this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

If you are lucky, they'll allow younto make a phone call to either family or legal council.

In the US, the best option is to be wealthy enough to have a family lawyer, or otherwise a friend who knows what to do in case of detention by law enforcement.

If you have a family member who can adult, they can comb through the many non-profit legal services and see for which ones your incarceration qualifies.

That said, copyright infringement is not a felony in the US and you'll piss off the lawyers of the MPA and RIAA if they can narrow it down to you, but you're in danger of non-legal retribution like your ISP throttling your service.

Kim Dotcom got his house raided by ICE (in New Zealand!) on alleged piracy grounds (by way of the MEGAupload service) but that case is way more complicated and has to do with a new (legal) music distro service he was rolling out that competed with the record labels. I digress.

But the police are less interested in stopping crime as much as pinning crime on someone easy (preferably marginalized or counter-culture) So you're in danger just from pure luck.

Also thanks to the CFAA the average American commits three felonies a day, mostly social media TOS violations. No one enforces these unless youre already regarded as a person of interest. Then these can be used to add years to a sentence. Judges are getting less interested in enforcing petty CFAA violations until your infecting hospitals with ransomware.

The reality in the US is the legal system is very arbitrary and routinely jails people (or kills them) for no good reason just to channel warm bodies into the prison industrial complex. The US has more inmates, total or per capita, than any other nation. Many in gulag conditions or worse.