Can copyright violation be a basis for a search

[ballzac]

Most people break the law from time to time, particularly in this age of the internet with the ease of copyright violation. I was just wondering if such a violation or other misdemeaner could be exploited by police who wish to search a property for another reason, drugs for instance, but haven't enough evidence for a search warrant.

Was it Al Capone that they got for tax evasion?

The way I imagine it is like this: A police officer busts a 'person of interest' for having a burnt cd, recorded VHS, or whatever, and then uses this to get a search warrant supposedly looking for evidence of piracy and...'looky what we have here', a large stash of illegal plants/chemicals.

Just wondering out of curiosity if this would be possible or probable, and if it's ever happened.

Doesn't necessarily have to be copyright/drugs situation, any example where someone has, by the deliberate effort of the cops, been busted for one thing when they were supposedly looking for something else.

[Auxin]

If they can get a search warrant they can bust you for any illegal thing they find or plant.

That being said I imagine it'd be hard for them to get a judge to sign off on a search warrant over a pirated snoop dog CD, about their only chance would be if they said they had an anonymous tip that you were producing the pirated copies and selling them.

I'm not sure on australian law but here they can get around search warrant requirements with arrest warrants. In the US if they have an arrest warrant and they enter your home they can bust you for anything they see while passing through the house to get you and they can do a search of whatever room your in. I assume Oz would at least allow the former.

I think aussie copyright law is the same as US copyright law in peoples right to make personal backup copies of copyrighted works, so if a cop kicks up shit over your personal backup eminem CD remind them of this.

[SaBReT00tH]

Most people break the law from time to time, particularly in this age of the internet with the ease of copyright violation. I was just wondering if such a violation or other misdemeaner could be exploited by police who wish to search a property for another reason, drugs for instance, but haven't enough evidence for a search warrant.

Was it Al Capone that they got for tax evasion?

The way I imagine it is like this: A police officer busts a 'person of interest' for having a burnt cd, recorded VHS, or whatever, and then uses this to get a search warrant supposedly looking for evidence of piracy and...'looky what we have here', a large stash of illegal plants/chemicals.

Just wondering out of curiosity if this would be possible or probable, and if it's ever happened.

Doesn't necessarily have to be copyright/drugs situation, any example where someone has, by the deliberate effort of the cops, been busted for one thing when they were supposedly looking for something else.

OMG, I have thought about this exact same thing MANY times. I don't see how they couldn't succeed in doing it.

[apothecary]

Sure they could do this if we are assuming they are willing to lie to the judge.

But if they are lying to the judge (and we are assuming the judge buys it and signs the warrant), why wouldn't they just lie and say they have evidence of what they suspect?

This is a 'sneak' they would probably think is a total waste of time, 'cos if they want to bust you for something, they simply will.

Hundreds of easier excuses like "we smelt marijuana as we were on routine patrol" or even vaguer "we observed suspicious activity".

[ballzac]

You are probably right, but I was just thinking that with copyright infringement, it is almost certain that they will find something, whereas even a regular dope smoker may not necessarily have any on the day of the search. I don't know what happens if they go back empty handed, but it wouldn't look good. They might be able to claim that the 'piracy operation' had obviously been moved to another location, but they found pirated CDs and other evidence of piracy etc. At least they wouldn't go back completely empty handed. Then again, it just occured to me that they can bust you for even just a dirty pipe or something, so really it wouldn't be that hard for them to find something drug related in a drug user's house. Yep, you're right.

[Μορφέας]

I was told today to get a 'IP Blocker' for when downloading, It blocks your IP address so no one knows where your downloading to. It might be a good idea to look into something like this for security.

Edited December 25, 2006 by tepa

[apothecary]

I was told today to get a 'IP Blocker' for when downloading, It blocks your IP address so no one knows where your downloading to.

This is impossible.

There is software called PeerGuardian which denies connections from known law enforcement IP blocks, though.

[Auxin]

Not impossible, theyre called proxies

There are also encrypted networks designed so, ideally, no one can tell exactly where a hunk of data is going or in many cases what it is.

[apothecary]

Not impossible, theyre called proxies

Proxies really aren't all too difficult to penetrate.

There are also encrypted networks designed so, ideally, no one can tell exactly where a hunk of data is going or in many cases what it is.

But, the encrypted data is most likely forensically characterisable, so they can always say to a judge 'this encrypted traffic (while we cannot prove it 100%) is almost definitely P2P traffic here is a plethora of computer experts who agree'.

[Auxin]

they can always say to a judge 'this encrypted traffic (while we cannot prove it 100%) is almost definitely P2P traffic here is a plethora of computer experts who agree'.

No argument. They most certainly could.

BTW I legally share 30 gigabytes of free-distribution public domain works on a P2P network.

P2P activity does not inherently indicate piracy. Heck even if that werent the case if the traffic were encrypted no one would know who had the right to sue. RIAA? MPAA? A independent label? Any of 314159 porn producers? A small time anime studio in Cambodia?

If someone browses the web with TOR maby they just want to read the news at al-jezeera or al-manar without being red flagged by Big Brother, or perhaps look at shemale scat bondage without endangering their career (a big danger for kinky politicians for example).

If someones on a heavily encrypted P2P net like freenet or whatever maby they have buddies in china that like to debate political theory and trade pro-democracy books with him and are afraid to do so on the public net.

Any lawyer could supply a hundred legal uses for P2Ps.

[apothecary]

Of course. I'm all for such uses (you'll even see my name in some of the code patches provided for the project that Tor succeeded from), just playing Devil's Avocado for the hypothetical provided.

[botanika]

Bob Dylan once wrote 'if you want to live outside the law you have to live honest'.

[Torsten]

I think the greater danger is if you lead a very quiet life, have your dmt extraction glassware in the bathroom, and your crackpipe in the kitchen, thinking you are off the radar and hence safe. But you're forgetting that as part of your quiet lifestyle you just illegally downloaded the latest movie release and at 9am [instead of the usual 5am] they knock on your door and you suddenly realise you're fucked and that the 5 bucks you saved weren't a good deal.

A friend of mine once said to me that his golden rule is to only ever break one law at a time. This was a couple of weeks before he got arrested for speeding with 10 pounds of pot in the boot of the car

[Hagakure]

well if it happens i would hope th law enforcement would be busting down the doors of bikie fortresses to search for pirate cds before the odd dope smoker.

Bob Dylan once wrote 'if you want to live outside the law you have to live honest'.

i really like that one botanika

[SaBReT00tH]

I've found proxies to be useless. Maybe it's just the proxies I've used, but I've found them to be extremely slow due to their servers and bandwidth which means if I'm on a 2MB Internet connection and they're on a 256k one, I will not get faster speeds than 256k. Also, by using a dodgy random proxy I'm basically allowing my entire computer to be vulernarable to the computer at the other side of the proxy, and anyone else who is using that proxy can probably access my comp completely aswell.