Tag Archives: law

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Iceland as free speech haven-state

Still riffing on the shifting sands of geopolitics, here’s another interesting nugget: the people behind the controversial (and short-of-funds) Wikileaks site have been lobbying Iceland to introduce a suite of journalism shield laws and become a sort of free-speech sanctuary or safe harbour for controversial data [via @qwghlm].

The new laws would be modeled on the kind of shady tax laws that tax havens offer the rich. Under the WikiLeaks’ proposal, Iceland would offer sources and journalists a strong package of legal protections thereby establishing itself as a sanctuary for free speech.

Wikileaks’ proposed laws are based on a pick-a-mix approach to the freedom of speech laws around the world: “So we could just say we’re taking the source protection laws from Sweden … the First Amendment from the United States, (and) Belgium’s protection laws for journalists,” said WikiLeaks’ Daniel Schmitt at the Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) that took place last week in Berlin.

Iceland’s a good target, I guess – their recent adventures in economics have left them very open to legislative change, for a start. But how much use will national laws be in a world where nations are little more than a rectangle of coloured cloth and some nostalgic folk songs?

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Is killing a drone operator a legitimate act of war?

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Here’s a tricky modern conundrum for you, via Cheryl Morgan. Over at Crooked Timber, people are discussing a recent BBC radio program about the increasing use of remote-controlled drones and UAVs by Western military forces, specifically in theatres of the “War on Terror”; I’ve not had the chance to sit down and listen to the re-run of the program, but the post at CT raises the titular question:

Some of the people controlling drones are in the military. Some of them are civilian contractors, perhaps based in a different country to the army they’re fighting for (such as British commercial operators based in Surrey, flying surveillance drones for the Dutch in Afghanistan.) The programme raised the issue of whether software engineers might one day be tried for war crimes. Looking at things the other way, if the Taliban contrived a way to blow up one of these operators on their daily commute in Nevada or Surrey, would it be a terrorist murder of a non-combatant or a legitimate act of war?

Leaving aside the fact that I’ve always found the notion of “legal warfare” to be more than a little ludicrous (as surely the laws of war are set by whoever won the last one, designed to maintain the geopolitical status quo, and hence inherently partisan), it’s an interesting question. The line between combatant and non-combatant has become increasingly blurred over the course of the last century, and the remote operations afforded by drone technology (not to mention guided missiles, and arguably any technology superior in accurate range to that of the opposition) are firmly planted in a sort of moral no-man’s-land. Is there a quantifiable difference between pulling a trigger to kill a man who you can see through your rifle sight, and pressing a button that kills a man who you can see on your computer monitor, thousands of miles away in a country you’ve never even been to?

It seems perfectly clear to me that there’s no moral difference whatsoever: to kill is to kill, no matter how it is accomplished or mediated. So the final question stands – is the drone operator a legitimate military target for the faction or nation he is deployed against? If not, why not? And where does that legitimacy spring from? Is it a genuine ethical construct, or is it a sort of retrospective justification after the fact? “Kill ’em all – let God the lawyers sort ’em out.”

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The legislation of fabrication – should 3D printing be outlawed?

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Here’s another sf-nal thought experiment to keep your brain occupied. We frequently mention 3D printing and fabbing here at Futurismic, but usually in the context of its positive disruptive potential – a potential sea-change in capitalist economic systems, for example. But here’s a negative response from analyst Nick Jones of the Gartner corporation [via Fabbaloo]:

… do we really want an affordable domestic fabber? Fabbers will likely “print” objects using some form of plastic. So the inevitable consequence of mass market fabbing will be a huge increase in the amount of non-biodegradable plastic waste clogging up the planet for hundreds of years into the future. Should we maybe ban fabbers before the problem arises? Like most problems there are solutions, like biodegradable plastic. But if we wait until all the problems with a technology are solved before we permit it, then we will waste a decade or two of potential value; and in any case there’s no way we can predict all the social and environmental issues associated with a new technology before it arrives.

I’d agree with Jones’ last point – social disruption patterns, particularly, are very hard to predict accurately (which is probably part of the reason they’re perversely fun to discuss), and it’d be a shame to lose out on the potential power of fabbing to transform the life cycle of many of the things we use on a daily basis.

But there will be plenty of people who will see fabbing as a threat, environmental or otherwise, and who will push for legislation to control or suppress it. A victorious climate lobby would certainly flex its muscle against a technology that promised to democratise mass manufacture, as would those corporations whose bottom lines would vanish overnight – not just delivery firms like FedEx, but the factories in developing nations that churn out tchotchkes and basic hardware at low-low prices. It will be interesting to see how the traditional left-right political binary will fall across this issue; I suspect it might not be in the direction most easily assumed.

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Can fictional characters be libelous?

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gavelHey, writers – ever based a character on a friend, no matter how loosely? Well, you’d best be careful to stay friends with them if you get published, because there’s now a legal precedent for a character in a novel being considered as libel:

A Georgia jury has ruled that Haywood Smith, author of the bestselling novel “The Red Hat Club,” libeled a former friend who had served as inspiration for a character portrayed as a sexually promiscuous alcoholic. The jury awarded $100,000 in damages to the plaintiff, Vicki Stewart.

In the past, defamation claims based on fictional characters haven’t been very successful. (For example, in 1985, Nathaniel Davis, the former US ambassador to Chile, lost a $150 million libel suit against the makers of the Universal film “Missing.”) But that might be changing.

In the “Red Hat” case, Smith’s lawyers took this case up to the Georgia Court of Appeals before it could be heard by a jury. As a result, the case likely won’t amount to a net monetary win for Stewart, who spent five years litigating the battle.

Given that the plaintiff pursued the case beyond the point of financial victory, I’m inclined to believe that there really was some deep offence caused in this case… but as TechDirt points out, “for it to be defamatory, you have to be able to show the harm caused, and that’s only going to happen if a lot of people know that the character is supposed to be the real person, which seems unlikely in most cases.” [image by bloomsberries]

Indeed, the Barbra Striesand Effect has probably made more people aware of the character in this case. Either which way, there’s a whole lot of ambulance-chasers out there who’ll see an opportunity here, so I guess we can add libel to plagiarism on the roster of “lawsuits to file against people whose success you resent”.

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The Anonymous Hunters: corporate critics and whistleblowers beware

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Have you ever bad-mouthed a big company in an internet comments thread? If so, the Wragge and Co. law firm of Birmingham, UK may be hot on your tail (provided the comment is vitriolic enough to provoke the company to spend money, one assumes) – they’ve just announced a new legal “task force” for tracking down the identities of nefarious anonymous commenters [via TechDirt].

The Cyber Tracing team at Wragge & Co was set up to deal with what the law firm said was a rising problem with people making anonymous statements that defamed companies, and people sharing confidential information online.

And Wragge boasted the new team would ensure there was