French Court Orders P2P News Site To Report On File Sharing Convictions

from the freedom-of-the-press? dept

Here's an odd one. Apparently a French news site that focuses on file sharing/BitTorrent/P2P news has been ordered by a court to report on the convictions of file sharers in France. It's not entirely clear under what laws, but perhaps it's a "fairness doctrine" type of thing. Apparently, the big entertainment companies took the site to court over its failure to report on the convictions. The site is more well known for pushing back against things like three strikes laws or the typical propaganda from the industry -- so the industry pushed it to also publish news of the convictions. What's weird is that these "conviction reports" include lots of personal information on those who were convicted, including names, addresses, and birth dates. I'm somewhat surprised the site didn't try to put these convictions into a bit more "context" to show how silly or unreasonable they might be -- but perhaps the court order forbids that.

8 Comments | Leave a Comment..

Legal Issues

by Mike Masnick

Mon, Oct 6th 2008 3:51pm

Is A Conviction Constitutional If It's Based On Evidence From An Unconstitutional Search?

from the buttle-or-tuttle? dept

In a case where the legal implications should thrill any fans of Terry Gilliam's movie classic Brazil, the Supreme Court is set to examine if it's constitutional to convict someone, based on evidence that was only collected due to bad data in a government database. There's no question that a search of someone due to bad data in a database is unconstitutional, but the question is whether or not what's found in that search can then be used to charge someone. In this case, a bad (obsolete) database entry in a county database resulted in the search of an individual's car, where drugs and a firearm were found. This resulted in a conviction and jail time, but the search itself wasn't constitutional, because the data was incorrect. The appeals court let the conviction stand, oddly arguing that throwing out the conviction wouldn't put much pressure on governments to keep their data clean. The court also argues that anyone convicted as a result of such bad data, should simply file a separate, civil, lawsuit against the government. Of course, it seems like the bigger issue should simply be on the constitutionality of using any unconstitutionally obtained evidence in a lawsuit.

31 Comments | Leave a Comment..

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French Court Orders P2P News Site To Report On File Sharing Convictions

from the freedom-of-the-press? dept

Is A Conviction Constitutional If It's Based On Evidence From An Unconstitutional Search?

from the buttle-or-tuttle? dept

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