Mark Bao tracks down his stolen laptop and has the last laugh

There was no remote activation, there was no spying, there was no nothing. The perp recorded himself, and two month later as Mark was checking his backups he realized the stolen machine was still backuping itself.

What it would come down to is reasonable expectation of privacy, but considering the admission that the laptop was stolen, most judges would throw this whole thing out if privacy was the legal argument. Any thief would know that a person whose property was stolen would probably go looking for it.

Mark's first amendment rights to publish data that is recorded on his property trumps the alleged thief's expectation of privacy.

The other issue that could come into play is copyright, but again, Mark is the owner of the property. Photographers who shoot photos on company equipment don't have the copyright of those photos; the publisher does, unless there is a specific contract between the author and the publisher granting the publisher (or the author) reproduction licenses.

Lastly, others have mentioned libel/slander. There's one flaw in this argument: Nowhere in the video description does it a) explicitly accuse the person of being the thief (so if he was found not guilty, the accused has no case there) and do so with malice or b) even make fun of the guy's dancing (which is a statement of opinion and wouldn't hold up in court).

Settled.

So yes, abstractly, a thief should not have to give up their rights, but on the other hand, it's a thief -- and there's a particular concrete US ethos that influences mine and the jury's thinking about this. We wonder why we should care about the rights of this particular person who chose to steal other people's possessions.

In other words, cry me a river. :-)

Whether you think it's right or wrong, a jury isn't ever going to give the thief any leniency here. I believe in some European countries there are professional juries? Perhaps Germany?

We don't have that here. It's just people off the street and they have no legal training and they go with their gut feeling quite often and they DEFINITELY will in a case this simple.

If the thief's apartment was burned down or he was murdered or got beat up or something like that as a result of the notoriety, then there may be a case. But not because of some public humiliation or something related to privacy matters.

This is just the way juries work in the US.

Jury nullification. US Juries can find in opposition to the facts, the evidence, the law, the judge's instructions, etc.

In short, if you put a case in front of a US jury, with a clearly documented violation of a clearly worded law, you may still find the jury returning a verdict of 'not guilty'. And that's just the way it is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

One thing this guy has going for him is that he did return the laptop to you. I think he deserves a little credit for that.

Although if you did give them that information and they still couldn't pursue it, there's not much else you can do (except, of course, bang your head against the wall in frustration).