Either way, it's stolen goods that need to be returned to the owner. You don't tell the owner of a car "too bad, your stolen car was bought in good faith by a third party".
It's a ethical question more than a legal question. Perhaps they did not buy the laptop, maybe someone else in their family did and they are merely a bystander.
* Do they have an expectation of privacy?
* Does this violate this expectation?
* As a deterrent for buying stolen property does this possible violation outweigh the benefit?
Consider a school which loans out laptops to its students but then uses the laptops to spy on the students. Or a company that backdoors its product so that when it is pirated they can spy on the users that pirated the software, perhaps uploading all their email to tumblr.
* Would such an action ever to ok?
* Where do you draw the line?
* What if you inform people that you are going to do this? How loud of a notification do you need to be justified (tiny sticker on the back of the laptop)?
> A suburban Philadelphia school district is agreeing to pay $610,000 to settle two lawsuits brought by students who were victims of a webcam spying scandal in which high school-issued laptops secretly snapped thousands of pictures of pupils.
But that still doesn't justify invading their privacy in this way. Yes, the laptop should be returned - no, you don't have free reign to do what you like with their usage of it.
What are the rules about publishing photos taken automatically by the stolen property of one person from the UK when that property is in Iran (or any other country)?
Are there rules?
Clearly, a legal opinion on this will be complex, to say the least.
- she's not a minor (as far as we can tell) so having/publishing her pictures are not illegal in the UK.
- She's not a UK resident or have established a valid UK contract, or contact UK authorities about international law concerning rights to the use of ther image
So, i'd say it's pretty legal. Douchbaggery, but legal.
If i were on his place, i'd get enough personal information to 'convince' (wink wink) her that it was her best interest to return my property and report the seller (if that was the case) the local authorities.
Also, since he never mention that he tried to contact her, it makes him 10x more idiot.
The location of the laptop has nothing to do with it. It is the behavior of the publisher that is unethical and/or illegal. If the Iranians have a cause of action against the publisher in the UK based on privacy laws, they would have standing to bring a suit in court in the UK. They don't have to be citizens to do that.
because if they don't know that they're goods are stolen, they haven't done anything wrong and there is no reason why their privacy should be allowed to be violated
NOTE: This is what is called a 'rhetorical question'. I'm not trolling.
> Shouldn't he be able to use it as he sees fit?
Say it ends up in the wheelhouse of an old oil tanker and the Captain prefers its GPS and maps application to the 1980s-era thing built in to the ship. If the legitimate owner of the laptop "saw fit" to modify the displayed GPS coordinates such that a catastrophe ensued, "shouldn't" he be able to do that?
After all, it's not his fault that a coastline packed with baby seals was standing in front of it.
That gets into the territory of intent. If he intended to crash the ship, then it's illegal. If, in the normal course of working on his laptop, he changed the map's endpoint to somewhere else (say, the local Wal Mart), he did not intend to crash the ship.
Is Dom intending to cause harm with these pictures? Is he actually causing harm? Those are the relevant questions.
But for a portable 'personal' computer like this Mac laptop, it's difficult to "use it as one sees fit" in the normal way when it's in Iran. Sure, it's possible he could make a remote connection and continue to edit documents on it or something. But in practice Dom is unlikely to get any real utility out of it by treating it as cloud server in the hands of untrusted parties. We probably all agree that Dom should be free to recover and wipe his own data from it, but that's purely an attempt to cut his losses rather than derive further "use".
So Dom continuing "to use it as he sees fit" is not really possible. Nearly everything Dom can do remotely to this computer will be inseparable from his intent with respect to effects on these other parties.
Look at the pictures. Who do you think needs the laptop more? I think it's better (and probably all we can do) to inform the Iranian police and plead with them them to just find and ask these people who sold them the laptop.
Whoever's ultimately responsible for the theft is in the US--finding the seller on the Iranian side will help you track down the person who ultimately stole it.
