Is that unusual among all the countries of the world? Or is the US unusual for having a statute of limitations?
It makes sense - imagine trying to defend yourself against an case where the police has been sitting on evidence for 50 years, and anyone you could call in your defense is long-dead.
The jury doesn't just live in a vaccum. There are rules for what kind of evidence is admissible to them, and we don't just leave it to the jury to yolo it.
Sometimes, those rules don't make 100% sense. That's the case with any set of rules (Especially ones surrounding legal procedure!). We set rules, because we think that they are a good idea most of the time.
And most of the time, for most crimes, the tradeoff between trying a decades-old case, and of preventing the harassment of an innocent person over a decades-old-case leans towards the latter.
In that model and imbalance of resources, having statue of limitations in place alleviates the need for defendents to, for example, keep records of their actions and reasoning for 30+ years. How would you navigate being charged for tax evasion from 35 years ago, for example?
EDIT: to be clear, I don't think this is necessarily a precise defense of statuetes of limitations specifically, just a "well they're not a bad idea" sort of defense
Source: I read the Wikipedia article on inquisitorial systems and watch tv. So I don’t know what I’m talking about but it sounds nice (also aligns with what I’ve heard about French court procedure) I think this covers Japan too (anyone who plays phoenix wright might wonder: why is the judge just declaring a result?)
> In that model and imbalance
> of resources, having statue
> of limitations[...]
> "Discarded TV film was secretly salvaged from bins and skips by staff and contractors who worked at the BBC between 1967 and 1978, when the corporation had a policy of throwing out old reels. [...] “The collectors involved are ex-employees and so are terrified. The rule was that you didn’t take anything, even if it had been thrown out."
I think making this an offense is insane, but I don't see how these cases are any more ambiguous than if the same happened yesterday.
The question is whether the owner of property has a right to order its destruction, and whether an employee (or equivalent) is stealing or legitimately salvaging if they "rescue" said property from the trash.
So who has lost, what value needs to be recovered? There's no reasonable reason for anyone to pursue legal action, it would just be vexatious and / or a waste of tax payer money.
If I break into your house, eat your food, but leave money on the counter for the same value, you didn’t make a loss, but I’m sure you would want me to be arrested
If I took a piece of potato peel out of your bin that was on the pavement, that might technically be a crime (I don't know). But are you going to pursue a civil suit? What compensation are you going to get?
Are the police or CPS going to prosecute? Is it in the national interest? Or are they wasting resources for no reason.
The BBC are in no way being harmed by someone who has permission to be on the premises taking something that the BBC literally believes to be rubbish.
There's a legal concept of irrationality. This would seem to be an example of that.
Yes, I agree with you, but clearly this is illegal in the UK. I'm only narrowly commenting on how in this case the passage of time doesn't seem to have impacted anyone's ability to discern the facts of the case.
Does there have to be loss? If you throw away a phone containing your nudes and I recover it, can I leak them? By your logic yes because nothing was lost, you didn't want them. Sometimes it's not as simple as you wanting to keep something or not, you should also have the right to decide that something you created should not exist.
I suppose the ultimate answer is not to leave pictures of your self nude if you don't want people finding them. I'm guessing most people wouldn't want just one random person having access to their nude photos.
I'm not sure how this example changes if you replace throwing away with selling on eBay, whereas if the BBC had sold the tapes on eBay, presumably we wouldn't be having this conversation, so the comparison is flawed.
> I'm not sure how this example changes if you replace throwing away with selling on eBay, whereas if the BBC had sold the tapes on eBay, presumably we wouldn't be having this conversation
What? How is that even remotely comparable? Had they sold it obviously it changes everything. Maybe even with clauses on how it's allowed to be shared and so on.
You aren't adding complexity, you're changing the situation entirely.
The BBC threw things away. they meant to throw things away, because they didn't value them. If you throw my phone away, that doesn't mean I don't value it. If you throw a phone with nudes on, that you don't want people to see, then you obviously value your privacy and shouldn't have thrown your phone away with nudes on.
At some point you have to take responsibility for your own actions.
>What? How is that even remotely comparable? Had they sold it obviously it changes everything. Maybe even with clauses on how it's allowed to be shared and so on
My point is, if you sold a phone with nudes on you probably wouldn't want people looking at them.
So the 'morality' of that is independent of how the phone was gained.
On the other hand, if the BBC sold the tapes, there wouldn't be an issue.
So the comparison is flawed. One is an issue of how the item was obtained, one is an issue of what was on the item.
I'm not changing anything from the perspective of the dumpster diver, which is my point. The rest of the discussion is just you grasping at straws to make a point you're allowed to use what you found anyway you want.
The BBC not valuing them is your interpretation, they're allowed to value them being destroyed and unreleased. If someone "found" the Christine Chubbuck tapes and released them, would that also be fair game?
Who is the person to take responsibility in that case? The leaker or those who couldn't properly (according to you) dispose of the property? You're putting the responsibility on the victim.
You can't demand everyone to understand these thing, how far are you allowed to go? Restoring deleted data on a hard-drive? The intention was obviously to delete the data, but incompetent. The simplest solution is that intellectual property stays with the creator, period.
The original issue isn't one intellectual property you know. It's one of storing 'stolen' property.
I don't think I've advanced an opinion on ip.
If I throw away, sell or give away a music cd I don't think that implies that I'm giving away a license to reproduce that cd.
Your nude example, as I pointed out is an issue for just the one copy, which has nothing to do with IP rights.
On the other hand an employee probably wouldn’t get the copyright etc, it’s still their intellectual property, it’s just a rare collectible item that got thrown away and is now properly recognized.
That's an oversimplification, and can vary from state to state (or even city to city). In my city, the trash is in a can owned by the waste management company. As soon as it's in the can, it's considered to be owned by that company. Anyone taking things out of the cans without permission are technically stealing. Things placed next to the can (oversized items and the like) are not protected in that way.
It also matters where the cans are placed. Even in places where trash is fair game, unless it's physically in a publicly-accessible place, you're trespassing to get to it.
I'm not specifically arguing for or against, but I guess it's not so simple.