Good question. Unauthorized publishing of Lady Gaga’s copyrighted music on the internet would most likely result in a takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. If that failed, then the offending website could be taken down. No such protection applies to classified material from our military or government agencies, except for the original leaker who will, no doubt, pay the price. Republishing leaked classified material carries no penalty.
Solution: Hillary, don’t stamp your cables SECRET. Stamp them COPYRIGHT.
Monday, December 6, 2010
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7 comments:
Really? Um... no:
"Lady Gaga" torrents available on thepiratebay.org: 603
"Wikileaks" torrents on same: 163
Chances of getting Jammie'd by the RIAA: much closer to zero than getting prosecuted by the Swedes over a leaky prophylactic.
Priorities, Corky, priorities. And an agenda, too.
The Times won't publish Climate-gate emails because they were 'stolen', but has no problem with purloined national security stuff. Typical.
The TSA cops an attitude when we gripe about their methods while certain parts of the southern border have become a narco-terrorist free fire zone.
OK Gaius,
let's see you volunteer to put up Lady Gaga's stuff on your own website, served via static ip via vanilla http, and let's see what happens.
Music torrents are just much harder to control, because when as soon as they are eliminated or poisoned, new ones appear from the woodwork, it's certainly not from lack of trying by the RIAA, and there have been far more lawsuites over music downloads (with infamous examples of grandmas with million dollar suits), than any lawsuits over national security (can't even remember any, actually).
Anyway please post the url when you've got your site up, since it's so safe and all.
One more thing - how many people who visit pirate bay like to read at all, much less in depth foreign policy material?
Another appropriate comparison from the private sector would be the internal (and cumbersome) security US companies must have in place that was mandated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
No low level clerk would ever be able to access all of the company's financial information, for example.
US Gov Docs are public domain. The Espionage Act covers military/DoD documents, Section 798 covers crypto and SIGINT, but I don't know of anything that covers diplomatic confidential communications.
One itsy-bitsy little problem with this argument: Wikileaks is normally hosted in Sweden, a country which offers pretty much "no questions asked" hosting services to all.
Short of the DOS attacks -which can eventually be defeated- and physical destruction of the servers, there isn't much the US can do.
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