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Comment by urza | Hacker News Reader

"When a person located abroad violates the laws of the United States, that person may be held criminally liable despite the fact that the person has never set foot in the United States."

Americans, you really need to do something about your goverment and laws. The sooner the better.

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It's a basic principle of international law that a country can hold someone criminally liable for violating laws in that country, even if they did so from abroad, so long as the activity was specifically targeted at the country or had a major impact on that country. E.g. if you run a service that defrauds people from a country with lax fraud laws, but specifically advertise to people in the U.K., the U.K. is within its rights to hold you criminally liable under their fraud laws. This is most visible with financial crimes, which aren't uniform between countries.

This isn't new. If I fire a gun near the English/Scottish border and kill someone on the other side, I will be tried under the laws of the other side, as although I fired the gun in, say, England, the murder is considered to be a Scottish matter. (Of course, in this example, I'll have also committed a firearms offence in England, so could be tried for that under English law!)

This is because:

#The crime of murder is an offense in both countries.

#legal jurisdictions can be lawfully transfered. England can thus give legal jurisdictions of the case over to Scotland even if the shot was made inside English border.

#International law (pre-EU) puts some legal weight on which nationality the victim comes from when dealing with murders.

#EU law has similar international laws as above.

#A murder weight much heavier than copyright infringement, and allows for more legal actions on an international level.

So to sum up, the reason why a murder at the border of England/Scotland has no similarities to the case of Megaupload, can be seen through the years of legal history and jurisdictions law, common sense, and the fact that Australia and U.S. is not part of one large International body like EU.

So, can women in the US be charged by other countries for, say for example, not wearing a burka in public? Can they stone my ex-girlfriend for being a slut?

You can't even be asked to read the first bullet point you are replying to?

#The crime of murder is an offense in both countries.

Well that's the first time I've seen someone say "can't be asked". Is that a regional variant or a minor error or what?

Polite form of "can't be arsed" which I see more frequently ^_^

Possibly the most distressing quote I've read in a long time.

Should I be following Irish law too? Indian? Israeli? I don't have anything to do with them, but I'm probably breaking their law in one way or another.

Are you targeting your activities in Ireland or India or Israel?

You can't just read out the "target people in the country/have a major impact on people in the country." If you're operating say a financial services website, and specifically allow users from Ireland to sign up, or advertise to users in Ireland, should you be surprised if you have to abide by Irish banking laws?

Nope, bu I run a website, people visit from all over the world on a daily bases.

There is a legal (and practical!) difference between simply making something available that people from different countries might might access and purposefully targeting a particular country. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlovich_v._Superior_Court. This is in the context of personal jurisdiction between sovereign U.S. states, but the principle in the international context is the same.

Did megaupload ever "target" US users?

Yes. They had colos on the east and west coasts, and ran AdSense ads.

A large portion of what is published on the public internet in the west is likely breaking conservative speech and obscenity laws in dozens of other countries.

There really must be context for this. They can't be claiming that every country needs to follow every other country's laws, or even that that holds on the internet. At the same time, they can't be claiming that every country should respect their laws, right?

I don't understand how I should interpret this without context, but at the same time I can't imagine the context that wouldn't make it horrifying.

They claim that MU violated US laws on US soil without physically being here, over the internet. That makes sense to me.

In this case, can they take actions for blocking the website? It seems like a more logical solution to me.

I'm not sure Americans would feel better about the government blocking certain websites -- isn't that what SOPA was attempting to legalize?

He was arrested in New Zealand under NZ law by NZ police. Should we do something about their government and laws?

This is disingenuous. Just because other actors outside the US were involved, does not mean that US citizens shouldn't take action and hold their own government accountable for it's actions.

The US asked/pressured/coerced (depending on viewpoint) the NZ government into doing it. The action US citizens can take is to get our government to not do such things on the world stage - particularly w.r.t. enforcing US laws outside of US jurisdictions.

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