Times. Mr. Schott was laugh out loud funny and I will be bookmarking his blog for further pursual!

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