Hacker News Reader

Comment by lionhearted | Hacker News Reader

I've got extraordinary mixed feelings on this one. On the one hand, people shouldn't feel like it's okay to buy stolen property for their own gain at the expense of the people it was stolen from. But then there's reasonable search and seizure...

Hmm, I don't know, I think I'm going to lean slightly towards stolen-property-bad side of the equation. If the editor wasn't a journalist, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all - if the head of engineering at another company bought a stolen trade-secreted device we'd be calling for his head. Buying obviously stolen property to profit from it is a bad thing and ought to be criminal - should there be exemptions made for doing it for journalism?

View on HN

> should there be exemptions made for doing it for journalism?

No. That would mean that journalists could steal anything, write a story about it, and not face justice.

Suppose that you became famous for fifteen minutes (this happens to people from time to time: see Susan Boyle, etc.) The exemption you propose would allow the press to enter your home, steal things, and plaster images of you and those things everywhere, without any regard for your rights.

My mum was accused of a climbing up drain pipes to break in to government offices to get documents that led to some important news stories being written.

Apparently the government department in question didn't like the more likely explanation that whistleblowers were handing her brown envelopes full of photocopied papers (which, as it happens, was what was going on).

Thre was talk of her being taken to court to try to compel her to reveal her sources, but the whole scandal resolved itself before then.

> The exemption you propose would allow the press to enter your home, steal things, and plaster images of you and those things everywhere, without any regard for your rights.

It was a rhetorical question, I actually mostly agree with you and see it the same way, just some minor lingering doubt about letting authorities search and seize from people doing journalism. While I think stolen property probably outweights it, I'm still of two minds about it and will think about it over the next couple days as more discussion and commentary comes out.

On the other hand, if you left all of your things abandoned in a bar, and someone working for the journalist picked them up...

I see nothing at all unreasonable about this search and seizure.

<edit>oops, didn't mean to downvote you. Can someone fix that for me?</edit>

I gave an upvote for you.

The triangles are too close; I've also accidentally downvoted someone before.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com