Criminal Law's Achilles Heel for Piracy

With the recent sale The Pirate Bay (TPB) as well as developments in the TPB and Mininova trials, the future of the Bit-torrent community is uncertain and filled with speculation at best. With the rise of new public trackers, as well as a move in the community for decentralization of trackers and indexing services, Bit-torrent technology is changing faster then today's legal systems can keep up with it, creating many problems when dealing with these cases.

This fast rate of change in the community is the Achilles' heel of criminal laws when charging and prosecuting illegal file sharing. This change is best described as following Moore's Law, exponentially doubling in the long term. When this is contrasted with the rate of change in our legal systems and the change in criminal law, which is drastically slower then that of technology, the discontinuity between the two become widely apparent.

In a recent presentation by Inspector Kevin McQuiggin, officer of the Vancouver Police Department in charge of the Forensic Services Section and B.Sc. in Computing Science and Mathematics from Simon Fraser University as well as a Master's degree in Communication, he shows the importance of recognizing this discontinuity now before it becomes too late. He explains how due to this difference, technology on the web is always able to out smart and stay one step ahead of any developments in the legal system. There also exists a lag when dealing with Internet crimes which happen to occur across multiple countries and jurisdictions. This lag occurs because of the physical limitations imposed on an investigating officer, and if the crime occurred across may different jurisdictions the amount of work and time required to effectively investigate these crimes increases by a great deal.

Bit-torrent technology is easily able to take advantage of these legal shortcomings by spreading out into several different countries across the globe, ensuring that no one legal system can take on an entire site at once. This, coupled with the deployment of many different trackers and indexing services to locate the same file, will make it difficult to target individual sites in the Bit-torrent community.

In order to effectively fight these upcoming major players in piracy it would require a complete overhaul of our current legal paradigm. These is because all of our legal methods and tools are outdated and unfit for these applications. At the time these laws were adopted there was no ability to commit a crime across multiple countries from around the world simultaneously. Although recently some new laws focused on computer crimes have been implemented, these only act as band-aid solutions at best. By redeveloping the criminal code to account for these recent social and technological changes, and combined with creating an Internet policing presence with no jurisdictional limitations, the fight against piracy can continue. This does however, have quite a low chance of happening anytime soon, due to the major problems and difficulties encountered, so in the mean time the fight against Internet piracy will be a losing battle.

Updating the CSSS Website

The time has finally come to update the website for the CSSS. After much procrastination and free time as of late the CSSS website will finally get the makeover it has been in much need of. As I always have a personal agenda with anything, the real purpose in the site makeover is to develop my knowledge and experience in Ajax, PHP and SQL. Below I have a tentative model of the future site, which will emit all sorts of Ajax artfulness.

CSSS 2009 General Election Results

The results are in for the 2009 CSSS General Election, which for the first time was done electronically, they are as follows:

President: Dave Hughes
Vice President of Operations: Curtis Muller
Treasurer: Chris Parsons

SFSS 2009 General Election Results

The results for the 2009 SFSS General Election are out, and I am pleased to see many CVOL picks were able to pull off a successful campaign.

President: Ada Nadison 1501

Treasurer: Joseph Zelezny 980

IRO: Andrew Fergusson 1219

MSO:Mona Law 1233

ERO: Alysia MacGrotty 954

URO: Shara Lee 1048

Member at Large: Winnie Chung 1354

Member at Large: Jonathan Brockman 1043

Arts Rep: Anton Bezglasnny 484

Science Rep: Chantelle Chand 360

Applied Science Rep: Graham Hiscocks 217

Business Rep: Karan Cheema 139

Education Rep: Sara Olson 38