We demand that you print out the offending emails, and return them to us forthwith.
You know what the funny thing is? Hollywood was so supportive of Sony until around the time info about Project Goliath leaked out from those emails
To Sony: Stop spreading crap music and movies and hardware with non-standard cables/power supplies, and knock it off with the invasive & oppressive DRM schemes and attacks on the Free Internet.
Or else
Why won’t this damn thing go back in to the bottle?
I would say that it isn’t at all hard to tell. Unfortunately, we appear to have collectively lost our sanity and decided that an attack on exactly that party is some kind of cyber-Pearl-9/11-Harbor, rather than keeping some kind of grip and continuing to watch them warily.
Ive got some questions…
If my stereo is stolen and sold at a pawn shop, that pawn shop owner doesnt have the right to sell that stolen stereo.
If my picture is stolen from my cloud account, I can apparently sue anyone trying to distribute it.
Now the twist… if emails are stolen from the government or a corporation, they can legally be distributed around the world freely? I dont get it. How does the press get special privilege with stolen property? Combined with the ability to keep sources confidential, this seems like it is a free ticket for them to hack and steal any juicy emails they want to?
I hope you haven’t read them. It would be wrong to read them. Kind of like brain-theft.
Hard to tell whether Sony or NK is a worse threat to free speech? Really?
North Korea is being waved as a raggy flag by the media, that’s all.
Here’s the best write up on the hack I have seen to date: https://np.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2puo8h/bittorrent_offers_distribute_sonys_the_interview/cn0ksh7
Well, I read clips from the racial email string regarding Obama and his movie preferences. So I guess I should turn over my laptop to the nearest DHS office.
I don’t remember seeing any of this outrage when The Fappening documents were being circulated and distributed. Is JLaw the next worst threat to free speech?
Because illegally accessing/copying/distributing private data isn’t theft. Nothing was “stolen” from Sony.
Given the socioeconomic impacts of the corporations of the size and influence of Sony, it could be argued that an occasional peek under their hood, showing an unvarnished internal snapshot of their real behavior, is quite in public interest.
Quite similar to the Cablegate, except in this case it is not a country’s diplomatic dealing but the political/economic dealing of a large private subject.
The more influential the subject is, the more of the public interest and scrutiny its behavior, including internal behavior, should attract.
I have some bias to admit; I had to deal with some Sony hardware and its imposed limitations and incompatibilities because of some family member poor choices and not listening to me. So I harbor some mild bitterness and quite some dislike, in addition to the significant base dislike due to the DRM and rootkits and Geohot and so on.
Here’s the thing: JLaw and all the rest of the people whose private photos were hacked are people. Sony is a corporation, and a publicly traded one at that. It’s also very powerful and likes to wield that power, as the Goliath e-mails make clear.
Now, even if one of the people whose private photos wound up being circulated had a lot of power (I’m not convinced being an actor does give you that, although I know the case could be made), a photo of them nude doesn’t really reveal any insights into how they’re wielding that power. I mean, okay, maybe if there was someone else in the photo who was an attorney general or a senator or something, but even then you’d have to link up other data to make it significant.
That’s the difference, and hence the outrage and lack of pity. Sony as a corporation may be a “person” under the law, but they’re also a powerful conglomerate who, it turns out, want to manipulate the law to erode free speech, and they have the money and clout to do it. JLaw is a human being whose hacked photos reveal no attempt to alter how the Internet works, although certainly people have called for tougher having laws in the aftermath.
Certainly JLaw never threw a bunch of lawyers at Twitter and told them to shut down anyone who was talking about her.
This corporate/individual schism is the real nub here, and if it was presented transparently as this issue, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. But it’s not: it’s being presented as a First Amendment issue, and the First Amendment doesn’t really differentiate between speech about private people and speech about corporations. Neither does copyright, for that matter.
Actually, corporate personhood has nothing to do with this, as it’s not Sony asserting its free speech rights (although arguably it is corporate media organizations—among others—who are); Sony is simply asserting its copyright.
I didn’t know the leaks indicated that Sony has some program or lobbying arm devoted to eroding free speech. I suppose the Goliath emails could suggest that, depending on how you interpret Free Speech, but it’s not like Google doesn’t also spend huge amounts of money lobbying or that industry lobbying hasn’t effectively immunized companies like Google from copyright claims.
Sure she (or others who actually had claim to the copyright) did. Or do you think all the links to her pictures just magically disappeared for no reason?
I didn’t try to see the photos even when they were known to be circulating, so I didn’t know that they weren’t. I suspect that one of the main distributors (the one who took initial credit for the hack even though he later claimed he had nothing to do with it) being charged probably had a major chilling effect on its own, no extra enticements required. It’s all fun and games until shit gets real.
I’m not American, but is it really true that the First Amendment treats corporations and individuals the same? There has to be something about hate speech in there, at least for civil law.
The Goliath e-mails do more than “lobby”. They’re about contacting state attorney generals around the US and basically giving them a brief for how to go after “Goliath”, and with what. It’s not clearly spelled out who or what Goliath is, but given the other references to SOPA and what the “going after” is about, it’s pretty clear they’re talking about taking down Google – even though Google isn’t breaking any laws, just ones the MPAA wishes were in place. At least, that’s what I got from the Ars Technica article.
So yeah, that’s where the free speech part comes in, because Sony and the rest of the MPAA, as revealed in these hacked e-mails, are trying to censor the web (again) via the search engine companies. The e-mails show Goliath/Google has already tried to explain, again, that’s impossible to do, but Sony & co. want it anyway.
And then on top of that, they want the e-mails showing what they’re up to repressed. So arguably this is shifting from hack to whistleblowing territory, and The Interview was just a pretext for the hack/leak.
I’m not aware that anyone was arrested or charged in connection to these leaks. Lawsuits against pirates, on the other hand, seem to have little effect on piracy—shit getting real doesn’t seem to be a huge deterrent, especially on those who are merely sharing already leaked data, and not doing the actual hacking.
Hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. The exceptions the the First Amendment usually relate to incitement to imminent violence or unlawfulness, commercial speech (truthfulness in advertising), obscenity, and libel laws.
That sounds like lobbying to me. Do you think that Google doesn’t engage in the same sort of lobbying? Or that Google isn’t breaking laws because the tech sector successfully lobbied for DMCA takedown safe harbors?
Whistleblowers probably wouldn’t also dump the SSNs of thousands of employees. If media outlets decided to share these SSN documents, would letters from lawyers also be threats against Free Speech, or be hypocritical of Sony?
I think there’s a difference between whether it’s ethical to publish certain information (which is where the public-interest angle enters the picture) and whether objecting to the use of illegally-obtained data is an attack on Free Speech.
I didn’t say the hackers were whistleblowers. I pointed out one side effect of their hacking was a certain amount of whistleblowing. The Fappening had no such side benefits.
And handing an AG all their paperwork and saying “have at it, we command you, and oh, here’s some money” is not lobbying in my book. Lobbying is when you are an unelected person or persons and you bend the ear of elected people to get your own way. Giving people already-completed paperwork and money is past lobbying, into ordering members of the government around. It’s rather frightening it “sounds like lobbying” to anyone.
And we’re talking about Sony here. If Google does something stupid (again), we’ll talk about them.
SSNs are not the same sort of data as e-mails. There’s all sorts of rules and regulations about storing them. If Sony wasn’t doing that correctly – now that’s news. If they were just listed in a regular, unencrypted e-mail – that’s definitely news.
Put it this way – the victims of GamerGate and other people who have been targeted by on-line hate mobs have had a perfectly rotten time trying to get any traction at all against people sending them hate mail, death threats, rape threats. But Sony wades in and gets to demand accounts get shut down, just like that? That just doesn’t seem right to me.
Nobody forced the politician to adopt the letter whole-cloth. They bent his ear and got their way, just as tech lobbyists often do. Lobbyists draft all sorts of things, from legislation to position letters, and try to get politicians to adopt them. If you think this is unusual or that companies like Google don’t engage in exactly this sort of lobbying, I think you’re fooling yourself.
I’m not sure there are. I’ve heard of private suits for the breach of privacy involved in the leak, but nothing about state action for violating any statutes or regulations. I’m not sure why illegal hacking of emails is somehow less bad than illegal hacking of SSNs, but that’s really irrelevant to the First Amendment, which doesn’t protect your right to publish emails but prohibit you from publishing SSNs.
It may not be right, but it’s not a First Amendment issue (and to the extent it is a First Amendment issue, it seems like you’d be comfortable suppressing the speech of GG trollies, which is hardly a strike against Sony’s position). If GG was using illegally gotten information that was copyright of someone else, they might have a claim. Using public-domain facts represents a First Amendment issue, uncomplicated by any copyright issues.
The First Amendment does not make moral judgments about the content of the speech. Indeed, making these sorts of judgments is anathema to the First Amendment, which protects speech you disagree with just as much as speech you agree with.
Oh for pity’s sakes. If you’re issuing death threats – well, you may be “free” to utter them, but they can get you arrested because they’re death threats. There’s no “censoring” involved.
As for the rest – not worth replying since you’re more interested in hearing yourself talk than reading what someone else wrote.
