this may be a bit different.. but in regards to US law and IMer's...
Lets say I'm an affiliate that doing ALL kinds of shady shit and I dont feel like stopping. Is their any countries you would recommend that basically give a middle finger to US law in regards to what us affiliates do?
For example, If I move to Canada and continue to do things, I can get brought back in rather easily, but I heard that moving to someplace like Panama might be a lot harder to bring me to justice. Any thoughts on this?
I might not move there myself, but rather set up hosting, domain, set up corp there.. etc. just wondering what "safe havens" might actually be out there and how good they are.
Ya, I saw it the first time
Ok, so assuming you have already read and understood what I had to say
here about most IMers having a link to the US that makes them still susceptible to US laws, lets talk a bit about non-extradition countries for fun.
Basically, some countries don't have a "give us our criminals back, we'll give you yours back" agreement with the U.S., typically referred to as an extradition treaty. Extradition is typically used for serious crimes, e.g. someone murders their spouse in the U.S. then flees back to their home country, etc. Extradition issues aren't much of an issue in the world of IM or any civil legal theory in general, (its mostly criminal issues), but there is still some application here.
If you are a U.S. citizen, and feel like moving somewhere that won't turn you back over to the U.S. if you do something really wrong, the problem that arises is your basically looking at countries that don't have a relationship with the U.S. Venezuela and Cuba come to mind, which have a gov't that might be viewed by many as being "hostile" to Americans. Basically, you might end up someplace that probably isn't very "American friendly",which has its own drawbacks. Panama I would have to look up, but I think they are pretty friendly with the US and its jursidiction, especially given these two countries' history.
As far as "computer/online" issues, there are many countries that don't recognize such allegations as crimes, or even worthy of civil suits. CAN-SPAM rules for example are viewed this way by a lot of civilized countries. As far as "bringing anyone back to justice" this stuff is all viewed as pretty low-priority, although hackers are finding that the damage they cause is making it harder to hide in foreign jurisdictions. You can live lots of places, even ones that have a good relationship with the U.S., and probably nobody is going to cuff you and ship you back to the U.S. because you left out disclaimers on your acai ads. It doesn't mean, however, that your questionable activities can't be cut off where they are vulnerable (i.e. ad buys, American CPA networks, US-based servers, etc).
Like anything else, you have to weigh what you give up vs. what you gain. You might not be risking jail time since you're outside the long arm of U.S. jurisdiction, but you are likely going to get your ads shut down, your favorite CPA networks will shun you, and you are probably going to be giving up alot of the potential money you could make if you could still market/operate in the U.S.
Just my two cents, I've never handled an extradition case, though I have tried to sue internationally based individuals, and its very difficult to do anything to them civilly.
I'm not at all afraid of selling back a domain, however the situation where they possibly registered a random gmail account to try to trick my scares me quite frankly. My other concern is that if the first contact with the trademark company is in fact a lawyer, there is a high likelihood the lawyer isn't going to act in their clients best interests eg.. our legal fees to get the domain back would be $20K, lets offer them half.
