[At-Large] [lac-discuss-en] GigaOM article : Louis Vuitton asks for SOPA-like seizure of hundreds of websites

Antony Van Couvering avc at avc.vc
Tue May 15 00:10:02 UTC 2012


Cybercrime is real crime.  Lots of crime is real.  Society has come up with methods to deal with real crime.  Throughout the developed world, those methods are remarkably similar.  They include an investigation, an indictment, an arrest (sometimes), a procedure to determine if the accusation is warranted and proven, and if so then some kind of penalty. 

I'm totally in favor of prosecuting crime. There are established ways of doing that.  Tearing down hundreds of years of jurisprudence because the crime is committed via the Internet instead of (for instance) the telephone, seems to me unwarranted.  I appreciate that you see the victims, that you are in the trenches seeing the damage they wreak.  But I don't think that calls for the wholesale dismantling of well established procedures.  

That's just my view, but I've been following this debate for many years and nothing has made me think that this crisis is so severe that we should think casually about rejecting basic protections for the accused.  I believe that this is dangerous. 

Antony


On May 14, 2012, at 4:49 PM, Derek Smythe wrote:

> On 5/14/2012 11:25 PM, Antony Van Couvering wrote:
>> I thought a criminal was someone convicted of a crime by a court. 
> 
> criminal (noun):
>  a person who commits a crime
> crime (noun):
>  activities that involve breaking the law
> 
> I actually find it pathetic that we are debating this. But here goes...
> 
> We all (should) know we cannot simply walk into a stranger's house and
> steal his property. Nor can we go into his bank and pretend to be him,
> stealing his money.
> 
> The virtual nature of the net does not change that. What it does
> change is it's international reach allowing criminals to evade
> prosecution. Yet the crimes are still as real.
> 
> If it takes a conviction to label the actions parties criminal or
> label those committing fraud criminals, we would have hardly any
> criminals on the net.
> 
> I find it sad that the laws of most countries have clauses like losses
> under XXX, losses over XXX. Effectively that means most criminals will
> never be prosecuted due to the international nature of the internet.
> This is an insult to the victims of "under XXX" who will never see
> justice, yet they also have rights. If you explain the happy-go-lucky
> unaccountable nature of the Internet, they cannot belive it. The
> current system is failing these victims. We can quote those lovely
> terms like the "The Budapest Convention on Cyber Crime" etc, yet the
> reality is it is not stopping cyber crime since even these agreements
> do not cover all the countries. Even where they do,  the one country
> may attach a different priority to it since they are not affected.
> 
> Even most of the lottery/pet/fake-shop/auction scammers know how to
> stay under the radar by regularly changing identities and defrauding
> in small amounts, using all those anonymizing mechanisms the internet
> provides free of charge to "protect your privacy". This hypocrisy is
> even apparent at some domain registrars and resellers, selling trust
> and stability away $10 a shot then turning a blind eye to the wrong
> doing.
> 
> How many real victims to fraud do we have vs the hypothetical
> political refugee trying to use the net for his plight? Why should
> those daily real unwilling victims be sacrificial lambs for the
> hypothetical politically prosecuted? What gives the one more right
> than the other? I would love to see how many refugees use the domains
> on the net as a platform vs actual daily victims to fraud. I am sure
> those hypothetical refugees would not be registering in their own
> domains anyway even if the wanted to. They would be sure to find a
> trusted sponsor abroad.
> 
> So let's keep this real please. Cyber crime is no less real than
> crime. Those victims also have rights. I have met many victims to
> cyber crime (three again today alone). But I have yet to meet "that"
> political refugee wishing to register a domain in his own name using a
> proxy service to voice his opinions.
> 
> Derek
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