Vancouver Newspapers Release Riot Photos To the Public

Chris Richardson — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:20:46 +0000

Remember those Vancouver riots from last summer? Remember how the police said they would make use of various social media platforms to track these ruffians down and punish them appropriately? Well, apparently, the social media sting didn’t net the kind of fish the Vancouver police were looking for.

Thanks to a local judge, The Vancouver Sun and The Province have been ordered to hand over all of their Stanley Cup riot photos to the police, but before they complied, the newspapers in question released these same images to the public.

And that’s just what they did.

In fact, the news service released over 5000 photos to the public, but their reservations in doing so remain:

“We will reluctantly turn over the photos and videos to police, but remain concerned that the production order turns journalists into evidence gatherers for police,” said Harold Munro, The Sun’s deputy managing editor.

“Police should only make such demands on the media as a last resort,” he added. “In this case, they have many thousands of photos and videos from the public that are still being reviewed.”

As indicated, the media outlets released “some 5481″ images to the public, the same ones they will be turning over to the police. While The Vancouver Sun is complying with the judicial ruling, the newspaper’s legal team asks that pictures with innocent citizens in them be destroyed.

While the chaos of the riots made the topic a popular trend, perhaps the most famous item to come from the Vancouver riots was the image of the couple kissing:

Of course, this kind of image is not what the Vancouver police are looking for, unless they’re wanting to issue a Public Display of Affection citation.

No, these are the kinds of images the police are interested in:

And:

The next question is, how does this kind of ruling make you feel? Should newspapers be compelled to release such images in order to assist with police investigations or should the police, well, find their own damn images? Let us know what you think.

The Law, Microsoft, And ISPs

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 19:37:11 +0000

A couple of legally-tinged topics consider whether Microsoft’s pledge not to assert patents against developers as part of its Novell deal actually do what they say, while a British lawyer contends Internet service providers should be liable when a denial of service (DoS) attack takes a website offline.

Free and open source software (FOSS) developers had hoped the agreement would be favorable to the work they do, and keep Microsoft from potentially hammering them with lawsuits. Such a state of affairs would go some way toward healing the perpetually open rift between FOSS developers and the technology giant.

However, Growlaw has cited an opinion from the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) that Microsoft’s patent pledge is not all it seems:

They have analyzed in particular Microsoft’s Patent Pledge for Non-Compensated Developers and see little value and in fact say it’s worse than useless, because it creates an illusion of safety and because it limits severely what that developer is allowed to do with his work:

The patent covenant only applies to software that you develop at home and keep for yourself; the promises don’t extend to others when you distribute. You cannot pass the rights to your downstream recipients, even to the maintainers of larger projects on which your contribution is built…

It’s worse than useless, as this empty promise can create a false sense of security. Don’t be confused by the illusion of a truce; developers are no safer from Microsoft patents now than they were before.

If you want to use Microsoft patents, SFLC chief technology officer Bradley M. Kuhn contended in the statement to the FOSS community, prepare to be “an isolated, uncompensated, unimportant Free Software developer.”

Across the pond, a British attorney thinks some liability for a crippling DoS attack should be laid at the doorstep of ISPs. New Scientist Tech noted how the prospect of lawsuits flying like Peter Pan and Wendy to Neverland will be considered:

At a conference called Blocking Denial of Service Attacks on the Internet, to be held in London on 13 November, Lilian Edwards, an internet lawyer based at the University of Southampton, UK, will argue that legal measures must be taken if these attacks are to be stemmed. Edwards notes that ISPs currently have no legal obligation to check data relayed to and from internet users. She thinks, however, that governments could require them to do so.

The idea of requiring ISPs to guard against DoS attacks will be strongly resisted by the companies concerned, says Malcolm Hutty of the London Internet Exchange, an association of London-based internet providers. “That idea is guaranteed to fail,” he says. “It’s not the ISP’s fault that DoS attacks happen – it is the computer’s fault for allowing the bots to be planted.”

One immediate problem comes to mind. If a website is taken down through the crush of traffic from a link on Digg or Slashdot, sites both known for sending lots of people to a featured site, and the visitors had no malicious intent, could the site publishers sue the ISP over the downtime?

Privacy advocates will have a field day with the notion that ISPs should be actively inspecting every packet crossing their network.

—

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

WebProNews » Legal Issues

Vancouver Newspapers Release Riot Photos To the Public

The Law, Microsoft, And ISPs