Wikileaks judge gets Pirate Bay treatment Every now and again, an event comes along and takes our breath away by reminding us just how far out of step the legal system can be with today's changing world. The latest example is last week's attempt by a federal judge in California to shutter Wikileaks, a website devoted to disclosing confidential information that exposes …
Those of you pillorying Mr White's abilities as a judge - if a plaintiff "wins" a hearing for an order to be implemented (which it does automatically in a jdugment in default), it isn't the judge's job to make sure that the plaintiff's lawyers have drafted the order properly.
Didn't we once have newspapers with investigative journalists to get all these leaks into the public arena? I suppose there is more money to be made finding out who Paris Hilton is f*cking than uncovering what politicians and industrial leaders would rather we didn't know about.
Well, obviously, I'd link to it from Wikileaks! :P
My point was (I'm sure you already realised this), is that if I post this libel on my own website, you've got a clear trail back to me as owner of the domain, and if it's hosted by any of the more reputable ISPs, You'd be able to take action both against me as the producer of that information, and also take steps to have the site taken down.
On the other hand, WIKILeaks appear to be saying that they don't intend to respond to legal takedown notices, and will be anonymising contributors:
"We have the usual small army of stupid lawyers that think we will piss our pants because they send us a scary letter"
Are you saying that we should trust WIKILeaks to police itself? This seem an unusually naive standpoint.
"an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking"
I imagine this might be a useful place to dump the HMRC's child benefit database, for instance...
There does seem to be a strand of techno-utopianism that greets these kind of developments with a response like "its the future, man, get used to it." Personally, I still think the rights of the individual to privacy, the rights of the content producer to benefit financially from their efforts, and so on, are valuable concepts. Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij have put it on record that they don't care about these kind of things. This is A BAD THING as far as I'm concerned.
@ Phil
What's the problem with an on-call tech being asleep? It's all a matter of the amount of money your willing to pay for service. This is normal, accepted behavior for a physician taking night call. It wouldn't be cost efficient to pay enough physicians to sit around awake all night waiting for a phone call. That doesn't reflect at all on work ethic, simply the level of service offered at a given price...
@bob_blah, Anonymous Soward, Gene Girard
I think it's very amusing that Judge White's ineptness caused more harm than good for the Plaintiff's side. It's inexcusable to say, though, that he was doing what many other judges do every day. He signed the document, and he's responsible for reading what he signs his name to! No way that was on purpose, either. He inadvertently issued unconstitutional orders. There's no other recourse for such malfeasance than to take away the appointment and disbar him as well. One fewer Bush-era judge to worry about.
Well, I'll be looking at it when I get home. Why did the bank think that by convincing one local judge to declare nobody is allowed to talk about this in his own little pissing hole that this was going to fix a global problem? Even if the ban was nationwide in the USA - do they not know the internet has borders wider than the USA??
Quite honestily it's like sending a deputy from the county sheriff's dept out to stop WWIII - on account of it's illegality. The judge did the right thing, acting in accordance with the relevant laws and statutes - i'm sure. The mistake is with the plonkers who chose such a public and completely ineffective way to get their injunction!
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