Judge rules Utah law banning undercover farm filming is unconstitutional
ksl.com
ksl.com
The meat processing industry is still extremely insulated, but let's hope this gets chipped away to reveal their secrets. This is one of the reasons undocumented immigrant labor is exploited: they generally won't say anything.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/21/us/meatpackers-profits-hin...
http://www.meatpoultry.com/articles/news_home/Business/2013/...
See also: SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK) to see what happens to those whom film use drones to legally film live caged animal shoots and other embarrassing/horrible human-animal interactions. http://sharkonline.org/
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
So even without "human health and safety concerns", there are valid reasons for not showing graphic details.
That said, I absolutely think enforcing ethical animal treatment through public pressure on factory farming trumps right-not-to-know.
I am not comfortable watching women give birth, that doesn't mean I shouldn't have children.
If you're not comfortable watching a woman give birth, you can choose to avoid the many thousands of available videos. You don't have that option with factory farming methods.
Nobody wants to watch animals being slaughtered on an assembly line, but they should absolutely have the option to see what happens with their food. I don't think there's any moral room for "It would be disgusting and probably harm their business, so we shouldn't film it."
I'm not comfortable watching people be killed, but I'll celebrate American Independence Day.
I'm not comfortable with watching surgery, but I'll undergo surgery.
There are loads of things I benefit from that I don't enjoy watching.
EDIT: FYI, I have butchered pigs, chickens, and rabbits.
The public interest absolutely trumps some sort of business-model protection. In fact the only exclusions I can think of to that involve trade secrets provisions, but typically there IIRC there are fairly narrow definitions of what can be protected.
I don't know what that means. "Industry" is people doing the same thing. Doesn't matter if it's one software programmer or one farmer or a bunch of them.
There are few people outside abbatoirs (or indeed inside them) who can watch animals being slaughtered and butchered without emotional trauma.
Sometimes things are hidden from us to protect us from harm.
The Utah Legislature approved a bill in 2012 that made it a class B misdemeanor to trespass on private livestock or poultry operations and record sound or images without the owner's permission.
So this particular law seems like a solution without a problem, given that trespassing for any reason is already illegal.
https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title76/Chapter6/76-6-S206.html?v=...
Entering property for just any reason doesn't count as trespass... you need to have some sort of malicious intent, and stay despite being reasonably warned (including by signs or a fence) that your presence is not welcome.
It seems to be a common thing in the US. In similar way, IIRC some states have laws which make it a separate crime to use a firearm to murder someone or federal telecommunication law apparently penalizes using telco networks for obscenity and harassment which is something Title II Net Neutrality opponents like to complain about.
And isn't trespass a civil law thing, rather than a criminal law thing? So this law created a criminal component that could be charged.
In most states you have to follow pretty strict rules around how and what you post in regards to no trespassing signs - and a failure to properly post is an automatic granting of rights to the property. Furthermore they'd likely have trouble actually following the letter of the law given the amount of "unknown" people that need to go in and out of the farm on a daily basis for deliveries/etc.
In other words - if you've got 30 truck drivers a day coming and going, and you haven't given each and every one explicit permission to enter your "private property", you likely have no grounds to sue the person you didn't want there. There is no concept of assumed rights that I can find in Montana law.
http://codes.findlaw.com/mt/title-45-crimes/mt-code-ann-sect...
you can put up no trespassing signs, thats legitimized. Encroaching on free speech however is not.
I don't understand how trespassing on other people's property could be anything but illegal.
Yes, yes, I've heard the retoric that the industry has bad guys and bad guys don't have rights. (So stop using encryption all you bad people!)
But that can't be the real reason, right? The KSL article is pretty brief. Anyone know the reason it was ruled that trespassing isn't trespassing if it's on a farm?
Ag-gag laws are usually pretty different - they basically constitute prior constraint of free speech.
Ah. So I infer "trespass on private livestock or poultry operations" is still illegal, but the other formely prohibited actions are now okay.
These environments, or disrupting their operations because you're trying to get a sweet shot, can be legitimately dangerous. Discouraging people from trespassing in search of publicity could certainly constitute a rational basis for such a law.
It's a neat trick to ask what possible justification there could be and then downvote the explanation.
The five minutes a day I spend trying to quit vim?
I mean, I could claim anything upset me enough to cause me to lose sleep, couldn't I? I'm feeling pretty upset right now that someone could say something like what you've said, in fact. I might not be able to sleep knowing there are folks who feel that way.
And, that is effectively what these laws are about; the industrial agriculture industry wants to be completely free from criticism and free from being seen committing crimes. They already have the protection of the law when it comes to breaking and entering, trespassing, etc. They want law that goes beyond that and shields them from any criticism. Which is not a right we in the US have; we can sue for libel, but we cannot demand that people not say true things about us that are unflattering or upsetting to us.
Does the public have the right to see the inside of the Boeing design lab? The Ford assembly line? How about a livestream of code being written that runs medical equipment?
The public doesn’t have a “right” to see that.
The militant vegan crowd would have the most humane slaughter in the history of the world featuring a cow that lived to a ripe old age eating nothing but grass imported from a Swiss meadow while listening to the soothing acoustic tunes of John Mayer – and they’d still portray that as if it were an ISIS beheading. Because they have an agenda and it isn’t “safety.”
The FDA and the Department of Agriculture have the job to ensure health and safety. Are we making an argument that they are failing? Based on population size and geographical size, the US has a very safe food supply.
These documentaries aren’t about food safety, let’s not be naïve.
The cynic in me would offer that very few activists actually care about free speech – only that their speech is free. It might seem that we are all hypocrites to some degree.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2017/03/29/felony...
Abortions are not illegal in the US, nor is receiving a medical consultation on an abortion. The Planned Parenthood video guys weren't exposing a crime.
But it seems tenuous to me to claim that the state can criminalize trespassing, but not trespassing for the purposes of X, or conspiring to trespass to commit X, regardless of X.
In this case, X is speech protected by the First Amendment. The state cannot make "trespassing for the purposes of making legal speech" a worse crime than trespassing in general.
>In short, the cases cited by the State answer the question of whether a landowner can remove someone from her property or sue for trespass even when the person wishes to exercise First Amendment rights. And generally, as the cases make clear, the answer is yes. But that is not the question before the court. The question here is whether the State (not a private landowner) can prosecute (not sue for damages) a person based on her speech on private property. [...]
> In sum, the fact that speech occurs on a private agricultural facility does not render it outside First Amendment protection. Nobody disputes that owners of an agricultural facility can immediately remove from the property any person speaking in ways the owners find objectionable. But if the State wants to criminalize the same speech, it must justify the law under the First Amendment.
>The Utah case, filed by animal-rights groups, was the first lawsuit in the U.S. to challenge one of the ag-gag laws. It came after a woman was charged in 2013 when she filmed a front-end loader dumping a sick cow outside a suburban Salt Lake City slaughterhouse. The case was dismissed because she was standing on a public street when she made the recording.
It is as if states enacted laws against graffiti bearing a particular political or religious message, with either a greater punishment, or broader definition of "graffiti", than existing graffiti laws. Yes, graffiti is already illegal; yet these laws clearly violate free speech and equal protection, since the punishment is different based on what message you are trying to convey with the graffiti.
It's unfortunate that you got downvoted.