

Police Arrest Men for Spreading Popcorn Time Information - eis
https://torrentfreak.com/police-arrest-men-for-spreading-popcorn-time-information-150819/

======
existencebox
At the risk of making a slippery slope argument, it's impossible not to wonder
how this boundary will continue to move (how many degrees of separation can be
prosecuted from an actual crime). I'm sure the more extreme advocates of this
prosecution will try to draw parallels to "What if someone put a bomb making
guide online"; but this illustrates the point well: When the original
feinstein bill to make illegal distributing bomb making information was put
into place, it was not long after that corporate interests wanted to move the
needle such that financial damages were protected in similar form, in this
case from CD cracking.

We've now moved one step further, pursuing those helping people find ways to
help them do an illegal act (my own opinions aside, it's still illegal), and
while this can be very readily justified as simply expanding the scope of
investigation for involved parties, I have two primary concerns.

\- One, where do you draw the line? As a sister post jokingly put it, google
should clearly be taken down for facilitation too. But perhaps it's not such
an outlandish suggestion after all?

\- Two, there are too many similarities in my mind to how prosecution in the
drug war focused on end users, and the overwhelmingly negative outcome from
that angle of attack; With the additional leveraging of some of the most
extreme violations that can be brought against these individuals (as another
sister post jokingly puts it, "those terrorists!"), I must again take the
sobering reality from that joke in that we are further criminalizing acts that
at the end of the day have EXTREMELY disputable damaging impact, and for
practical purposes, entirely overturning the subjects lives (who, I have no
reason to believe were not otherwise productive citizens; but no longer) in
the pursuit of this crusade.

That was quite the rant. A bit of a conglomeration of a few subjects very
close to heart, I guess.

Let me try and end this with a thought, however, more to the tune of what
HackerNews wants to be:

Given that the pre-takedown content of the site is still present on
Archive.org, I wonder how much of a statement it would be to start mirroring
the content in a more "disposible" fashion across multiple providers, play a
game of whack-a-mole. Or if something like Etherium, or another distributed
system, is truly the panacea for content like this. It probably takes away
from my earlier points in that I would support this form of dissent, but I
can't help but see things like that and not want to "aim to misbehave."

~~~
simoncion
> Given that the pre-takedown content of the site is still present on
> Archive.org...

It will be _until_ a crawler-hostile robots.txt is "accidentally" added to the
site. :(

------
eis
So now people are getting arrested for writing about and linking to a software
that helps people potentially infringe copyright. Plus their domains seized
and website shut down before they have been found guilty of anything.

Shoot first and ask later. True Hollywood style.

Luckily Torrentfreak is not based in Denmark.

    
    
      “The Danish State Prosecutor for Serious Economic and International Crime is presently conducting a criminal investigation that involves this domain name,”
    

Wow so this is treated as a serious economic or international crime. Those
terrorists!

~~~
err4nt
QUICK! Raid Google, Im pretty sure you can jse it to find infringing material
too /s

