Techdirt. Stories filed under "lithuania"

Lithuania And Estonia Use Google Maps Street View To Catch Tax Cheats

Glyn Moody — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:48:42 PDT

As we've noted before, the information captured by Google's Street View has been put to some surprising uses, and the Boston Globe has come across a further fascinating example from Lithuania:

Sitting in the comfort of their own offices, inspectors used the free Internet program for a virtual cruise around the streets of some of the Baltic country's big cities, uncovering dozens of alleged tax violations involving housing construction and property sales.

They identified 100 homeowners and 30 construction companies as suspected tax dodgers thanks to Street View, finding homes where they shouldn't be and other suspicious activity, Darius Buta, a spokesman for the State Tax Inspectorate, said Wednesday.

Ars Technica points out that Estonia is doing the same. This might lead to demands for houses to be blurred, as can be requested in Germany. But the Boston Globe article notes that it's not just Street View that tax authorities are mining for clues about people not paying all their taxes: In the United States, the Internal Revenue Service has said it would be cross-referencing information from taxpayers' Facebook and Twitter accounts if their returns threw up any red flags.

In Britain, tax officials have revealed they are using Web crawling software to trawl auction websites for undeclared sales.

Authorities in Greece have been using satellite imagery to locate undeclared swimming pools in wealthy neighborhoods.
The ability to draw on the massive stores of data that are now publicly available means that even seemingly trivial information, when cross-referenced with more of the same, can allow governments and others to create surprisingly detailed profiles of people that may have far from trivial consequences.

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Lithuanian Minister Of Justice Says ACTA Is Unnecessary, Doesn't Actually Help Creators And It's Time To Reevaluate IP

Mike Masnick — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:40:53 PST

Here's yet another example of a European official speaking out against ACTA. However, unlike in many other countries, where it appears to be politicians merely pushing back on public backlash, and urging caution and public review, the Lithuanian Justice Minister, Remigijus Simasius, has completely condemned ACTA and said that it should lead to a wholesale re-evaluation of IP rights system itself.

The essence of my comment was that certain provisions of ACTA are new to our legal system (more severe punishment, more control of internet providing services) and I do not see why those provisions are necessary.

I have also stated that our life is more and more dependent on R&D, new inventions, creativity. Existing IP protection system, however, is more about protecting the IP protection industry than a protection of inventors and authors. Current debate worldwide is a clear sign that we have to re-evaluate the existing IP rights system.

While it'll be interesting to see how far all of this goes, it's quite notable just how much backlash the SOPA overreach is suddenly creating -- where all sorts of skepticism about existing copyright law is suddenly coming out in more mainstream places.

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Microsoft Sues BitTorrent Tracker

Mike Masnick — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:10:00 PST

After already targeting a bunch of users of a popular Lithuanian BitTorrent tracker, Microsoft has apparently now tried suing the owner of the torrent tracker itself, though the guy claims he stopped running it at the end of last year. But, again, it seems backwards to sue the operator of a tracker, when that tracker does not host or transmit any copyrighted material itself. On top of that, Microsoft has sued for $43 million, when Lithuanian law apparently limits the potential damages in this case to $53,000. Either way, due to the case, the (previous?) owner of the site has had his assets frozen -- which seems pretty extreme based on just an accusation, rather than a conviction.

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