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Rob Heverly

Guilty Pirates, Line Up Over Here

pirateI almost titled this post, “Wut?”, but decided against it. It was, however, my initial reaction to this ArsTechnica story, Feeling guilt over P2P use? Piracy Payback wants to help. From the article:

Feeling a sense of remorse, contrition, guilt, shame, and self-loathing over all that unauthorized peer-to-peer downloading you’ve been doing? Salve that stinging conscience by giving some cash back to artists!

That’s the pitch behind Piracy Payback, a website that collects donations from downloaders and distributes them to rightsholder organizations in Europe and North America (where much of the content originates).

The basic idea seems to be: if you download, and then you feel guilty, you can give some money to the artists you’ve “stolen” from by giving money to Piracy Payback, which will cheerfully pass it along to the artists. Except the basic idea is not the one that has been implemented. Piracy Payback does not give money to artists. It gives money to “rightsholder organizations.” This is not, in any way, the same. Will this money in any way filter through to the artist you “stole” from? Not likely. Why not? Because you don’t, you can’t, tell them which artist you stole from (just the medium you stole from, if you want to list it, choosing from music, film, television, software, gaming, or all of the above). We’re not even sure which rightsholders organizations cooperate with the site. Any “trickling down” of revenue to the relevant artist or creator would have to be happenstance (artists might as well play the lottery). What you’re really doing is giving money to the organizations that might later sue you for copyright infringement. Just melts that guilt away, doesn’t it?

Why would anyone do this? Let’s look at one possible reason after the jump.

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Fake Profile Poster Barred from Public Positions for Life

We’ve read a few examples recently of lawyers getting in trouble for what they post online: a lawyer disciplined for posts about a judge and another charged with revealing client confidences (here are other examples from the ABA journal and the NY Times). But it’s not just lawyers getting in trouble.

In an unreported opinion out of the Superior Court of New Jersey, Appellate Division, in early September (but just now showing up online on Lexis), the Court affirmed a decision in which a university police officer who posted a fake (and apparently nasty) profile of a female colleague on Facebook was permanently barred from holding any public office in New Jersey (under N.J. Stat. § 2C:51-2) [the decision is N.J. v. Mandi, 2009 N.J. Super. Unpub. LEXIS 2499 (September 9, 2009)]. The Court found that because the fake profile was of a co-worker (with whom the poster had previously had a relationship), and was made using a university computer while on the police officer was on duty, the officer could be fired and prevented from working in the N.J. public sector again.

According to the Court, the three facts (co-worker, university computer, university time) sufficiently involved or sufficiently touched upon his public office that permanent forfeiture of any future public employment was suitable:

[T]he statutory scheme is clear. Any person convicted of an offense, including a petty disorderly persons offense, as was defendant, is subject to forfeiture of his present position, and is permanently barred from future public employment, if the offense “involv[ed] or touch[ed] on his public office, position or employment.”

I assume the outcome would have been different had he posted the profile from home, using his own computer, but still created a fake profile about his co-worker ex-girlfriend. The Court’s analysis does not pose this as a hypothetical.

I have two things I want to raise (after the jump).

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