Really stupid idea for a lot of reasons. In a case like this deleting the evidence is the last thing you want to do anyway. What you want is all of the evidence, including documentation of the visits by the authorities and exactly what they said/did during those visits to be in the hands of one or more attorneys well-known enough that the prosecutors aren't willing to attack them directly, with instructions on where to send that evidence so that, should anything untoward happen to you, all the details the authorities don't want getting out will end up in the headlines shortly thereafter. The authorities want the whole matter to be forgotten, make the path of least resistance be for them to not hassle you anymore.
How would you feel if, out of the blue, a couple of big, muscular guys in biker leathers and dark glasses showed up on your doorstep wanting to talk to you about some work your employer was having you do and the vendors you were working with? They want names, phone numbers, contract details, delivery dates, all kinds of things they have no business asking about but are asking about anyway, and even if they aren't breaking out the baseball bats yet they're being really really insistent about you answering their questions.
The problem is that the LAPD and other LEAs do have recourse: they go gripe at the politicians and threaten to label them as "anti-law-enforcement". The politicians then put pressure on Facebook to let LEAs do anything they want. And Facebook quietly complies.
It comes down to the "newsworthiness" test. The public has no real interest in a bunch of jewelry owned by anyone, so if the jewelry is stolen and given to a reporter the reporter has no protection (at least so long as they don't themselves know the items were stolen). The public does have an interest in knowing that eg. their elected officials are taking bribes, so if someone steals the documentation and gives it to a reporter who reports on it the reporter is protected because the public's interest in knowing their elected officials are corrupt has been deemed to be more important than the government's interest in prosecuting theft.
I think most people's problem with targeted advertising isn't the targeting itself so much as how it's done, that it's based on tracking what each person does everywhere they go and assuming that the conclusions drawn from that wide net are of more importance than what the person's doing right now (what the web page they're on is about). Targeting advertising of religious material towards followers of that religion is great, but if I'm looking at a web site listing cars for sale I'm probably not wanting to see ads for religious material no matter how closely I fit the profile for the advertisers of such or how much religion shows up in my web activity the rest of the time. Either give the web sites on which ads appear more control over what kinds of ads appear, or start making site content the most important criteria in selecting what ads appear regardless of what the advertisers may want. The advertisers may be the customer, but if your customers piss off your product badly enough you won't have any product left to sell.
Worse, the sort of targeting done today is a lagging indicator: it shows up consumer interest too late to do anything but annoy the user. If I'm looking to buy a used car, you have about 30 seconds to detect that and start getting ads in front of me. If you wait until you've seen a pattern of me visiting used-car web sites to start showing me ads, chances are I'm in the process of buying one and the ads are just annoying now since I won't be in the market for a car again for several years. Targeting based on the web pages I'm visiting right now would've gotten far better results in that kind of very common case.
From the standpoint of the drug itself, this is therapeutically trivial. The drug and it's mechanism often don't change at all, the only changes are in the packaging to slow the rate at which the active compound gets made available in the bloodstream. There's a bunch of standard things pharmaceutical chemists can do to achieve that goal, and one of the first things on the agenda once a drug is developed and approved is to work through that set to see what you get. The results of that sort of work should absolutely not be patentable, once you have the drug the remainder of the process is just SOP.
Where it should become patentable is when SOP fails. Sometimes you work through the standard tricks and nothing works. You need to change the drug's structure slightly to get it through the liver in higher quantities, or you need to go back and work out a precursor compound whose metabolization into the active drug you can control better to make it amenable to extended-release packaging. That's the kind of novel stuff that ought to be patentable, not just applying one of the standard methods used to create extended-release forms of other drugs that're already well-documented and just need tested to see which one works best for this particular case.
And as usual, his "solution" just happens to be what his backers want: men to get women to stay home and take care of the kids and the house and stop making such a racket over men's behavior, then go to their nice minimum-wage factory job making products and spending their paychecks buying things like good little consumers.
I see a few... shall we say, minor problems with his "solution".
You know, with a good-quality printer that can print on heavy stock, it shouldn't be that hard to reproduce an image of a license plate with any number on it you like. It'd be... amusing if various politicians were caught with their plate number regularly doing questionable things in an area covered by these cameras...
Re: Re: Count me among those at Techdirt who think this ruling i
"minimal merit" is a construct of the courts, but not outside their authority to set. The law speaks of "probability of success" as the standard the plaintiff has to meet to overcome an anti-SLAPP motion. "minimal merit" is the court's definition of the standard needed to meet the "probability of success" requirement. In California that standard isn't just the "evidence sufficient that, if believed, would sustain the plaintiff's case" but "evidence sufficient to overcome any defenses to the claims". The actual malice standard puts a very high bar on the evidence needed to overcome it, in this case evidence existing at the time of the investigation strong enough to lead a reasonable person to doubt it's conclusions. Even if the investigation was in fact lacking, if evidence of that wasn't known to TG at the time they can't be said to have been acting with with reckless disregard for the truth.
If they packed up their toys and went home, that'd be fine. Like the kid in the sandbox, they're gone and the rest don't have to deal with their tantrums anymore. No, the problem is that they won't pack up their toys, if the rest of the kids won't give in they'll go running to the "adults" complaining about how the other kids are picking on them and the "adults" won't do the adult thing and tell them that if they want to set the rules then go over to their own sandbox and stop bothering the other kids.
What complicates it is that back when these characters were created the contracts didn't routinely include the kinds of provisions that'd settle the work-for-hire status cleanly. That's likely a combination of complacence on the part of the publishers plus being able to argue the status of the creators as either employees or freelancers depending on what was more advantageous at the moment. Inevitably, though, stuff like that comes back to bite you.
My bet is that Disney will settle, because without clear contract terms the question of work-for-hire is going to come down to depending heavily on the employment classification of the creators: freelancer or employee of the publisher. Disney and a lot of other interests really don't want legal precedent set (especially at the Supreme Court level) saying that that comes down to how the employer treated the worker, and any precedent there favorable to Disney is going to upset the applecart for a lot of interests.
Re: You can ask if anyone remembers seeing floral curtains, righ
Not quite. Someone remembering an item isn't the same thing as finding the actual item during a search. But that "Yes, I remember those curtains." should be sufficient probable-cause to justify a warrant to review the (lawfully-obtained) footage for confirmation, which would've rendered the evidence admissible instead of it being thrown out.
Does the court not allow the argument that since the case violated the due process and unreasonable search and seizure that he's owed compensation for having to go through an unreasonable process that the government dragged on well past any reasonable level?
Unfortunately not in general, only where the relevant law specifically allows it. There's a lot of that in the American judicial system, eg. where if you reject a settlement and go on to win but the award's less than the settlement you have to pay the loser's costs and fees even though you prevailed. The whole system has a reek of "This is a court of law, not a court of justice.".
I suspect what'll happen in this case is the Feds will return the money, all of it, and then ask for his case to be dismissed as moot because there's no damages he can claim. What I'd like to see is one of these cases where the victim did have damages he could claim even after the return of his money, eg. the money was to pay for something he'd put a deposit down on and he'd lost the deposit because of being unable to make payment after his money was confiscated. Ideally the item would also be something that can't readily be replaced, like a collectible car or original artwork, so that even if the Feds offer to cover the lost deposit on top of returning his money he could still show damages that resulted solely from the confiscation and nothing else.
I believe you missed the point: this is a criminal trial, and the government can keep the defendants jailed until the trial ends or the government drops the charges. All the government has to do is drag out the process and the defendants can be kept in jail indefinitely. So what's the difference between being jailed because you were convicted and being jailed because you haven't yet been acquitted?
What you're ignoring is something common to all SLAPP suits: that the process itself is the punishment. Whether or not the defendant eventually prevails is irrelevant when the cost of prevailing is so high due to the legal process that the defendant can't afford to keep going long enough to prevail. Section 230 provides a legal process for shutting down such abusive suits before the defendant is forced to incur the ruinous costs of successfully defending themselves.
How does this desire for complete control keep happening, even when it regularly results in public blowback?
Because it sometimes works and it never results in measurable negative consequences for the company. What it'll take to end it is, in this case, 117Scape responding to them "No. I already deleted the material and all the backups just like you asked, it's too late to get them back. Sorry, but you shouldn't've made your original demand if you weren't absolutely sure you wanted it followed.". Only when companies find themselves with no way to backtrack once they've acted will they start thinking before they act.
That seems reasonable. The goal isn't supposed to be to generate revenue for the city or to prevent parking entirely, but to encourage drivers to not occupy a parking spot for too long (ie. park, do your business and leave, freeing up the spot for someone else) so as many different people as possible get a chance to park throughout the day. The annoyance of having to feed a meter seems like the perfect way to do that.
I think I agree with the Slate article that the risk for the politicians behind this (as opposed to the religious groups) is that the Supreme Court will rule it valid. Up until now they've been able to push these laws as a way to play to their base, confident that the courts will strike them down and they won't have to deal with the backlash from everyone not part of their base. Until the Supreme Court suddenly didn't strike it down, and now those politicians are having to worry that the reality will be bad enough to trigger a public groundswell that'll sweep them right out of office.
Though I'd give them one more thing to worry about and put a law in the pipeline barring providing any medical treatment to accident victims if that treatment would endanger the life of compatible organ-transplant recipients if the victim doesn't die and their organs can't be harvested (oh, and bar declining to become an organ donor if doing so would endanger the life of any organ-transplant candidate).
Yeah, I'm a vicious offspring of a female canine who fully believes "work to rule" should be deployed with extreme prejudice here.
Here's a question for you: are you proposing that it's acceptable to bar someone from having a medical procedure performed on them if performing that procedure would endanger the life of another person? Because that seems to be what you're proposing.
Warning: think CAREFULLY on ALL the consequences of that proposal before answering yes.
On the post: When The FBI Shows Up At Your Door About Your Reporting, That's Intimidation
Re: Re:
Really stupid idea for a lot of reasons. In a case like this deleting the evidence is the last thing you want to do anyway. What you want is all of the evidence, including documentation of the visits by the authorities and exactly what they said/did during those visits to be in the hands of one or more attorneys well-known enough that the prosecutors aren't willing to attack them directly, with instructions on where to send that evidence so that, should anything untoward happen to you, all the details the authorities don't want getting out will end up in the headlines shortly thereafter. The authorities want the whole matter to be forgotten, make the path of least resistance be for them to not hassle you anymore.
On the post: When The FBI Shows Up At Your Door About Your Reporting, That's Intimidation
Re: two sides
How would you feel if, out of the blue, a couple of big, muscular guys in biker leathers and dark glasses showed up on your doorstep wanting to talk to you about some work your employer was having you do and the vendors you were working with? They want names, phone numbers, contract details, delivery dates, all kinds of things they have no business asking about but are asking about anyway, and even if they aren't breaking out the baseball bats yet they're being really really insistent about you answering their questions.
On the post: Facebook (Again) Tells Law Enforcement That Setting Up Fake Accounts Violates Its Terms Of Use
The problem is that the LAPD and other LEAs do have recourse: they go gripe at the politicians and threaten to label them as "anti-law-enforcement". The politicians then put pressure on Facebook to let LEAs do anything they want. And Facebook quietly complies.
On the post: Yes, Even If You Think Project Veritas Are A Bunch Of Malicious Grifters, FBI Raid Is Concerning
Re:
It comes down to the "newsworthiness" test. The public has no real interest in a bunch of jewelry owned by anyone, so if the jewelry is stolen and given to a reporter the reporter has no protection (at least so long as they don't themselves know the items were stolen). The public does have an interest in knowing that eg. their elected officials are taking bribes, so if someone steals the documentation and gives it to a reporter who reports on it the reporter is protected because the public's interest in knowing their elected officials are corrupt has been deemed to be more important than the government's interest in prosecuting theft.
On the post: Facebook Limits Some Ad Targeting; People Still Won't Be Happy
I think most people's problem with targeted advertising isn't the targeting itself so much as how it's done, that it's based on tracking what each person does everywhere they go and assuming that the conclusions drawn from that wide net are of more importance than what the person's doing right now (what the web page they're on is about). Targeting advertising of religious material towards followers of that religion is great, but if I'm looking at a web site listing cars for sale I'm probably not wanting to see ads for religious material no matter how closely I fit the profile for the advertisers of such or how much religion shows up in my web activity the rest of the time. Either give the web sites on which ads appear more control over what kinds of ads appear, or start making site content the most important criteria in selecting what ads appear regardless of what the advertisers may want. The advertisers may be the customer, but if your customers piss off your product badly enough you won't have any product left to sell.
Worse, the sort of targeting done today is a lagging indicator: it shows up consumer interest too late to do anything but annoy the user. If I'm looking to buy a used car, you have about 30 seconds to detect that and start getting ads in front of me. If you wait until you've seen a pattern of me visiting used-car web sites to start showing me ads, chances are I'm in the process of buying one and the ads are just annoying now since I won't be in the market for a car again for several years. Targeting based on the web pages I'm visiting right now would've gotten far better results in that kind of very common case.
On the post: Drug Price Negotiation Is A Second-Best Fix. Here's What Will Really Work
Re:
From the standpoint of the drug itself, this is therapeutically trivial. The drug and it's mechanism often don't change at all, the only changes are in the packaging to slow the rate at which the active compound gets made available in the bloodstream. There's a bunch of standard things pharmaceutical chemists can do to achieve that goal, and one of the first things on the agenda once a drug is developed and approved is to work through that set to see what you get. The results of that sort of work should absolutely not be patentable, once you have the drug the remainder of the process is just SOP.
Where it should become patentable is when SOP fails. Sometimes you work through the standard tricks and nothing works. You need to change the drug's structure slightly to get it through the liver in higher quantities, or you need to go back and work out a precursor compound whose metabolization into the active drug you can control better to make it amenable to extended-release packaging. That's the kind of novel stuff that ought to be patentable, not just applying one of the standard methods used to create extended-release forms of other drugs that're already well-documented and just need tested to see which one works best for this particular case.
On the post: Josh Hawley: The War On Men (?) Is Driving Them To Porn And Video Games (Things Many Men Like?)
And as usual, his "solution" just happens to be what his backers want: men to get women to stay home and take care of the kids and the house and stop making such a racket over men's behavior, then go to their nice minimum-wage factory job making products and spending their paychecks buying things like good little consumers.
I see a few... shall we say, minor problems with his "solution".
On the post: License Plate Reader Company Continues Expansion Into Private Neighborhoods With The Help Of Some Useful Cops
You know, with a good-quality printer that can print on heavy stock, it shouldn't be that hard to reproduce an image of a license plate with any number on it you like. It'd be... amusing if various politicians were caught with their plate number regularly doing questionable things in an area covered by these cameras...
On the post: Billy Mitchell Survives Anti-SLAPP Motion From Twin Galaxies A Second Time
Re: Re: Count me among those at Techdirt who think this ruling i
"minimal merit" is a construct of the courts, but not outside their authority to set. The law speaks of "probability of success" as the standard the plaintiff has to meet to overcome an anti-SLAPP motion. "minimal merit" is the court's definition of the standard needed to meet the "probability of success" requirement. In California that standard isn't just the "evidence sufficient that, if believed, would sustain the plaintiff's case" but "evidence sufficient to overcome any defenses to the claims". The actual malice standard puts a very high bar on the evidence needed to overcome it, in this case evidence existing at the time of the investigation strong enough to lead a reasonable person to doubt it's conclusions. Even if the investigation was in fact lacking, if evidence of that wasn't known to TG at the time they can't be said to have been acting with with reckless disregard for the truth.
https://www.advocatemagazine.com/article/2020-may/the-anti-slapp-statute-in-2020
On the post: Google, NBC Bring Dumb Cable TV Blackout Feuds To Streaming
Re: It takes two to have a fight.
If they packed up their toys and went home, that'd be fine. Like the kid in the sandbox, they're gone and the rest don't have to deal with their tantrums anymore. No, the problem is that they won't pack up their toys, if the rest of the kids won't give in they'll go running to the "adults" complaining about how the other kids are picking on them and the "adults" won't do the adult thing and tell them that if they want to set the rules then go over to their own sandbox and stop bothering the other kids.
On the post: Marvel Hit Once Again By Estate For Some Spider-Man, Doctor Strange Copyright Terminations
Re:
What complicates it is that back when these characters were created the contracts didn't routinely include the kinds of provisions that'd settle the work-for-hire status cleanly. That's likely a combination of complacence on the part of the publishers plus being able to argue the status of the creators as either employees or freelancers depending on what was more advantageous at the moment. Inevitably, though, stuff like that comes back to bite you.
My bet is that Disney will settle, because without clear contract terms the question of work-for-hire is going to come down to depending heavily on the employment classification of the creators: freelancer or employee of the publisher. Disney and a lot of other interests really don't want legal precedent set (especially at the Supreme Court level) saying that that comes down to how the employer treated the worker, and any precedent there favorable to Disney is going to upset the applecart for a lot of interests.
On the post: Massachusetts' Top Court Says Police Need Warrants To Search Body Camera Recordings
Re: You can ask if anyone remembers seeing floral curtains, righ
Not quite. Someone remembering an item isn't the same thing as finding the actual item during a search. But that "Yes, I remember those curtains." should be sufficient probable-cause to justify a warrant to review the (lawfully-obtained) footage for confirmation, which would've rendered the evidence admissible instead of it being thrown out.
On the post: DEA Returns $87,000 It Helped Nevada Law Enforcement Steal From An Ex-Marine
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Unfortunately not in general, only where the relevant law specifically allows it. There's a lot of that in the American judicial system, eg. where if you reject a settlement and go on to win but the award's less than the settlement you have to pay the loser's costs and fees even though you prevailed. The whole system has a reek of "This is a court of law, not a court of justice.".
On the post: DEA Returns $87,000 It Helped Nevada Law Enforcement Steal From An Ex-Marine
Re:
I suspect what'll happen in this case is the Feds will return the money, all of it, and then ask for his case to be dismissed as moot because there's no damages he can claim. What I'd like to see is one of these cases where the victim did have damages he could claim even after the return of his money, eg. the money was to pay for something he'd put a deposit down on and he'd lost the deposit because of being unable to make payment after his money was confiscated. Ideally the item would also be something that can't readily be replaced, like a collectible car or original artwork, so that even if the Feds offer to cover the lost deposit on top of returning his money he could still show damages that resulted solely from the confiscation and nothing else.
On the post: Mistrial Declared In Backpage Founders' Trial; After DOJ Ignores Judge's Rules Regarding What It Could Present
Re: Re: Re: Re:
I believe you missed the point: this is a criminal trial, and the government can keep the defendants jailed until the trial ends or the government drops the charges. All the government has to do is drag out the process and the defendants can be kept in jail indefinitely. So what's the difference between being jailed because you were convicted and being jailed because you haven't yet been acquitted?
On the post: Florida Presents Its Laughable Appeal For Its Unconstitutional Social Media Content Moderation Law
Re: Something strange.
What you're ignoring is something common to all SLAPP suits: that the process itself is the punishment. Whether or not the defendant eventually prevails is irrelevant when the cost of prevailing is so high due to the legal process that the defendant can't afford to keep going long enough to prevail. Section 230 provides a legal process for shutting down such abusive suits before the defendant is forced to incur the ruinous costs of successfully defending themselves.
On the post: Another Mod War: Jagex Demands Shutdown Of HD RuneScape Mod, Retracts After Public Backlash
Because it sometimes works and it never results in measurable negative consequences for the company. What it'll take to end it is, in this case, 117Scape responding to them "No. I already deleted the material and all the backups just like you asked, it's too late to get them back. Sorry, but you shouldn't've made your original demand if you weren't absolutely sure you wanted it followed.". Only when companies find themselves with no way to backtrack once they've acted will they start thinking before they act.
On the post: Sixth Circuit Reaffirms It's A Fourth Amendment Violation To Chalk Car Tires For Parking Enforcement Purposes
Re: Re: A victory? Maybe not.
That seems reasonable. The goal isn't supposed to be to generate revenue for the city or to prevent parking entirely, but to encourage drivers to not occupy a parking spot for too long (ie. park, do your business and leave, freeing up the spot for someone else) so as many different people as possible get a chance to park throughout the day. The annoyance of having to feed a meter seems like the perfect way to do that.
On the post: New Texas Abortion Law Likely To Unleash A Torrent Of Lawsuits Against Online Education, Advocacy And Other Speech
Re: Re: Somebody is going to test this
I think I agree with the Slate article that the risk for the politicians behind this (as opposed to the religious groups) is that the Supreme Court will rule it valid. Up until now they've been able to push these laws as a way to play to their base, confident that the courts will strike them down and they won't have to deal with the backlash from everyone not part of their base. Until the Supreme Court suddenly didn't strike it down, and now those politicians are having to worry that the reality will be bad enough to trigger a public groundswell that'll sweep them right out of office.
Though I'd give them one more thing to worry about and put a law in the pipeline barring providing any medical treatment to accident victims if that treatment would endanger the life of compatible organ-transplant recipients if the victim doesn't die and their organs can't be harvested (oh, and bar declining to become an organ donor if doing so would endanger the life of any organ-transplant candidate).
Yeah, I'm a vicious offspring of a female canine who fully believes "work to rule" should be deployed with extreme prejudice here.
On the post: GoDaddy Reignites Debate Over Infrastructure Layer Moderation By Banning Texas Anti-Abortion Snitch Site
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Here's a question for you: are you proposing that it's acceptable to bar someone from having a medical procedure performed on them if performing that procedure would endanger the life of another person? Because that seems to be what you're proposing.
Warning: think CAREFULLY on ALL the consequences of that proposal before answering yes.
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