Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Fri, 25 Jan 2013 07:25:56 PST Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130117/02530421711/copyright-is-becoming-guilt-accusation.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130117/02530421711/copyright-is-becoming-guilt-accusation.shtml you are guilty based on accusations, and then have to go through a long, arduous and often biased-against-you process of proving your innocence. The article points out two examples of this. First, the Kafka-esque process that Jonathan McIntosh went through to keep his mashup video (one cited by the Library of Congress as a quintessential example of fair use) from being taken off YouTube. Of course, it actually was off for quite some time, because YouTube's ContentID system is also based on a "guilt by accusation" system -- after which you have to convince everyone (including, initially, your accuser) that you're really innocent.

The second is the new "six strikes" plans from US broadband players. One of our main complaints with all of the "strikes" plans is that they all are based on accusations, rather than any conviction. While there's an "appeals" process, it's quite limited and the rules have it so that the deck is completely stacked against those who appeal.

What both of these examples have in common, obviously, is that they're so-called "voluntary" solutions, put in place by companies, often due to arm twisting by the entertainment industry, combined with threats of government regulation if such "voluntary" actions don't happen. While it may seem that voluntary agreements are to be encouraged, when they create a situation like this, in which users are being declared guilty merely upon accusation, with little real recourse in many cases, something seems wrong. We run a very real risk of discouraging important services and innovations when we start taking away core concepts like "innocent until proven guilty" -- even if it's just in civil issues between private companies. It's a trend that's quite worrisome and can lead to many innocent people getting punished.

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]]> guilty-until-proven-otherwise http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20130117/02530421711 Fri, 16 Jan 2009 13:53:00 PST Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090115/0559143421.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090115/0559143421.shtml "neck snap break," days before his wife was murdered, and then there was the woman who searched on "how to commit murder" and other rather damning phrases like "instant poison" and "undetectable poisons," before her husband was murdered. In yet another such case, an investment banker has been convicted of a hit-and-run that killed a woman, after his Google searches soon after the accident turned up the phrase "hit and run." The guy had claimed that he believed he hit a deer, but his Google searches suggested he knew it was a person. Beyond just searching for the phrase hit and run, he also did searches on: "auto glass reporting requirements to law enforcement," "auto glass, Las Vegas," auto parts, auto theft, and the Moraga Police Department. Since the incident was in California, the thinking was he was looking to get the damage to his car repaired out of state to avoid any suspicion from the auto repair place. While the guy appealed the ruling saying that even with those searches he didn't have any actual knowledge he had hit a person, the appeals court didn't find that to be very convincing.

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