EU laws are easily checked online and differ greatly than those in the States. As I am based in the EU and Zerox is in the EU - that is all that matters here. Lauda was involved only to assist an investigation.
I am also in EU.
EU law does not exist. Every country has its own laws and they differ tremendously within EU. You need to specify which country laws you think are applicable.
However that being said nobody is going to any court about any of these issues. So even if there would be some law of some country it would be pretty irrelevant especially some details of it.
I'd like to suggest to everyone here, please refrain from giving your opinions as if they are facts, if you are no expert of international laws, if you are not a lawyer then just stop acting like one.
What matters is moral code and that has some relevance to general worldwide consensus about laws or how they are interpreted by laypeople. Some lawyers opinion does not matter at all how laypeople in bitcointalk define their moral code. This is quite generally accepted.
Most of the stuff that people accuse Zerox of doing seem pretty small stuff. I glanced over the accusations and it seemed like somebody wanted to hide the lack of anything explosive by making the list long with petty stuff.
The extortion attempt was by far the biggest issue in here and it is significant exactly because that stuff is new. Do we want to add another thing to long list of shady stuff that are considered acceptable by bitcointalk general moral code?
Extortion is extortion whether you want money or information or a pink pony or whatever else to yourself. And in this case it was traditional extortion in exchange for money with undeniable written proof for it in the messages sent to Zerox. I do not know any other crimes that can be explained away by writing some note to yourself that you keep hidden in your drawer. How the perp interacts with the victim and what happens in that interaction is what matters in criminal cases and what defines what kind of a crime it is. Zerox was being extorted and blackmailed and so what happened was an extortion and blackmailing.