Posted 01/15/2008 at 10:57:16am

The primary investigation - when the guy was first stopped and agreed to let customs agents look at his laptop - showed some files with names that indicated that they were child pornography. It didn't reveal the entire contents of the computer, and turning over the password would give agents access to /every/ file on the drive, not just the ones the first investigator saw. When that first investigation happened, the laptop had been on - presumably Boucher had already input the password that session. When the laptop was rebooted, the PGP reset and needed a password again.

Posted 01/10/2008 at 04:18:28pm

Heh, I had been trying to think of a good pun on their catchphrase, but they've had so many over the years.

Posted 11/09/2007 at 04:14:08pm

yay, an award!

Posted 11/09/2007 at 03:55:57pm

Ex post facto laws are laws that subject people to criminal liability after the fact, by punishing you for doing something yesterday that wasn't illegal at the time you did it. It's rooted in the fairness and due process ideas that you can't be expected to comply with laws you had no way of knowing would exist. What's going on here is the opposite -- removing punishment after the fact, which is not unconstitutional. Congress can certainly decriminalize things or remove courts' ability to hear them, and retroactive immunity doesn't impose the kind of burden that retroactive punishment does. Not that it wouldn't be nice if, in this case, Congress couldn't retroactively take away a protection for those of us who may have been spied on.

Posted 10/23/2007 at 07:44:47pm

I totally agree -- if bandwidth is the problem, address the bandwidth issue, whether by throttling all users or offering tiered pricing for higher use. What someone chooses to use that bandwidth for is really none of their business. There are too many legitimate uses of p2p to justify blocking the transfers altogether.

Posted 10/10/2007 at 12:43:31pm

Whoa there, I'm all about the EULA issue, but what happened here wasn't it. When the photographer posted the photo to Flickr, he had to manually and affirmatively choose to license it the way he did. Flickr's default is All Rights Reserved. The photographer may not have understood what he was doing, but he chose the Attribution license totally freely. The license clearly permitted commercial uses, so Virgin was under no duty to notify or compensate the photographer. His freely-chosen license said "use this for anything as long as you credit me," and that's what Virgin did. Whether or not he /understood/ what he was offering is a separate question, as are the privacy and publicity rights of the /subject/ of the photograph.

Posted 10/04/2007 at 05:19:01pm

How's this for a defense: the Copyright Act makes "distribution" an infringement of copyright, and what Ms. Thomas did wasn't distribution. She made files available in a shared folder, sure, but has the RIAA shown that anyone accessed those files without authorization? No, all they can establish is that their investigators (who have the permission of the rightsholder) were able to obtain copies of the songs -- copies they were entitled to make! Ms. Thomas didn't copy or transmit the files at issue, the RIAA's authorized agent did. Keep an eye on Elektra v. Barker and Elektra v. Perez to see if this theory will hold water in court.

Posted 09/02/2007 at 09:38:46pm

The original sniff may not be a search, but detaining people long enough to be smelled counts as a seizure. If the dogs indicate the presence of contraband, police then have to conduct a search to find it (but the dog's reaction will probably qualify as probable cause). The special needs exception to the 4th Amendment's warrant requirement is an increasingly broad loophole. To my knowledge it hasn't extended beyond searches incidental to legitimate traffic stops and searches in public schools. t's not hard to imagine, however, that the necessity of ferreting out piracy could be considered another such "special need," especially if the dog-sniffing is only conducted while people are being stopped for some legitimate purpose, like airport security checkpoints.

Posted 08/10/2007 at 12:42:27pm

@Mad Beaver: when I use someone else's photo, I credit them at the bottom of the post by saying something like "Thumbnail photo courtesy of [someone]" and their name is a link to the photo, usually on flickr.

Posted 08/06/2007 at 04:23:04am

US Airways, actually. Finally got on a plane several hours late, to discover that the new plane had tvs in the back of every seat. "Well, that's cool at least," I thought. Until I realized the tvs didn't turn on. And the woman at the end of the aisle had massive BO, to the point where even my friend a few rows back smelled it. But I made it home, at least.