[olug] MPAA toolkit

[Bill Brush]

As far as the whole liability thing goes, the test for liability is
the "reasonable person" test.

If someone comes over to your house, asks to use the phone, you let
them, and they proceed to commit phone fraud, or other crime with it,
the owner of the phone would not be held liable UNLESS it can be shown
that they knew that the person intended to commit said crime, and
allowed it.

Carrying the example a little further, in the case of someone using
open wireless, if someone tapped your phone line, and committed phone
fraud, or other crime again you would not liable unless it can be
shown that you did not take reasonable precautions.

Another example is if you loan someone your hammer, and they use it to
vandalize someone's car, you're not liable unless you knew that's what
they were going to do, and then you're liable even if you don't loan
them the hammer because you knew they were going to commit a crime and
didn't report it.  That's called being an accomplice.

Now with ISP's you may have a service agreement stating that you are
responsible for all traffic on your connection; however, that's a
contractual agreement, and has no real bearing on criminal or civil
liability.  In other words they can cut off your service for a black
hat violating your TOS, but that doesn't mean you're criminally
liable.

With regards to the original topic the legal and legislative system is
fairly resilient in that bad laws don't survive court challenges or
never get passed the committees.  The RIAA and MPAA are powerful
lobbying groups, but people using their civil right to beat on their
reps does work.  The Net started with a government project so I don't
know how anyone can think that government is suddenly going to get
involved, they've always been there.

The legal system isn't nearly as screwed up as you might think if you
just read about the spectacular failures.  Kind of like you never hear
about the 10's of thousands of trains that cross the world every day,
but if one of them crashes, it's front page news.

Bill

On Nov 28, 2007 11:02 AM, Obi-Wan <obiwan at jedi.com> wrote:
<snip>