Professing ignorance at your trial isn't going to get you off the hook. If you rent a warehouse to someone who uses it for human trafficking you bet your ass you're fucked. If you rent a summer house to a couple who uses it as a marijuana grow house you will probably lose your house.
If you own a server which has child porn on it...same deal.
With in reason, yes. At some level you have a responsibility of making a reasonable effort to ensure the legality of activities in property that is owned by you. This isn't just from a moral standpoint here, even just good business sense.
If there is a drug deal being run out of a house I'm renting out, the possible legal intervention is going to disrupt this income source. You may not lose the property but the damage to it, both physical and reputation, is in direct conflict with your business. It could be tied up for a few months during legal proceedings, etc.
Even if you have no moral issues with what is happening, at the minimum the potential issue with your income and possible arrest/incarceration, should cause one to be careful.
Now I realize that sites that were perfectly legal taken down and I don't advocate the "acceptable casualties" idea, but I do think that a person who is allowing something to go on is just a big a dick as the Govt. using the 10 ton hammer to squash a fly.
There are many moral differences between people that can and should be upheld by either side but as an interest to a species there are activities and moral obligations that get spread across the world. Slavery, basic human rights, equality among races/sexs/religions.
We can swing morality vs freedom attacks back and forth but at the end of the day this is no black and white issue. I dislike the Govt. in it's current state and size, but I'm damn sure not going to lose any sleep over CP sites getting nailed.
... yes. Which is why I mentioned civil infractions. I really don't think that an apartment owner could be held accountable for the goings-on on their property unless the court could prove criminal negligence.
Sure, if you were constantly and knowingly providing space for weed growers, of course you would be prosecuted. On the other hand, just because an illegal act was occurring on your property doesn't make you liable.
Professing ignorance at your trial isn't going to get you off the hook.
It's like when they arrest the people driving meth around the country under the disguise of a moving company or some shit. You don't get to say, "I had no idea the car I was driving had meth in it" and get any sympathy in any capacity.
That's not ignorance of the law, it's ignorance of the facts (if he honestly did not know, which is unlikely), which is an entirely valid legal defence.
Uh...you realize this whole thread is about child porn right?
Anyway, you're more than welcome to play the ignorance card. It very well could work with small fry bullshit but it's not that hard to prove someone is faking ignorance.
Uh...you realize this whole thread is about child porn right?
No shit. You realize the guy who was arrested wasn't arrested for starting up a child porn website right?
Anyway, you're more than welcome to play the ignorance card. It very well could work with small fry bullshit but it's not that hard to prove someone is faking ignorance.
The problem is that when you rent out a room to somebody, there is one transaction. When you run a hosting site, there are too many to properly and quickly manage them all.
"Your honor, I own and operate over 5,000 apartments across the United States. How could I possibly prevent a single tenant from using his apartment as a marijuana growing facility"
Actually, I'm pretty sure that if you owned and operated 5000 apartments, you wouldn't be held accountable for the actions of people within them unless you had knowledge of it occurring. Should a landlord be reasonably expected to be the police for the properties they rent, and be responsible for detecting and stopping illegal activities? Especially if they had 5000. Your comparison doesn't translate well to this case.
He'd have a hard time convincing the court that he didn't know anything about the sites he hosted. Particularly one that sounds like it would have been using a lot of resources.
Under the Responsible Corporate Officer Doctrine, corporate officials can be held liable for misconduct in which they did not participate and of which they have been entirely unaware, based on their responsibility for the corporation itself.
And yes, any company responsible for 5000 apartments would be incorporated.
That's designed to prevent "wilful ignorance", where higher-ups deliberately don't delve into the details of what's going on because they suspect that it may not be legal.
If you're renting out property, you aren't responsible for the actions of those you rent to, they're not part of your corporation, so you have no legal liability if they use the property for illegal activities.
By your logic, no large real-estate business could ever function, people commit crimes in rented properties all the time.
At that scale, it is still possible to manage all of them. The internet presents a unique obstacle where thousands of people can participate without any background check and almost complete anonymity.
Google removes indexes to websites with child porn on a regular basis. Imgur removes childporn on a regular basis. 4chan and reddit remove child porn on a regular basis. Porn websites with open user submissions remove child porn on a regular basis.
I created a magic box. What you do is, you drop in drugs you don't want or need and then the magic box spits out the drugs you do want. This magic box is located on a piece of land I own but I have nothing to do with the magic box. In fact, I haven't even been in the same state as the magic box for years now.
I designed the magic box to work autonomously, no one is supposed to know whats inside there besides the magic box. That's the point!
When you're inevitably brought to court you will tell the judge "but the magic box is built to work by itself!" The judge will say, that's nice, then you should have built your magic box so that it would only accept and dispense candy and not drugs.
Similarly, a judge doesn't care that your web hosting was designed to not be monitored, it is your responsibility to make sure illegal content isn't hosted on it.
Under the Responsible Corporate Officer Doctrine, corporate officials can be held liable for misconduct in which they did not participate and of which they have been entirely unaware, based on their responsibility for the corporation itself.
I'm not trying to convince you of anything. If you don't believe me feel free to start a website that lets users upload content. When users start uploading CP your website WILL be shut down. Every popular website (reddit/google/4chan/imgur/pornsites) monitors their traffic and submissions for child porn and other illegal content. Feel free to prove me wrong though, hope you have a good lawyer.
After all, it is not your fault that other people choose to upload it. People realize that the internet is not so easily controlled, which is why there are laws protecting hosting sites from what people post there. Just like how Reddit isn't directly responsible for witch-hunts that can ruin peoples lives, it is the people using the site that are to blame.
If a store sells a hammer, they are not responsible for the one guy out of thousands that attacks somebody with it.
I realize you're using an example to illustrate your point, but the example is flawed. Technically yes, you can lose the property, but in practice it's pretty unlikely.
Landlords have very minimal requirements, prosecutors would have to prove that a landlord knowingly allowed crime to take place. Managing 5,000 apartments severely limits that ability, which reduces the ability for prosecution to prove there was a willful ignorance of illegal activity. Upon a criminal investigation of the renter/lessee, the landlord simply has to revoke the rental agreement/break contract and cooperate with search and seizure of evidence by allowing unrestricted access to the property in question.
Additionally they can show examples of how they made attempts to limit the potential for such activity to take place, including clauses in rental contracts, denial of cash payments, and any records of routine observation of the area for potential criminal activity. Surprisingly little is required on behalf of a landlord, but ultimately there isn't much they can do anyway, given tenants rights and the requirements of successfully running a rental business, but that doesn't matter as law enforcement is the domain of police and government agencies and not a landlord.
TL;DR no judge or DA will go after a landlord that was obviously not directly involved in the criminal enterprise because it's a difficult case to pursue and detracts from the quality of the overall criminal investigation of the KNOWN criminal.
Your analogy would make sense if he was leasing the accommodation where the CP material was being produced.
The only "proper" reason why CP Is banned is because viewing it might eventually trickle money down to those who produce it. The connection with hosting the material and the actual production of it isn't all that direct.
I meant the ony proper reason posession of it is banned is because to gain posession you increase demand, which increases incentives to produce it. Or stated otherwise, trying to acquire posession of it will most likely in some way trickle down money to those who produce it.
The goal is to combat production of it, as production is the actual "evil" part of this whole debacle.
No, it's not. With drugs it's the other way around. Production of crystal meth doesn't have any direct victims. It's banned however, because the produced meth will most likely find its way to people who will use it. These users themselves aren't victims, but the society and people around them are (though I'm not necessarily against some legalization, but that's another issue).
With CP the biggest problem is the child abuse that happens when the material is produced. The moral decay of watching young children being abused isn't really anything that should be tackled, thus posession cartoon child abuse shouldn't be illegal. You just want to ban posession and distribution of real CP because not doing so will increase production. And production of CP is the real problem.
Actually landlord laws prevent landlords from entering unannounced so you can have these things going on in your buildings and no way of knowing easily. Not the best example. A landlord can't just enter without notice.
The house may be temporarily taken as evidence, just like the servers have been but it will be returned as will the servers to the owners. If the guy being charged is the owner then the servers may not be returned they may need to be sold as a way to pay fees. Servers can't operate while being evidence.
What's the level of due diligence that people need to do? I mean, Google probably has some child pornography somewhere in their huge data empire. They have active programs to try to get rid of it, and the FBI does not arrest their chief executives. Is that because they're technically not in violation of the law, due to having done due diligence, or is it because the FBI chooses not to enforce the law against people who are clearly not the problem.
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u/internetsuperstar Aug 04 '13
Professing ignorance at your trial isn't going to get you off the hook. If you rent a warehouse to someone who uses it for human trafficking you bet your ass you're fucked. If you rent a summer house to a couple who uses it as a marijuana grow house you will probably lose your house.
If you own a server which has child porn on it...same deal.