10 pointsby 16594470913 hours ago2 comments
  • JuniperMesos2 hours ago
    My biggest concern with this law is that it will be used to bring charges against bystanders who film violent crimes in public and thereby publicize those crimes, when people in positions of power over the Polish criminal justice system would prefer not to do so.

    Obviously, one salient example of this kind of thing is people who film nonwhite immigrants in Europe committing violent crimes. The anti-immigrant political agitation currently happening in Belfast was sparked by the viral promulgation of cell phone video of a Sudanese asylum-seeker slitting the throat of a random white person (video footage that is actually already difficult to find in its original form by searching); if a law existed that would allow the state to jail "online streamers of violent crimes and cruelty", I have no doubt that many people within European criminal justice systems would attempt to use that law against the bystanders who originally took the footage and/or promulgated the footage, in order to try to prevent the kind of public unrest that is currently happening in Belfast.

    • watwut2 hours ago
      You dont have to worry Poland wont be conservative or racist enough. Neither of those is a risk there.
  • tencentshill3 hours ago
    Why punish the act of recording? If they're stupid enough to film themselves committing a crime, don't get in the way.
    • xlii2 hours ago
      This is aimed at so called pato-streamers (from pathological).

      Till now nothing could be done about them as they claimed it was dramatizing only. No law prevented streaming fake-rape (and streamers were smart and implied the act while being off camera, so anti-pornography laws didn't apply)

      Such streamers were wildly popular with youth, so crackdown happened. There's now law to back state versus that, but rest assured no one will try to pick people off the street. Polish law is riddled with laws allowing easy punishment but there's no will to exercise it.

    • Const-me2 hours ago
      Might be jurisdiction. Let’s say a person who is not a Polish citizen committing and broadcasting a crime outside of Poland, then trying to enter Poland. IANAL but I think this law sends that person to jail as long as the video is accessible from inside Poland.
    • toomuchtodo2 hours ago
      Because it sticks if other charges don’t.