Comment by bbor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bbor | Hacker News Reader

So the story behind the title is that the UK gov claims that the IP block wasn't working? And the author agrees that IP blocks can't really work, even?

Separate from the free speech debate, the international law part of this seems pretty cut and dry. Here's the bolded parts:

  So, it appears, as with 4chan, Ofcom has elected to proceed with a mock execution... Ofcom is trying to set the precedent that... you have to follow its rules – even if you’re American and you’re engaged in constitutionally protected speech and conduct. To that end, Ofcom has renewed its previous threats of fines, arrest, and imprisonment, against SaSu and its operators – all Americans.

Isn't that how laws work...? Like, it's illegal to be gay in some countries. Theoretically, those countries could open proceedings against every openly-gay person in the world, and try them in absentia. That would be evil and silly of course, but I don't understand what legal principle it would be violating?

More pointedly: what is this lawyer actually "representing" these "clients" for? I don't see any mention of any US legal action, and presumably you need to be british to represent people in UK court. Isn't this just activism, not representation?

Let's say hosting a website for cat pictures is illegal in the UK, but I am based in the US (alas, I am not).

I put up my cat picture website but because the UK is a tiny and barely known country, I don't realise that this cat website would be breaching laws there.

My website gets popular and I receive a strongly worded legal letter from an entity in the UK claiming that they want to take me to court and fine me for providing this website to their citizens.

I am like: WTF? Just fucking block it from your perspective if you don't want your citizens to see it? And I seek legal advice from my lawyer who says: Well, they have no jurisdiction here, so you can ignore this letter, but if you want to minimise hassle, you could just geoblock the UK and hopefully they'll stop coming to you.

So I implement basic geoblocking, which works 99.99% of the time (at least when it comes to figuring out which country an IP is in).

The UK entity acknowledges this in a letter and tells me that this is a sufficient solution for now, but they'll keep watching me.

I go about my business, for some reason or another I make a mirror, which I also implement the geoblocking on, now proactively, because I don't want any more annoying letters from the UK.

Some time later, the UK entity sends another letter claiming they're continuing the proceedings because someone in the UK told them that they could still access my cat website and provided evidence. Within 10 minutes myself and my lawyer both use VPNs to verify the geoblock is still working, and we're confused.

We ask the UK entity WTF, and they say: We have evidence, the fact that it's clearly still working from _our_ perspective is irrelevant, I bet you just geoblocked our IP address.

What do you do in this case?

> I don't understand what legal principle it would be violating?

Jurisdiction? Don't you first have to commit the crime in the jurisdiction in question?

A government can claim jurisdiction over anything worldwide. A different government can disagree.

The two may negotiate over that, in which case common sense ideas like "they didn't do it in your territory" may make one side look foolish, which may in fact have a real influence over the outcome of the negotiations.

If they can't come to an agreement, then it may become a matter of whether the "offender" happens to travel somewhere where they can be grabbed. In the end, jurisdiction is about who has the power to enforce their laws. There's no universally-agreed-upon uber-legal system to make it otherwise.

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