My point is that "guilt" should be determined by the laws of the country you reside in. Even if google is guilty of it (I'm not saying they are), it doesn't mean this guy is. Why? Because they abide by different laws, since they are governed by different laws.
To me, this is as preposterous as if Norway had strong ties with some Muslim country, and extradited me because of caricatures of Muhammad.
Unfortunately this is true in almost all of the developed world. While developing countries may not have specific legal prohibitions, we know that that doesn't stop big companies from having their way. Heck, even a first-world country like Sweden couldn't resist the pressure from Hollywood to prosecute and jail the operators of the Pirate Bay, which had long been recognized as totally legal in Sweden.
Another issue is that on the internet, jurisdiction is a very messy affair. An American judge will likely determine that California and/or the federal government has jurisdiction over such a case because Google is based in California. Most developed countries have treaties with one another that allow them to enforce foreign civil judgments on behalf of the jurisdiction that entered them. Most developed countries also have mutual extradition treaties. The countries that don't can easily be paid off by an interested party.
That's a core principle of the law of all those countries, similarly strictly applied. The issue here is not the proof, but the definition of guilt. If you know you are supposed to ask where something comes from, you are guilty if you don't.
It sounds to me like a German name, is he from there? Then how is it possible that the US judges this single person directly in the US?
He should be sent back to Germany, trialed there, and the US can only sue the company. Everything else is a huge violation according to US thinking even.
Think about China would jail and trial a US citizen that is doing on business for Google in China.
No, you are not going to get arrested in America for making a joke about George Washington.
Enough with the irresponsible moral equivalence arguments.
There are glaringly material differences between 'Google software scanning your mails to target ads' and 'the police having $2/hour folks reading private chats to arrest you for totally arbitrary reasons'.
I'm not a fan of countries who apply their laws globally but I don't think that is the case with the GP's hypothetical because the server is hosted in that country - thus that is literally where the crime was committed.
You may not be physically present in the same location as the server in the GP's hypothetical but the crime you committed was within the territory of that particular country.
To me, the equivalent is flying over to the country, committing a crime, then flying back before the crime had been detected and using that as a defence for why you shouldn't be extradited.
That's just my opinion though. I do agree that the age of the internet has made the issue of legal jurisdictions a murky one.
Just to play devil's advocate here, if the offences were conducted in the US (US hosted servers, paid for in dollars and earning e.g. advertising revenue from US customers serving ads to US users) then maybe he has a case to answer for in the US. I don't know, I made those things up because I'm not familiar with the case. If anyone here knows more please do tell.
If that is the case, then it's just a question of whether he should be tried in the US or the UK. However if you set yourself up to do business in the US and break the law there by e.g. violating the copyrights of US companies, surely doing so while sitting in another country should be no defence?
As I say, I don't know enough about this case to be able to say but the basic principles of responsibility in play here seem sound to me. If you earn US dollars in the US and break US laws, you should be prepared to defend yourself in a US court. No?
Sure, but if you violate those laws and then travel to that country they're completely allowed to persecute you. That's what happened to the Huawei exec (or to be more specific, she traveled to a country with extradition treaties with the US).
Fascinating how a Canadian was convicted of breaking a USA law. I assume the criminal was probably selling the device to Americans but it's bizarre to me. As an American, I would never face judgment for some of the anti-speech laws of China or Saudi Arabia, for example.
I know the Kim Dotcom story is the best example of USA law being global law, but every instance is genuinely fascinating.
I don't understand what you're getting at. If a US citizen broke my window (i live in the UK), i'd report it to the police and the criminal would be subject to UK law at all times while here (unless he has diplomatic immunity or something). What does that have to do anything with your 2nd point? Do you mean "sue", or do you really mean "use" like you wrote? If you meant sue, then of course we can, Google has a presence in the UK and thus is subject to UK law (not saying all of Google might be subject to UK law, but at least its UK arm).
I'm going to say yes. If they and their business are completely outside of the US, then unless they are breaking a treaty (ex: war crimes), I would say that it is justice. To think otherwise would be to place the expectation that every person in the world be held to the expectation that they know and understand the laws of every other country in the world. That to me sounds unreasonable. For example, how many non-US censorship laws do you think are broken by Americans on a daily basis? Do you think it is right and just that all of those Americans be charged with a crime by other countries? And that they be extradited on request?
If a law is universal to the point that you think charging non-citizens residing outside of your country is just, then I would expect that declaration to be recognized via a treaty or an agreement by the United Nations. No matter what you think of Kim Dotcom and others like him, the charges and approach by the US government to me do not seem like justice in any sense of the word.
Telling your followers to kill someone in another country is considered committing a crime in that country. Distributing information that at some point originated in another country is generally not.
I'm not even in their country, pretty sure I'm not going to get extradited for breaking the privacy laws of a jurisdiction in which I have no physical presence.
Mostly these laws are scoped to the country one is living in. The problem is, say I decide to post a meme inciting violence in a different country or limiting a country's decision to join NATO (the quran burning in Sweden for example caused Turkish president Erdogan to block Sweden's NATO bid)... I don't have to face any charges or responsibility, despite potentially affecting the lives of millions of people.
The countries have every right to legally prosecute their residents for breaking the local law. This doesn't mean that everybody worldwide has a duty to assist this prosecution. Even more, there are many cases (e.g. those I listed above) where a honest person should not cooperate but hinder and obstruct this foreign legal prosecution as much as their own local laws allow.
Whatsapp has a duty to protect their user's privacy. Unless they receive a binding legal order from their authorities (in Whatsapp's case, USA) it is entirely right to ignore nonbinding requests from judges in Brazil, Thailand, Iran or everywhere else. Simply submitting to out-of-jurisdiction authorities is not due process, it is sharing personal data with third parties without the user's consent which (IANAL, IMHO) is legal in USA but would be prohibited if, for example, Whatsapp was headquartered in EU.
In your examples, the listed companies (or their appropriate subsidiaries) are subject to those laws because they are headquarted there, those laws are their local laws exactly unlike the nonexistent legal relationship between Whatsapp and Brazil.
Some countries will have bilateral agreements to obtain evidence from abroad - a process on how e.g. Brazil law enforcement could cooperate with USA law enforcement to get a request that has some legal force in USA (and vice versa). In the absence of that, a provider should side with their users privacy and ignore foreign requests as a policy.
> Seems kinda silly to enforce a country's laws on someone even when they're in another country.
It's relatively common these days. The US assumes global jurisdiction for anything that touches the US Dollar (as e.g. Kim Dotcom of Megaupload has been fighting for years now), and most Western nations assume global jurisdiction for a select few grave crimes (mostly murder, war crimes and sexual exploitation of underagers).
I'm not defending the action of our country but your analogy is way off. You're comparing two whole different scenarios. People around the world commit stuff all the time that would violate our laws but you never hear any cases like Kim's until today. Remember the reason Kim was brought to American justice system was because MPAA (American Company) alleges that MegaUpload caused over 500 million dollars in damages to their company. That's a large sum of money and if its in any other industry, any company would do the same.
So why couldn't the UK prosecute him? Why should he be prosecuted under the laws of a country that is not his own?
The problem with the internet is that we're fast becoming subject to the laws of every country. I mean, that one guy almost got put to death by Iran...
Hypothetical: A Pornhub executive flies from New York to Seoul on Etihad Airways. While transiting in Abu Dhabi airport, they are arrested on charges of obscenity. What would be the reaction in the US?
Factual: In 2006, David Carruthers was arrested while transiting through Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. He was convicted under the RICO act and sentenced to 33 months imprisonment. He was the CEO of the online gambling company BetOnSports, which operated in full compliance with the regulations in the UK and Costa Rica, but accepted bets from American gamblers. Gary Kaplan, another BetOnSports executive, was extradited from the Dominican Republic.
The precedent set in the BetOnSports case is either utterly hypocritical or extraordinarily dangerous. If we give every country the right to impose their laws across the whole internet, we don't have an internet any more. A Facebook user posts a comment critical of the Thai royal family; Zuckerberg is sentenced to life imprisonment for lèse-majesté. A Chinese internet user accesses anti-government material via a VPN hosted on AWS and a Google search; Bezos, Page and Brin are all sentenced to 10 years hard labour for subversion.
To me, this is as preposterous as if Norway had strong ties with some Muslim country, and extradited me because of caricatures of Muhammad.
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