Like for example: a drug raid, or they’re accusing you of illegal hacking, or some sort of TheSilkRoad type of stuff.

Assuming the original investigation find no evidence and leads to no charges, could they use the pirated content that you have as a last ditch effort to get you in prison? Not distributing, just personal use.

Not limited to any specific jurisdiction, just want to know what happens in general.

  • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    18·
    8 days ago

    IANAL and not really sure if this would hold up for digital assets, but if there is a search warrant, anything in plain view is up for grabs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horton_v._California. I would assume anything on the hard drive can be evidence in court if it is in plain view of the assets of the search warrant.

    But also, for simply possession of pirated content, I don’t think the state would charge you, but you could be open to civil litigation if the copyright holders find out somehow.

    EDIT: Looked into it some more, and seems there’s precedent that files of similar type on a hard drive are considered to be in plain view if they match the type of files which would be searched via a search warrant of the hard drive

    In the case of United States v. Wong, police were searching the defendant’s computer for evidence related to a murder when they discovered images of child pornography on the computer. Although the warrant was specific to evidence of the murder, the Ninth Circuit held that the plain view exception allowed them to seize the child pornography, as searching graphics files was valid under the warrant and the files were immediately identifiable as contraband.

    https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-9th-circuit/1158361.html

    • bluGill@fedia.io
      2·
      8 days ago

      If you can show the searcher should understand the orginization of your filesystem then you can argue other places are not to be searched.

      only way I can see that applying is if the warrent is about sharing files - files in a non-shared location are not part of the search. I doubt this will ever happen in the real world.

      • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        4·
        8 days ago

        I edited my post to include a case which explains the plain view exception with regard for digital files. From the sound of it, if the warrant were for like a Bitcoin wallet or some data file, then movies and images are likely out of scope, but if the search warrant were for video files, then pirated material would be in plain view of the search.

        Based on this, I think it’s safe to assume that if there is a search warrant for video evidence related to a crime, and you have pirated material in a folder called /media/Jellyfin/Marvel Movies, that content would be admissible. I don’t think you could argue that the analyst should have understood that the only files in that directory were Marvel Movies, because if that were the case, then everyone would hide video evidence of their crimes in a Marvel Movies directory.

        • bluGill@fedia.io
          2·
          8 days ago

          Though you need to evamine every file because ‘/usr/bin/bash’ might really be an illegal video. (I’m a bsd fan so this would be useful to me if only I had something illegal to hide)