https://torrentfreak.com/uk-police-launch-campaign-to-shut-d...
And with that, they have at the least gotten registrars not located in their jurisdicrion to transfer domains
https://easydns.com/blog/2013/10/08/whatever-happened-to-due...
Do people forget the owner of Megaupload being extradited? In many ways this is just catching up to the current US state.
And there's a lot of confusion here between basic consumer data protection laws and (IMHO massively overreaching) "Online Safety" laws. This isn't Imgur making a stand for free speech, this is Imgur wanting to track and sell user data - to which minors cannot consent. Putting on my tinfoil hat you could argue that many of these companies are trying to encourage this misunderstanding intentionally.
It 100% won’t; there is no DMCA safe harbor for criminal conduct, only for a narrow category of civil liability.
“Following the DMCA” is irrelevant to anything the FBI would be involved in.
Or to give you another example in backpage the founders where aquitted since the judge could not trace that the money came from a "criminal source" https://www.courthousenews.com/backpage-executives-acquitted...
Yes, it is only possible to qualify for the safe harbor, if you haven’t committed criminal infringement.
But, as criminal infringement is not part of the DMCA, following the DMCA has no probative value against accusations of criminal infringement. Criminal infringement means you aren’t qualified for DMCA safe harbor regardless of whether you follow the DMCA, but following the DMCA doesn’t mean you aren’t guilty of criminal infringement.
> Or to give you another example in backpage the founders where aquitted since the judge could not trace that the money came from a "criminal source"
Backpage has no relevance to criminal copyright infringement. About the only connection between this case and that is that Backpage was also a nexus for a lot of misinformation about a (completely different, Section 230 rather than DMCA) safe harbor provision.
IMO, the law should establish some parental rights over their children, I don't think this is controversial. You can argue with what the limits of the rights are, how they interact with the rights of the child, and how that changes as the child ages, but the basic ideas is pretty sound.
And then given that, it is the role of an elected government to determine all these factors, subject to review of the courts. That all seems to be working here.
If you follow the DMCA (e.g., honor takedown notices, register an agent if you’re a platform, and act quickly when notified), your exposure to criminal liability is essentially zero.
Example: If you’re from Mexico and your work is infringed in France, French law protects you like a French author. So you could sue where the infrigment is happening, ie france.
There’s been multiple cases where non-US gambling websites have had their domains confiscated by the American government because they have American users, going back about 20 years.
Committing crimes remotely from another country was never a loophole to escape the laws of that country.
When a country requests extradition they’re not claiming jurisdiction over another country. They’re saying that a crime was committed in their country by the person and they’re asking the foreign country for cooperation in prosecuting that person.
The MegaUpload case is not equivalent to what the UK is doing. MegaUpload was operating as a business, taking payments, and exchanging money. Once you start doing explicit paid business in a country you can’t claim you’re not involved with that country.
If a country starts claiming that merely making content accessible globally is a crime in their country, that’s an entirely different issue. Not equivalent to the MegaUpload case.
> Do people forget the owner of Megaupload being extradited? In many ways this is just catching up to the current US state.
Again, false equivalence. MegaUpload was operating as a business with US customers. They also had some hosting in the United States if I recall correctly.
Once you start doing business in a country and have customers there, you’re involved with their laws.
They didn’t even completely follow the DMCA, though. They had active features to detect duplicate uploads via file hash and link them together via deduplication, but a DMCA takedown request would only remove one link to the file rather than actually remove the content.
They claimed a lot of things and tried to ride a wave of internet populism, but their case wasn’t really as controversial as they tried to make it.
Megaupload's business model was pretty much exactly the same - but with "any" file instead of just images.
If the UK version didn't have ads, and UK-focused ads at that, they might have a point - but I don't see any "false equivalence" here.
And playing games about "indirectly" monetizing people (through ads or similar) doesn't mean they aren't /customers/. Otherwise every consumer law would be trivially worked around.
I’m not entirely sure the argument that the MegaUpload case and this Imgur case aren’t equivalent really holds up here. Imgur are collecting data from minors in the UK, and presumably selling that data (otherwise, why bother collecting it). Which is a crime in the UK (and the EU). You’re not allowed to collect people’s data and sell it without consent, and minors can’t provide consent (that’s basically what makes them minors).
Presumably Imgur sells adverts, and likely sells adverts to UK buyers. So for pretty much all the reasons you outline that the US should have jurisdiction over MegaUpload, the UK should have jurisdiction over Imgur.
I also take issue with the idea that being paid for something is the bar that we should be assessing a companies involvement in a country by. Obviously conducting monetary business transactions in a country is a very strong argument for jurisdiction. But it’s less obvious to me that breaking local laws, without making a profit, should somehow exempt a company from that countries laws. Particularly when the laws in question deal with how a company directly interacts with the citizens of that country.
It would be absurd for the UK to create a special exception to allow underage youths to consent to user tracking at an age lower than the standard age for legal consent in any other context.
But would you at that, this is a discussion started by a news article where one of the scummy companies is discovering what those consequences are. So something must be working.
Seems like a loophole for arbitrary criminal accusations of a people living abroad who are not affiliated with the country making the accusations. With this kind of logic, adult website operators should be extradited to some middle-eastern country for violating their sharia law online. It's wrong. Site operators living abroad should not be held accountable for not adhering to arbitrary local laws, unless they are conducting business directly in that country.
Claiming jurisdiction is one thing, ensuring cooperation of the host state is another, and requires either kowtowing to the US or similar legislation, even if there is an extradition treaty.
If the DMCA allowed US operators to host torrent catalogs openly, there’d be a plethora of them.
The arguments are very similar. You could claim that only accepting fiat currency should count, but that would open a massive loophole that would be trivial to exploit
Also its hard and extremely expensive to defend yourself to prove it in a niche specifically where people are looking not to pay making it harder to montize to defend properly.
Middle Eastern countries are not able to convince e.g. the US or any of the European Countries to extradite their citizens (or sometimes legal residents) for violating the moral codes of let's say Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan.
Because these countries know that (and becaue of diplomatic consequences) the law and/or government there doesn't even try it. But if the CEO of a porn site travels there he can and most likely will be held accountable. Tha
If it's a crime in both jurisdiction prosecution is certainly a possibility and happens regularily (or both countries cooperate to convict people without extradition)
Ultimately the United States have a lot more diplomatic sway over the world than some random country and that's why they can and do ask for a lot more.
If you ever need an example of everday US soft power that it is.
Imgur was showing ads (business) and collecting data (business) and operating a message platform (business) in the UK. They have stopped.
This seems fine?
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent_in_North_Americ...
Why do you think that is?