Matthew Findley wrote:
Let me see if I can get caught up on whats gone on since I left work.
Oh, you were posting on your employer's time? I personally believe in the "presumed innocent until proven guilty", so rather than assuming you guilty of misusing your work time for private activities, I'll presume that posting here is part of your work. That would also explain the FUD without holding you personally accountable for it. Yeah, this presumption of innocence thingy is just great, isn't it? Of course you may correct me if I'm wrong, but you do have the right to remain silent ;)
First I should probably clear this up. I am not a lawyer. I work at the U.S. Attoreny's Office yes; but, only as a clerk.
So nothing I say is legal advice, the postion of the DOJ, to be considered an offical interpretation of the laws, ect....
Still, I asked you several times for a pointer to law or precedent that would support your view and you fail to provide it. You could ask a colleague who is a lawyer, perhaps?
Someone asked if attempting to block KP would eliminate intent. This question would be up to the jury. While you would probably need 100% blocking to win in a civial trial. This would be much more likely to satisfy a criminal jury.
Civil lawsuit for kiddie porn? And who is materially entitled to sue, pray? The abused child(ren) depicted in the porn, sure, and hardly anyone else at all. I kinda fail to see where such a lawsuit would come from.
Someone else pointed out that ISPs are not officaly common carriers. This is of course correct. But the hybrid nature of what they do gives them a sort of grey status. So while no responsable for what goes on across their networks in general. They are responsable if a problem is brought to their attention and they fail to act.
I was the one to point that out and I insist that ISPs are not being held responsible for questionable content even if it is brought to their attention and they refuse to act, except in certain DMCA situations.
That person also used the example of an employ abuseing a company computer.
In that case the company isn't criminaly responsable beacuse they didn't know what the employ was useing the computer for. You can not be held responsable for something you fail to forsee and prevent.
If you run a company with anything more than three employees, you can be sure that sooner or later someone will do something illegal on the net. If you run a company with hundreds of employees, you can be sure that someone does something illegal on the net every day. Common sense says so. Due diligence is easy: all you have to do is install a proxy and add some automated monitoring of employee activities. Many companies do that for their own sake. It's not perfect, but it's cheap, it's easy, and it's in the company's own interests. With your view on passive facilitation and willful blindness, every company that doesn't implement at least some kind of elementary protection can be held criminally accountable for employees' actions. Yet we haven't seen a lawsuit like that to this day. How come? Is the DoJ too busy posting on mailing lists to prosecute some companies, or has Our Beloved Leader issued a decree ordering his campaign contributors to be left alone?
Quote
'IANAL (BIKAF), but I would expect that for ignorance to be willful it can't be a side-effect of a goal, it must be a goal in itself. There are plenty of reasons why someone might want to use Freenet other than obtaining illegal content.'
That is very true. Other wise we could hold people responsable for virus on their computer. You can not arrest someone for what they didn't know and thus couldn't see. But you can for something they did know but chose to ignore. You know that your node is transmitting bad stuff and its doing so by your choice to activate it, ignoreing it simply beacuse you can't see it is not a defense.
Nobody can escape the deluge of warnings - on the net, from the newspapers, at work, in society at large - which say that if you run an unprotected and unpatched machine it *will* get infected. Connecting a Win98 box to the net and not even having a virus scanner is, according to your own reasoning, willful blindness. Yet you say that a person doing that won't be arrested, but anybody running freenet would and should be. I have to admit that I can't follow your reasoning. The question is: is it your reasoning that's inconsistent or is the law inconsistent? If it's the latter, wouldn't you be all for making it consistent and jailing people who connect vulnerable computers to the net?
Let me put it this way.
When you all fire up your nodes you know there is a very strong likelyhood that it will end up houseing and transmiting illegal material, correct?
We don't "all fire up our nodes". This is not a conspiracy, if that's what you're getting to. When *I* fire up *my* node, I know that some illegal content *might* pass through it; not that it will. However, I do not fire up my node in order to facilitate that content to spread. I fire up my node in order to access legal information on freenet. I cannot access that information unless I do fire up my node. I am like someone transporting a truckload of fruit in the corse of legal business, knowing that some harmful insects might be in some of the fruit, but unable to control each fruit individually without ruining the whole load. Tell me, have you ever heard of someone getting prosecuted for transporting harmful insects from Idaho to California?
So you know your computer will be doing something illegal and yet choose to do it anyway simply because you can not see it. That is willful blindness and is not a defense that will stand up in court.
Well, we are all beginning to just repeat ourselves. If we go on that way, the discussion will get boring. May I politely step back and let you have the first go at a new argument to support your views?
Z
-- Framtiden är som en babianröv, färggrann och full av skit. Arne Anka _______________________________________________ Support mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://news.gmane.org/gmane.network.freenet.support Unsubscribe at http://dodo.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/support Or mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
