Under pressure from the Mormons, Wikinews caved in and removed a link to a leaked mormon handbook (still) hosted on wikileaks.


However, the original link is still available in the edit history.

Hm, have I just violated the DCMA or something here? Will I get a knock at the door from.....two clean-shaven men in matching trench coats?

I saw that, but due to some of the outrageous antics by members of this site lately, I forgot about it. Thanks for bringing that up because it is quite important.

I wouldn't think Wikinews would legally be obliged to remove the link. CNN, BBC, or any other news site wouldn't remove it if having the link was necessary to do the story.

Does this mean Wikinews has no journalistic protections? Is it not seen as a news site?

Right. Back to business. This is why that Mormon story was interesting, from today's Valleywag:

http://valleywag.com/392510/jimmy-wales-an...day-wikipedians

Yep. And in the back of your car, somebody will leave a warning tupperware of jello salad. Which means... you'll soon be sleeping with the jello salad!

They don't wear trench coats anymore. But they do sport the trademark short hair and that "just walked off the aircraft carrier" veneer.




and

Did you not read Shankbone? He's *not* a journalist, and never claimed to be one!

Or he is, on his user talk page, and when he wants access to some movie star or something.

Classic Wikipedianism. Use it to fluff yourself when necessary, responsibility-free.

Oog.


Yep. The bad guys would leave a plastic baggie full of goldfish, a la "you'll be sleeping with the fishes".

The *good guys* threaten you with midwestern culinary-fare (jello-salad, wonder-bread sandwiches, & bundt cakes).

Two different ways of threat-delivery.

I have a heavily shaken bottle of Coca Cola just behind the door, just in case....you can't be too careful.

Are you the guy that let one of the most abusive WP editors ever, Gary Weiss, off scot-free?

Why yes, yes you are.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=197933475

Liar.

What's Vallywag's source (or any source) for Snow's ancestry and religious persuasion? Has he made that public somewhere?

I couldn't find anything within the standard 5-minute "idle-curiosity" window, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if it were true... Apparently the Snow family is very large - they even have their own college. (Okay, I know it's not their college...)

Turn-of-the-century era Mormons tended to have quite large families in general, if you know what I'm sayin'.

No, providing links to copyright material is illegal:

BitTorrent Bust

It is irrelevant if it is a journalist who is doing the copyright infringement. Providing links to copyright material can result in visits from the FBI.

All BitTorret did was provide links to where copyright material could be downloaded. They hosted none of the copyright material themselves.

"AHHHHH!!! It BURNSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!"

Actually, no. If you use enough, all that will happen is you will see their true physical forms: A couple of cleancut young men who are now dressed in wet clothes stained with coca cola, and looking disappointed. "Are you SURE you wouldn't like to know more?"

We don't get much of their kind, we suffer from Jehovah's Witnesses instead, who fulfil the same role, only they usually limp, mutter to each other and can do passable Quasimodo impersonations.

My favourite line, on which I look back on with pride.

Old crones: Knock, knock.

DB: Scrabble, key, open. Wilt.

Old crones (proffering The WatchTower): "Could we take the time to tell you about the bible."

DB: "Hmmm, not on a Sunday, thanks."

Click.

Old crones: "???"

Yeah, Snow had 4 admitted/official wives and probably 5 others, as the practice was outlawed by the feds and lots of people kept adding new ones. I'm sure his number of descendents are huge, and probably nearly precisely known (give or take a recent birth or two) thanks to the massive Mormon geneology database. He fathered his last child at 83, five years before he died, which considerably beats Anthony Quinn.

Toward the end of the 19th century starting circa 1862, the Feds outlawed polygamy, though they didn't manage to enforce it in the Utah territories till the 1880's. Since technically a man wasn't legally allowed to be married to more than one woman anyway, they couldn't exactly outlaw a practice which was impossible legally to do. So they outlawed multiple "cohabitation". These are Washington lawmakers hopping from bed to bed and visiting brothels and so on, but what society at that time (and our time) could NOT abide, was the idea of living with the SAME SET of women openly, for YEARS. Like gay marriage, this should have been been seen as its own punishment, but hypocrisy here rises to new metalevels which haven't ever slacked off. Polygamy is a female mega-catfight about titles and dividing resources, and sex has nothing to do with it, even now.

Snow himself was arrested and convicted on the unlawful cohabitation charge, and there's a really cartoon-like photo of a bunch of LDS higherups (not including Snow, though) in a Utah prison as a result of this, wearing that old blank-and-white striped prison garb.

http://books.google.com/books?id=sUe3cvDd4...xZlyaf0Nw&hl=en

Are you sure? That puts us in the soup. We have thousands of links to the sites of newspapers and broadcasters, all copyright and all downloadable.

There's a lot of lobbying going on by the MPAA and the RIAA (among others) to redefine the term "download" to include torrent trackers (and similar P2P file-sharing networks). One of them was just forced to shut down just last week, IIRC - TorrentSpy, I think it was. They were based in Los Angeles, which would have to be the worst place in the world for a torrent site to be based, and they were ordered to pay something like $110 million!

The DHS Press Release hosted on boingboing doesn't mention the Mormon handbooks as part of the reason for targeting Elite Torrents, though. So it might be just a coinkydink...

Anyway, Wikileaks still has the PDF's available, as does the Pirate Bay, which is safely based in Sweden. Most of what I've read seems to indicate that there's nothing all that sensational in there, or at least nothing one wouldn't expect.

There is a crucial distinction between linking to the copyright holder's own site and to a copyright-infringer's site.

Word is that Wikileaks is using the same webservers as Pirate Bay.

Sure enough:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/21/wi...tproof_hosting/

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/w...d-in-sweden/?hp

The second link even carries a quote from Mike Godwin...

A reason why Wikileaks is so hard to prosecute is that Wikileaks refuses to tell where they are located. (Circumstantial evidence is that Wikileaks is based in the United States.) It got the California injunction revoked because they claimed that the domain name was owned by an Australian citizen who is resident in Nigeria, hence a Californian court has no jurisdiction.

I felt a burning in the breast, but I'm pretty sure it was gas from all of the Coke I drink.

Wikileaks? Oh yeah, they're just down the street, in my dentist's next-door neighbor's basement. I think their son Maynard runs it - he's into all that fancy "computery" stuff...

Anyway, Slahdot is now reporting that Wikileaks has, true to its name, leaked a document that proposes a new multi-lateral trade agreement between "Intellectual Property-Producing" countries, including Switzerland but not Russia or Sweden. Apparently it's called ACTA - for "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement," though there's supposed to be little or nothing in there about actual counterfeiting, at least the traditional variety involving the printing of large amounts of fake money and securities.

The part that's of interest to Wikiland is at the top of page 3:


In other words, this would most likely curtail the application of "fair use" provisions severely, possibly even criminalizing usages of copyrighted material that were previously considered acceptable.

In addition, the proposed agreement would ("IPR" = Intellectual Property Rights) give law enforcement agencies...

So, if you're still doing those torrents and such when this goes into effect, it would probably be a good idea to get yourself a few of those 8-GB USB sticks, and maybe find yourself a nice off-site backup site. Prices are dropping all the time!

ALSO:

Should we split the torrent-related stuff out of this thread, or just retitle it, something like "Mormons, Wikinews, leaks and torrents"?

I don't see much in this document which relates to Wikileaks. Wikileaks articles are often ridiculously inaccurate. I don't see anything about restricting fair-use. What Wikileaks does is not fair-use and fair-use is not copyright infringement.

Copyright infringement has traditionally been a civil law violation. The trend has been to make it a criminal matter.

The parts I don't like are:
1) authority to order "ex parte" searches
2) "ex officio" authority to take action against infringers

i.e. the ability to take action against an alleged infringer without the nuisance of going to court and giving the infringer the opportunity to defend himself.

The difference between Wikileaks and Pirate Bay is Wikileaks engages in copyright infringement while Pirate Bay does not engage in copyright infringement but instead facilitates copyright infringement by providing links to where copyright materials can be obtained.

I think Wikileaks deserves a thread all its own.

That is a difference, but thanks to the precedent set by (of all things) the LDS Church, linking copyright material with knowledge that it infringes is contributory infringement in U.S. district courts. Well, sometimes. The Tanners (career ex-Mormons) never appealed their 1999 injunction, so the district court ruling is not compelling precedent, but the hyperlinking/contributory infringement doctrine got some more bite in Universal City Studios v. Corley (2nd Cir. 2001). Contributory infringement is not expressly forbidden by copyright statute, but the Supreme Court has said:
So merely facilitating copyright infringement will sometimes earn the same sanctions as direct infringement. If Pirate Bay could be reached by U.S. Courts, I have no doubt it would have already been shut down.

In Grokster the Supreme Court put a lot of weight on the fact that the service touted itself as a source of copyrighted material. A district court wouldn't have to think too hard about what "Pirate Bay" connotates.