Thread: Assignment: US Bill of Rights... what would you do?

On the copyright comments: US law is not law in other countries!
These sites are not illegal in the the countries in which they are hosted. No crime is being committed in the countries where the servers are located.

In the case of the famous "Pirate Bay" it was perfectly legal in Sweden - the site owners had checked with a lawyer.
Then, the US started putting pressure on Sweden to change it's laws. Sweden first refused. The US eventually threatened trade restriction unless the law was changed or re-interpreted to make TPB illegal. Sweden could not risk such economical damaged and complied. The owners of TBP (awesome techies and supporters of free information online) were just sentenced to PRISON!!!

Personally I think that there may be a case for people paying for certain types of entertainment (games and films) online. I don't think it is critical for people to be able to play computer games and watch Hollywood blockbusters. BUT books, software, music and information should be FREE and available to all. Bittorrent makes that possible.

Google pulled out of China over concerns about Censorship.
Now it is going to impose censorship at the request of US commercial interestes.

Originally Posted by Google

“We will prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete. While it’s hard to know for sure when search terms are being used to find infringing content, we’ll do our best to prevent Autocomplete from displaying the terms most frequently used for that purpose,” Google writes.

Personally I stopped using Google some time ago.

Не доверяете работе правительства. Мы не должны доверять этому правительству с тайнами. Им нельзя доверять

Originally Posted by Sgt. Cold

Meaning that these Rights are not the governments to take away.

Exactly. It's a pity that the schoolteacher is confusing the constitutional rights with one of the principles of the Common Law "everything which is not forbidden is allowed". You don't need a special Amendment to assert that. It's good that rockzmom's daughter is a good student and illustrated in a fun way what her teacher explained to her class earlier, but the schoolteacher should probably be prepared a bit better.

Originally Posted by Hanna

Google pulled out of China over concerns about Censorship.
Now it is going to impose censorship at the request of US commercial interestes.

Personally I stopped using Google some time ago.

From that quote, it doesn't say anything about censoring the results of searches, just the autocomplete search terms. And I'm pretty sure they already do that with swear-words and words associated with pornography.

Originally Posted by Sgt. Cold

Не доверяйте работе ...

Не доверяйте правительствам. Особенно не доверяйте таким правительствам, у которых есть тайны от своего народа. Мы не должны доверять таким правительствам.

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Наверное, правительств без конфиденциального делопроизводства вообще не существует.

Here is a very cool "Fourth amendment" T shirt, underpants etc to wear when flying, for those who do not approve of the "naked" body scanners and generally think that the anti-terrorist paranoia means the terrorists have won. The person at the scanning machine will see the US fourth amendment in appear on the scanner screen. 4th Amendment per above seems to be about respecting peoples integrity and not harrassing them with searches unless there is very good reason to suspect them of a crime.