The cloud and the law.

There is one aspect of cloud computing that fails to get mentioned in the plethora of articles surrounding the various marvels that will rain down on us like manna.

For those living in the States it maybe makes no difference, but there are legal implications of storing your stuff on US-based servers… namely, you are subject to US law…. no matter where you live.

This, combined with the very one-sided extradition treatise, means that, like with the Megaupload saga anyone could be flown off to a US prison on the thinnest of evidence for committing something which is not necessarily seen as a crime in, for example, the UK.     [. com = USA].

Just embedding a video, for example, has now been declared by a federal judge, to be a crime if the copyrights are infringed.

It could be argued that the legal system is just as good in the States as anywhere else but, again, there is a huge difference when it comes to technicalities, sentencing and, most influential, who is doing the heaviest political lobbying.

The movie empires, long a heavy-weight lobby, have a substantial effect on how US law is enforced. As a dying dinosaur it is lashing out in it’s death throws unable to follow the lead of iTunes and other music-related solutions to the problems connected with easy internet access, choosing instead to escalate and legal-napalm everyone they can.

I chose to move my blog to Iceland, partly because I like the existential nature of the name soror Nishi.is and partly as a token protest, partly for green reasons. They are trying to implement a new privacy policy, the IMMI, to protect jounalism. I am not naive enough to believe that Iceland could in fact rebuff a concerted US diplomatic attack, but I don’t plan doing anything bad enough to warrant that.

There is, many might say, no reason to be alarmist, “abide by the law and you have nothing to fear”, however…. the laws are being manipulated as we speak and..there’s the wild card thingy…like drones getting buggy software. Innocence is no protection under the law.

So, be mindful as you upload to the cloud, that you enter US legal space.

:))