I'd love to see the jurisprudence on this. If there are any photos, do they also get the copyrights? Can they share any nudes they find? How about that Adobe license?
As a non-lawyer, it is clear that owning the medium doesn't mean you own the information on it (or the cloud wouldn't be a thing). If we agree on that, then logically, it is possible to exfiltrate information that does not belong to you without authorization, which I think can be called "hacking".
Considering copyright violation to be hacking seems pretty out there to me, and I haven't seen clear evidence that Twitter actually holds that point of view.
If transferring ownership of a physical data storage device does not constitute transferring ownership of the data stored therein, then I don't know what does.
When it comes to the cloud, that sounds more to me like leasing storage rights, but I'm no lawyer.
I think you misunderstand US copyright law. With few exceptions, almost all pictures and emails are copyright by whoever took the picture or wrote the email. Is there some reason that these would not qualify?
I believe excerpts of pictures or emails taken for news reporting qualifies as fair use. It's not like they showed the whole picture, they just cropped his face with the crack pipe in his mouth. Likewise, the full emails where they discuss illegally peddling influence and pay for play with all the headers wasn't published. Just select emails with enough metadata to give context.
Copyright doesn't supersede the first amendment right of free press. At worst, the NYPost is on the hook for $150,000 per violation. They can probably make that much and then some on the scoop. It may be worth it to them, even if they lose on a fair use argument. It's a huge scoop in October of an election year.
I probably do. This is the first I've heard of that.
Regardless, the NY Post article in question did not publish any of the pictures and I doubt the same copyright law applies to emails.
"Northeastern University Law Review: Do Not Forward: Why Passing Along an Email May Constitute Copyright Infringement"
http://nulawreview.org/extralegalrecent/do-not-forward-why-p...
However, the issue has not been well tested in courts. The piece ends by saying "Congress should act to clarify whether and when forwarding an email infringes the author’s reproduction right in the work."
Whether the repair shop owner had copyright to the content is totally irrelevant. He had legal possession of the drive, and handed it to a journalist who found something newsworthy on it.
Almost every single major story every told in modern history will contain essentially the same type of information transfer, and it is not illegal for the journalist to use this information or publish it if it’s newsworthy.
Sometimes a source can go to jail for sharing the information. But almost certainly that won’t happen in this case, because there is no evidence that the repair shop owner did anything wrong. In fact, he was the one who called the FBI!
No. He handed it to a lawyer working for the President of the US' personal lawyer (Rudy Guiliani), not a journalist. Guiliani handed it to the NY Post and then worked with them.
Stealing a laptop and causing a bit of damage to initiate a costly repair, then leaving it with a shop under an assumed name seems like a solid Mitnick-level hack to me.
Makes perfect sense, if you want it to.
You missed my sarcasm. If you believe son of the Vice President abandoned his laptop in rural Deleware to a Trump supporter to eventually give it to the Trump campaign, I have several bridges in NY to sell you.
https://time.com/5902557/hunter-biden-rudy-giuliani-ukraine/
No clue if any encryption was used though, and either way the doxxing restriction could stop it.
1) Assuming Biden did bring and abandon the laptop, what do state laws generally say about data ownership? What does Delaware law say about it?
2) We can't assume it was Biden who brought the laptop. Suppose it was stolen: naively, I'd guess ownership can't pass to the store owner, because the person who brought it didn't own it in the first place. But who knows: IANAL. What if the laptop was legitimately owned by someone not Biden, but they stole Biden's data and moved it to the laptop before abandoning it?
3) Again naively, it appears that the shop owner definitely and Giuliani potentially distributed intimate videos of Hunter Biden without his consent. That would seem to run afoul of revenge porn laws, which are on the books in both Delaware (as of 2014) and New York (as of July 2019).
I don't know if the blanket assertions you're making are accurate or useful. At the very least, they need to be fleshed out, and there's way too little information available right now to say conclusively that the owner of the shop broke no laws.
IIUC, the idea is that the whole thing was a setup from start to finish:
1. Burisma emails were hacked;
2. Hunter Biden's iCloud account was hacked;
3. They bought a Mac, dumped a bunch of the hacked photos, along with some real hacked emails and some forged ones;
4. Sent someone over to the computer shop with the frame up on the laptop already in place;
5. Either the store owner was complicit from the beginning, or they just used him as a dupe.
The above may or may not be true. But again, IIUC that's the line that Twitter is taking.
If that's what Twitter believe (or can credibly claim to believe), then they're executing the policies in their TOS.
I'm not saying it's true, and I'm not saying it ain't. That's just my understanding of Twitter's stand on this.
I'm not saying that there is.
That's just my understanding of Twitter's reasoning, not a defense of them or anyone else.
Don't shoot the messenger, eh?
If the store owner was in on it, then he's taking a heckuva gamble on this working out right, with relatively little (known) reward.
The claimed story seems simpler.
Remember the guy got the FBI involved, which would make the whole operation a federal crime.
That said, the “hack” theory is pretty weak, I believe it mainly relies on a coincidence that Burisma was hacked last year https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/us/politics/russian-hacke...
However, the computer shop guy claims the laptop was dropped off in early 2019 and this article says the Russians hacked Burisma in November 2019. The email PDFs themselves provided by the NY Post are dated September 2019, so stuff doesn’t add up here.
And regarding the FBI, they were hoping that the FBI would open some sort of investigation, which would give the issue much more credibility. But that failed, so plan b was to just hand it over to NY Post.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/1/21497823/jacob-wohl-jack-...
My bet is that the NYP didn't bother to verify the emails, because they don't even know how to do basic due diligence on these types of things. (I would guess they're authentic though, FWIW.)
You're right - my comment was written under the assumption that the Biden camp has enough access to Hunter that they could verify the authenticity of the emails. I'll add: I would be shocked if that were not the case.
Regardless of my personal feelings about the NYP, my guess is they probably did verify to some extent and I agree that they are probably authentic.
I can understand the temptation of doing this sort of "slow the spread" if you're a social media platform faced with Trump, my worry is when that gets turned around and deployed against the Left, or against anti-trust, etc. I'm already getting near daily push notifications from Uber telling me which way to vote in California elections, I'm terrified of what the future holds where Twitter et al. can ban certain messages from even being sent to friends.
And suppose you're a campaign operative, and you've been tasked with finding out from Hunter whether the emails are authentic or not. He swears that they're not. Next question: do you bet the campaign on his honesty?
> my guess is they probably did verify to some extent
Probably verifying to some extent is frustrating when it's trivial to mathematically prove authenticity via DKIM.
As far as social media and big tech goes, as soon as they took on this role of moral arbiters of the world, they signed onto an endless stream of these controversies. This is the world we live in now.
This was in 2019 - I'm assuming that the emails are backed up somewhere.
> they took on this role of moral arbiters of the world
Who gave them this role? I certainly didn't and I will donate to anyone who supports taking this role from them.
Where? The laptop was lost in 2019, but the emails are from 2015. At some point they were on his company's mail servers, though whether they're still there would depend on their mail retention policy, which in my experience is often as short as 2 years. Even if they do still have it, going from campaign to Hunter Biden to ??? to IT personnel can take awhile.
> Who gave them this role? I certainly didn't and I will donate to anyone who supports taking this role from them.
I mean, if you're on Facebook/Twitter/etc, you are giving them this role, it's just a tradeoff you find acceptable for convenience.
Aside from the leak, it's also not the loss that it would be for most of us. He's rich. He had some sort of iCloud backup thing (sorry not a Mac user) to restore all the data, so he wasn't missing anything. Picking up an old laptop wouldn't be worthwhile if a replacement arrived before the old one was repaired.
(And again, note that the repair shop owner never saw who dropped off the laptop. He just inferred it was Hunter Biden because there was apparently a Beau Biden sticker on the laptop.)
Crackhead does not think the same way or act in any sort of reasonable manner. Well sometimes they do and then next day they break into a house crack a woman on the head killing her and get put into prison. While having enough money in the bank to stay high for years. It does not make sense but that is what one former classmate of mine did.
None of it surprising in any way.
Why would you knock up a stripper while cheating on your dead brothers widow who you were also dating?
How the contents of that laptop made their way to the news is a bizarre story. But that dude also made some bizarre decisions.
Because you are addicted.
Supposedly, this blind shop owner then gains access to the computer (doesn't say how, was it unprotected?) and it contains lewd videos of Hunter (again, blind shop owner). So he copies the drive (which is likely illegal in Delaware) and then he reached out to the FBI, or the FBI reached out to him, or someone else reached out to the shop owner (i.e. Rudy) and told him to reach out to the FBI. We don't really know because they can't get their story straight on that one.
Months later, and the FBI still hasn't announced an investigation, so they go to Plan B and Rudy hands the (likely illegally ) copied hard drive over to the NY Post.
Even if you believe their story, the shop owner likely broke some laws by copying and handing over PII to NY Post. But I am personally more inclined to believe that either the laptop was planted by someone, or that shop owner (who is an avid Trump supporter) was in on the ruse, and that the laptop/source material was not accidentally left by Hunter.
[1] https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/10/15/1986703/-Dezinfo...
The degree in which you "fall for it" is the degree in which you want to see Trump reelected. No one that could fog a mirror would normally believe such nonsense.
https://time.com/5902557/hunter-biden-rudy-giuliani-ukraine/
That doesn't corroborate the story, it compromises it.
How? The laptop does exist, so at a minimum this is not an outright fabrication, allusions to which I've seen several times in the comments here. The veracity of the photos of crackhead Hunter seems to be also beyond reasonable doubt. As is the fact that he was magically getting millions of dollars for things he has no expertise in, for some reason. The veracity of emails can likely be confirmed by the FBI using DKIM.
A better question would be why this did not come up during the impeachment hearings. There's some exculpatory evidence on that laptop.
And to answer your question, the intelligence community believes that this is GRU disinformation[1]. So that is why this wasn't used in the impeachment hearings. And also why the FBI is not investigating this.
[1] https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/521328-intellig...
Also, you might want to avoid such categorical statements, because one of Devon Archer's business associates has recently flipped and provided his emails as well. Those corroborate the "China" arc of the story. Note that the story you linked is a repost of a WaPo story, which itself has no on-the-record corroboration from ODNI, FBI or DOJ. So I'm pretty sure it's fake news.
It was a meth pipe. If you got something so basic wrong, why would anything else you said be true?
And please post links to your sources. Until then, I am going to go out on a limb and assume that the reason you are not doing so is because they are also coming from sites with little to no credibility.
Everyone is aware that Hunter has had drug issues. But HN is not the place to be calling someone a crackhead. Go to reddit for that.
Now you're just making shit up. It has been, numerous times.
The "repair shop" is almost certainly a poorly-convinced backstory as to the origin of the hacked materials.
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-intelligence-analysts-hac...
But you are right in saying that hasn't been confirmed yet.
The repair shop almost certainly retains ownership of unclaimed deviced after some period of time. The shop owns the laptop. The data is theirs to do with as they please and they chose to publish it (at least, that's the story). No hacking necessary.