US Government says you have no rights to anything stored in the "cloud"

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Tress

Tress

It would be like arguing that storing something in a safe deposit box was an automatic forfeit of your property rights for anything in that box. Bullshit.
 
Hylian

Hylian

News like this just keeps pissing me off more and more. It seems like a bunch of idiots who are making laws and decisions when they know almost nothing about the subject at hand. Plus since the mass media isn't informing the mass public they remain ignorant. Even if we try to inform them of what is going on they don't see the danger because they also do not understand the overall ramifications of what is going on. The internet and the tech world has been under so much bullshit lately with SOPA and all the other attacks against the internet. I just get the feeling that the government and big corporations won't be happy until the internet is as tightly under the control as the newspaper was before and relatively more recently television channels of any sort.

What is next? Are they so desperate for control and ignorant of the ramifications that control will cause that they are willing to turn our internet into a carbon copy of China's where the government gets to control what we see and hear?
 
strawman

strawman

In order to distribute information you give to a cloud computing service, you give them certain rights to the material you store there. Read the terms of service of any cloud storage service you use and you can plainly see that when you give them a file you give them, for all intents and purposes, ownership of that file.

Further, the cloud storage service specifically rejects liability for anything that might happen to your bits. They do not insure it in any way, and again you'll see that they are not an appropriate service to store your only copy of your files on.

This is not universally true, but it was true for megaupload.

What the prosecutors brief _probably_ states is that since the service provider claimed enough rights to the material, and disclaimed liability for loss, then by taking ownership of the property they need not provide terms above and beyond what the original provider did. Further, the data is no longer in a state where they could possibly provide any one individuals data back without turning on the whole service, which would of course then restart distribution of illegal content.

So they are, in their view, under no legal obligation to either provide someone with the data they stored on the service, nor is the data covered under any particular availability policy.

I suspect that the data was not covered under any privacy policy either. As far as I understand if you had the URL for an object, you could download it without authentication. Therefore there's an argument to be made that all the data is public, and as such there's no need for a search warrant to access any one individuals data.

For the bank box analogy, it would be like putting your valuables into a bank which specifically stated that they are not liable for any loss due to theft, they do not hold insurance, and further you give them rights to show the items and allow copies to be made and distributed to anyone who happens to know the lockbox number.

I don't think you'd bank with them, and similarly you should be as careful when storing your data online.

I'm not saying the prosecutor is necessarily right, I haven't read the brief, nor have I read megaupload a specific terms of service, but having read a lot of them for specific business purposes (hint: precious few online services provide any useful guarantees, and those that do are, as far as I can tell, never free) I'm inferring what I suspect the brief is stating.

The EFF is trying to campaign for inherent property rights to digital bits but you can't have it both ways:

Either bits can be owned, and thus you are stealing when you copy a song, but you can get your 'property' back when a service is seized, OR bits cannot be owned, only licensed and copyrighted, and thus they are only protected insofar as contract and copy rights allow, but no theft occurs when bits are copied, only broken contracts and copyrights.
 
Hailey Knight

Hailey Knight

stienman said:
The EFF is trying to campaign for inherent property rights to digital bits but you can't have it both ways:

Either bits can be owned, and thus you are stealing when you copy a song, but you can get your 'property' back when a service is seized, OR bits cannot be owned, only licensed and copyrighted, and thus they are only protected insofar as contract and copy rights allow, but no theft occurs when bits are copied, only broken contracts and copyrights.
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THIS. Fucking this.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

One of the other big deals is that folks are accusing the gvt of combing through all of the data they are holding LOOKING for reasons to charge people for alleged crimes. It is this discovery-without-a-warrant thing that REALLY has the EFF and others in an uproar.

--Patrick
 
@Li3n

@Li3n

stienman said:
What the prosecutors brief _probably_ states is that since the service provider claimed enough rights to the material, and disclaimed liability for loss, then by taking ownership of the property they need not provide terms above and beyond what the original provider did. Further, the data is no longer in a state where they could possibly provide any one individuals data back without turning on the whole service, which would of course then restart distribution of illegal content.
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I don't actually know the term megaupload had but if they where the regular protection against being sued if we lose the data then the governments claim is BS and would set up a really bad precedent.

The data wasn't irretrievably, or even a little lost. To continue the box analogy, it would be like if the bank didn't insure your stuff against theft, but it didn't get stolen, the government just arrested the bank people for fraud and then got to keep all the stuff you had in the bank because it was there... if this was about a physical object the very idea would repulse most people.

EDIT: Why does it show GB's avatar when i'm quoting steinman?
 
strawman

strawman

@Li3n said:
The data wasn't irretrievably, or even a little lost. To continue the box analogy, it would be like if the bank didn't insure your stuff against theft, but it didn't get stolen, the government just arrested the bank people for fraud and then got to keep all the stuff you had in the bank because it was there... if this was about a physical object the very idea would repulse most people.
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And to continue the analogy, this bank has an office complex that can store 30 billion items for 50 million customers and has 500,000 workers to manage the copying and distribution of those items.

The data may still exist, but as I said before there's no way for the government to retrieve the data for any individual user on a large scale. If it was one user, then sure, they can have one computer expert poke into the databases, find the items of interest, have the analysts and legal people determine the infringing nature of the items, and then return those items that the one person requested.

But it doesn't scale. They can't accept claims from everyone that was legally using the service for legal purposes (and no, that's not redundant), and thus they cannot accept the claims for even one person.

Not without employing those same workers using the same distribution policies and system, which, as they allege, would make them criminals for allowing the illegal copying and redistribution that they shut down in the first place.

@Li3n said:
EDIT: Why does it show GB's avatar when i'm quoting steinman?
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I keep forgetting to log out of my gasbandit alt when I post, so sometimes I post as him, then delete it, and repost as myself. If you reply quickly enough before I delete it, then it'll look like it came from my gasbandit alt.

I dropped my JCM alt years ago, and more recently ZenMonkey and Shego. I know a lot of people are sad the forum is shrinking, but it's not actually losing people, just my alts.

I took no pleasure in my chaz identity, but I thought it was necessary to keep people on their toes. To some degree I'm glad the forum ejected that alt - it did leave a sour taste in my mouth when I posted as him.
 
@Li3n

@Li3n

GasBandit said:
Because you touch yourself at night.
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So what's the effect for when i touch myself during the day?

stienman said:
And to continue the analogy, this bank has an office complex that can store 30 billion items for 50 million customers and has 500,000 workers to manage the copying and distribution of those items.

The data may still exist, but as I said before there's no way for the government to retrieve the data for any individual user on a large scale. If it was one user, then sure, they can have one computer expert poke into the databases, find the items of interest, have the analysts and legal people determine the infringing nature of the items, and then return those items that the one person requested.

But it doesn't scale. They can't accept claims from everyone that was legally using the service for legal purposes (and no, that's not redundant), and thus they cannot accept the claims for even one person.

Not without employing those same workers using the same distribution policies and system, which, as they allege, would make them criminals for allowing the illegal copying and redistribution that they shut down in the first place.
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And if that was the argument they where making it wouldn't have been a problem (ignoring the whole illegal raid the kiwi government actually appoligesed over etc.) for most people.

But it's not, it's that you gave up your rights to it... which is bs.



stienman said:
I keep forgetting to log out of my gasbandit alt when I post, so sometimes I post as him, then delete it, and repost as myself. If you reply quickly enough before I delete it, then it'll look like it came from my gasbandit alt.

I dropped my JCM alt years ago, and more recently ZenMonkey and Shego. I know a lot of people are sad the forum is shrinking, but it's not actually losing people, i'm just writing less.

I took no pleasure in my chaz identity, but I thought it was necessary to keep people on their toes. To some degree I'm glad the forum ejected that alt - it did leave a sour taste in my mouth when I posted as him.
Click to expand...

I think everyone agrees that we'd rather have your Shego alt then your stienman, or at least the ZenMonkey...
 
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