On Thu, 4 Dec 2003, Newsbyte wrote: > "When a notorious > key becomes known (and the key of e.g. TFE would certainly be > notorious), there will certainly be court orders against all > known Freenet nodes barring them from routing that key. And if > they continue to route the key in such a way that they can be > proved to have routed the key, they will be in contempt of court > or in violation of the law, and will be subject to arrest and > seizure." > > 1)Which court? Since Freenet works (or ought to work) even when a > majority of nodes are compromised (or court-ordered), I fail to see > how it would affect Freenet, unless it's a universal courtorder.
For example, the French courts, which have in the past been aggressive along these lines, for example in the Yahoo case, where Yahoo was required to block access to US sites offering Nazi memorabilia. While you might say that this would not affect Freenet, it would affect all Freenet users subject to French courts, which means everybody in the European Union. > 2)Even if universal; how is one going to enforce Freenet nodes to not > route certain keys? As if Joe Doe were even remotely capable of doing > such a thing...And if they would oblige the coders to do it; it's open > source, so sooner or later an alternate version will appear, probably > on Freenet itself ;-) Police in the UK have this habit of seizing equipment and holding it for a year or so. They don't have to file charges. They just 'investigate' the equipment. > 3)Routing a key as such is not illegal, even when the content may be. > The legal precedents in most countries are that linking to content is > not illegal on itself, and that ISP's - in principle - can not be held > accountable for what they route. It's not unreasonable to suspect > courts are going to equalize keys as references (like urls) and nodes > that route data as being equal to servers of ISP's routing data. Your assumptions are highly questionable. A British court decided several years ago that a Web site which had links through to content on another UK Web site was violating copyright laws. French and German authorities certainly hold ISPs responsible for what they route. I ran an ISP in the UK for seven years and was a director of the ISP trade association (www.ispa.org.uk) and also of the pan-European equivalent (www.euroispa.org). We had frequent meetings with regulators and with London lawyers specializing in the Internet. There is no doubt that ISPs do NOT have common carrier status. In Europe at least the regulators have held off from clarifying this issue because they have wanted to see how things would settle out. If something that is provocative enough occurs, the issue will be clarified and someone will be made an example of. > 4)The rulings in the napster case indicate that some services may have > responsability and have to shut down or get rid of the illegal > content...BUT, Freenet has no central authority, thus there is no1 for > the advocats to sue, exept individual users. The ruling also said that > the service or ISP must be made aware of the infringement, and be in > the possibility to remedie it. this means, that the (potential- > millions of freenet-users (all over the world) would have to get a > notice that a particular key (unlikely) or content is illegal, and > would have the ability to do somthing about it (even more unlikely). > > All by all, the hurdles for any court/judgement to effectively deal > with this, is staggering, and even if some day they would be able to > do so, by then the technology will have advanced even more > (steganography). In fact the hurdles are trivial. The police don't have to bust everyone. All they need do is identify a few examples, seize their equipment, and toss them in jail for a while. This gives the police, the courts, and the politicians something to brag to the newspapers about, a bit of time on the evening news. On the other hand, the best defense is that you truly have no knowledge of the traffic and no control over the infringement. That is, adding the ability to block specific content to Freenet gives _someone_ control over content and therefore makes them subject to court orders. -- Jim Dixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] tel +44 117 982 0786 mobile +44 797 373 7881 _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://dodo.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
