In the Principles of the Penal Code, Jeremy Bentham described offences that he labelled presumed or evidentiary. The conduct penalized under such offences is punished not because it is intrinsically wrong, but because it probabilistically indicates the presence of an intrinsic wrong. Bentham was sceptical of the need to create offences, but grudgingly accepted their value in light of deficiencies in procedure and the judiciary. These days the scepticism is even greater, with courts and commentators in the United States, Canada, (...) the United Kingdom and elsewhere believing that such offences deny a defendant the right to establish that he did not engage in the conduct that the presumed offence probabilistically but not necessarily indicates. On closer analysis, however, such scepticism appears unjustified. Almost all offences, and indeed almost all legal rules, are premised on a probabilistic relationship between the behaviour the rule encompasses and the behaviour that is the rule-maker's real concern. Presumed offences may make this relationship especially obvious, but it is a relationship that exists whenever the law operates by the use of rules. (shrink)

Public health professionals recognize the critical role the law plays in determining the success of public health measures. Even before September 11, 2001, public health experience with tobacco use, HIV, industrial pollution and other potent threats to the health of the public demonstrated that laws can assist or thwart public health efforts. The new focus on infectious threats and bioterrorism, starting with the anthrax attacks through the mail and continuing with SARS, has highlighted the important role of law.For lawyers to (...) serve as effective partners in public health, they should have a basic familiarity with public health: how public health professionals see the world and the key issues they tackle. A practical grasp of public health can be acquired, and often is acquired, “on the job.”. (shrink)

Public health professionals recognize the critical role the law plays in determining the success of public health measures. Even before September 11, 2001, public health experience with tobacco use, HIV, industrial pollution and other potent threats to the health of the public demonstrated that laws can assist or thwart public health efforts. The new focus on infectious threats and bioterrorism, starting with the anthrax attacks through the mail and continuing with SARS, has highlighted the important role of law.For lawyers to (...) serve as effective partners in public health, they should have a basic familiarity with public health: how public health professionals see the world and the key issues they tackle. A practical grasp of public health can be acquired, and often is acquired, “on the job.”. (shrink)

The article uses conceptual metaphor theory to analyse how the concept of “copy” in copyright law is expanding in a digital society to cover more phenomena than originally intended. For this purpose, the legally accepted model for valuing media files in the case against The Pirate Bay (TPB) is used in the analysis. When four men behind TPB were convicted in the District Court of Stockholm, Sweden, on 17 April 2009, to many, it marked a victory over online piracy for (...) the American and Swedish media corporations. The convicted men were jointly liable for the damages of roughly EUR 3.5 million. But how do you calculate damages of file sharing? For example, what is the value of a copy? The article uses a model for valuating files in monetary numbers, suggested by the American plaintiffs and sanctioned by the District Court in the case against the BitTorrent site TPB, in order to calculate the total value of an entire, and in this anonymous other, BitTorrent site. These calculated hypothetical figures are huge—EUR 53 billion—and grow click by click which, on its face, questions some of the key assumptions in the copy-by-copy valuation that are sprung from analogue conceptions of reality, and transferred into a digital context. This signals a (legal) conceptual expansion of the meaning of “copy” in copyright that does not seem to fit with how the phenomenon is conceptualised by the younger generation of media consumers. (shrink)