Kim Dotcom Loses Appeal Concerning Extradition

Legal Issues

from the it's-going-to-happen-eventually dept

To date, Kim Dotcom has been having a long string of victories in court in his ongoing battle with the US concerning their attempt to extradite him and try him in the US for creating and running Megaupload. One of the big victories was the district court ruling that the FBI needed to reveal its evidence against Dotcom as a part of the extradition procedure. The US DOJ had been arguing that the evidence only matters for the US trial, and that New Zealand should effectively rubberstamp the extradition. Eventually, you knew there had to be some setbacks in Dotcom’s case, and now an appeals court has overturned that earlier ruling, and said that the FBI does not need to reveal its evidence.

In its judgment, the Court of Appeal says extradition hearings are not criminal trials and that the judge deciding whether to order extradition has only to be satisfied there is a case to answer.

The court said the US government had a duty of “candour and good faith” in making an extradition bid, but a summary of the evidence held would suffice.

Dotcom has made it clear that he’s going to appeal this to the Supreme Court, so there’s still the possibility of at least one more level of review before this is over. I’m sure there are specific reasons for today’s ruling, but I have to admit it does seem odd that you can pull someone out of their home country and take them across an ocean without having to actually prove you have an actual case first. The idea that the US government is doing any of this in “good faith” seems like an assumption that isn’t particularly supportable in reality.

Filed Under: appeal, evidence, extradition, fbi, kim dotcom

System Used By New Six Strikes CAS, Falsely Identifies Game Mods As NBC TV Shows

Failures

from the this-is-going-to-be-a-disaster dept

Reader David Sutherland emailed us this week about a DMCA notice that he received via his MediaFire account. The notice, which we’ve included below (including all of the crappy formatting) claimed that he was using MediaFire to host “one of the following files: Downton Abbey, CONTRABAND (2012), GRIMM (2011), House M.D., MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS, THE, The Office.” The “file” they claimed was one of those TV shows/movies was “Cantha Cartography Made Easy 2009.tpf” which is actually a game mod for Guild Wars. You might possibly be able to argue that ArenaNet, makers of Guild Wars could have a copyright claim (maybe, sorta), but that’s not who sent the notice and it’s not what they claimed it was. Sutherland notes that he set up this MediaFire account solely to host game mods and has never hosted any other content there.

So, who sent the DMCA takedown? Dtecnet. And, as you can see from the messy, messy DMCA notice below, they tried to takedown a huge list of files. If Sutherland’s experience is anything to go by, you have to wonder how many of them are actually infringing.

Of course, we’ve seen plenty of bogus DMCA takedowns. It happens all the time. But this one is doubly important, because it’s from DtecNet, a division of MarkMonitor. MarkMonitor/Dtecnet also just happen to be the company providing the key monitoring for the new “six strikes” Copyright Alert System (CAS). The Center for Copyright Information has a web page on its site about an “independent expert assessment” of MarkMonitor’s antipiracy methodologies. Except… that page is completely blank. Perhaps, if they’re looking to do an analysis, figuring out why they’re taking down content that has nothing to do with what they claim would be a good place to start.

Good thing the CAS works entirely based on accusations, without needing to show any proof at all, huh?

Filed Under: cas, copyright, false alerts, game mods, six strikes
Companies: dtecnet, markmonitor, nbc

'Video Games Do Not Cause Violence,' According To Former FBI Profiler

Culture

from the political-ax-grinding-to-continue-unabated dept

The national discussion about links between video games and violence continues. Unfortunately, most of the loudest “discussion” seems to be taking the form of proposed legislation that takes the view that the connection is a foregone conclusion. There’s a wealth of misinformation to draw from, especially if one wants to believe that video game violence leads to real life violence, and many of these pundits and politicians have already found all the “evidence” they need to justify their push towards video game regulation or flat out bans.

One of the voices sure to be ignored in this debate is one with actual experience with violent individuals. Former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole had this to say about the subject during a panel discussion hosted by CBS News.

“It’s my experience that video games do not cause violence,” O’Toole told CBS News. “However, it is one of the risk variables when we do a threat assessment for the risk to act out violently.”

“It’s important that I point out that as a threat assessment and as a former FBI profiler, we don’t see these as the cause violence,” she added. “We see them as sources of fueling ideation that’s already there.”

O’Toole’s statement echoes what many others have noticed while researching video games and violence. Violent video games don’t craft new killers. However, they may encourage pre-existing tendencies. The push to censor or punish violent video games in order to prevent violence ignores the source of the problem, opting instead for an easily-accessible scapegoat.

As another panelist pointed out, violence statistics simply do not track with the rise of the video game industry.

Texas A&M International University psychology professor Christopher Ferguson pointed out that youth violence had recently declined to the lowest level in 40 years at a time when video games had become more violent.

As Ferguson sees it, this backlash against video games is nothing more than another moral panic; a periodic societal reflux that has attempted to lay the blame for societal woes on various handy villains in the past, like rock music, pinball and Dungeons & Dragons (among others). Ferguson point out the “attention” paid to comic books in the 1950s, which Congress and psychiatrists blamed for everything from juvenile delinquency to homosexuality.

Tragedies often lead to instant reactions and moral panic as legislators and special interests alike seize on parts of culture they distrust or misunderstand. This leads to a lot of “working backwards,” as we’ve seen in a number of bills that have been introduced post-Newtown.

“We’re in a mode of worry about — or panicking about this type of media. We may do some putting the cart before the horse, and we may see some people sort of starting with a conclusion and trying to assemble data in a very selective way to try to support that conclusion.”

Fortunately for gamers, the Supreme Court has already taken a firm stance against the government regulation of video games, viewing this as a violation of First Amendment rights. This, combined with studies that have failed to show any direct link between violence and video games, helps keep legislators from doing much more than making a lot of noise about the subject. But they’ll still keep trying, at least until the next bit of blamable culture comes along.

Filed Under: fbi profiler, video games, violence, violent video games

Spain Considers Making Digital Copyright Law Worse: Pleasing The US Again?

Copyright

from the never-ending-story dept

We wrote a couple of weeks ago how some were arguing that Spain ought to go back on the “naughty” Special 301 list for failing to show any “positive developments” on the copyright front recently. By an interesting coincidence, the Spanish Internet Association has just published a leaked draft of proposals to make digital copyright law in Spain even harsher. Here’s how the Web site ADSL Zone describes them (original in Spanish):

Interestingly, Google wouldn’t be affected by the new law according to ADSL Zone, nor would “occasional links” be prosecuted. Of course, everything would then hinge on what “occasional” meant in this context.

There’s also the following proposal:

The concept of “original media” is meaningless in the digital realm, where files are copied many times as they traverse the Internet, or as people move them around on their storage media. How on earth would you prove that your digital copy was “original”?

Finally, there is a suggestion for making the copyright levy system not only worse, but in conflict with current EU plans to rationalize it:

In an age where storage media are becoming ubiquitous — if Samsung’s refrigerator is running Android, it must have storage — such levies are anachronistic and harm innovation, so Spain’s plans to push on with them is one more indicator that it’s heading in the wrong direction. The big question, of course, is why it is doing this: is it simply the usual story of lobbyists’ privileged access to government ministers who aren’t interested in whether the new measures are fair or even effective? Or is this once more the heavy hand of America reaching across the water to put a little pressure on its Hispanic friends…?

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: copyright, criminal, links, spain, special 301