Silence agreements – a moral crime???

And here too, the loss of the hush money for the purpose of saving additional victims is blamed on the shame of luck and not on the public at large. And they don't say that if it is important to the public that a certain person publishes, then they should be honored to bear her advertising expenses, i.e., the loss of the hush money. How to estimate them is another question.

It has nothing to do with it. If the public thinks it right, they should compensate her. But it is her duty to complain. When I see a man drowning in a river, I must save him. Then I can perhaps ask for reimbursement from the public. When I see Reuven chasing Shimon, I must kill Reuven, and then ask for a share in the expenses of the bullet and cleaning the weapon.

When a person accepts money in order to act contrary to what he should or should have done, it is called bribery.
Soon they will call a minister who accepts money from a contractor to arrange a tender for him a “tender agreement”

Very strange. In order to promote a general public goal that does not particularly concern her, she has to pay (i.e. avoid receiving. It is exactly the same thing) let's say fifty thousand NIS. The dear public does not see fit to pay this amount for the aforementioned goal and expects some anonymous lady to finance public infrastructure from her own pocket. Even without traffic lights, there will be accidents and when there is no budget, the city engineer is not expected to pay out of his own pocket and then try his luck by requesting reimbursement from the municipality. Someone who discovers in a dream a recipe for a cure for Corona will not give it to the public for free and their computers will not be hacked to take the information, but will be paid a fortune.
Your answer is that silence is a crime and not a right of the victim. Another option is to see this information as worth money and whoever pays more will receive it (the offender or the public).

I will not return again to the distinction between profit prevention and loss prevention that you repeatedly do not accept. I gave examples from a chaser.

Why isn't publishing the information for free a loss? Because in your opinion, information about a crime is not information that has rights. That's the point, not the dubious difference between preventing profit and loss. And that point is not understood.

Even in the case of the pursuer, of course, if there is no law that forces the pursued to pay or the public to pay, then it is unreasonable to expect the guy to pay a penny out of his own pocket. If the public and the pursued are not willing to pay for what he will pay?! If so, then he will save and then be entitled to steal from the public or the pursued the amount he invested plus a premium for the unnecessary trouble they caused him to steal.

The Torah's explicit prohibition: And you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city and stone them with stones, and the girl shall die because she did not cry out in the city.

This is not a question of publishing the information. That's not what it's about. I'm talking about filing a police complaint to save future persecuted people.

What's the difference? A complaint is publication in the sense that it nullifies the value of the information. The entire public will be honored to pay for the rescue of future persecuted people, what does that have to do with it, the devil knows. As for regular information, if it saves others, then you pay for it and don't take it for free. I don't understand your opinion unless the point is that information about a crime is for some reason some kind of special information that should not be traded.

I have information about a crime: Reuven is about to murder someone (who is unknown). Reuven pays me a million shekels and I keep quiet. There are several aspects to discuss:
1. Was I right? Of course not. Certainly in your opinion, failure to prevent a murder is the same as murder.
2. Can I inform the police that I have information about a murder and demand a million shekels to reveal it? Maybe yes. In my opinion, no, because it is prevention of profit, not loss. But let's assume, according to your opinion, that it is.
3. Assuming that the police refuse to pay, am I allowed to take the million shekels from the murderer and keep quiet? Of course not. In doing so, I am causing the murder.
We are left only with the question of whether to demand the money from the police/public. But in any case, the information must be revealed. Except, of course, that is precisely why the information is worthless and you also have no card to force the public to pay.

Incidentally, there is also the option of taking the money from the murderer and then revealing the information (perhaps he can sue you). Like someone who borrowed at a cut interest rate, paid, and then sues the lender to pay him back the interest. He only accepted the loan on the understanding that he would pay interest and agreed.

If it is known who is going to be murdered, there may be a place to demand payment from him. In my opinion, no (not the whole million, but perhaps as a zucchini guard).

And we haven't even mentioned the Dina Demalkuta, which requires preventing crime.

My position is that if something is needed, then the public must pay. If the public does not pay, meaning that for them money is better than murder, then the public commits murder (a decision they are entitled to make, and make every day, for various reasons), and the person who remained silent has a piece of equipment that is a public obligation and nothing more. Just as I do not contribute all my savings to the health basket in Israel and around the world (this is a serious moral crime, of course, but difficult).

But I will ask again because I did not get the answer to a certain point. I understand that your argument is that it is forbidden to do business with criminals. Okay, I will accept that goods are forbidden. But why is it forbidden for a victim to bargain with the state for payment in exchange for the information she has (which is very important because it will save future victims, etc.). No less bad than state witness agreements. While it is clear that someone who found information about a coronavirus vaccine in the basement of their house will not be required to donate it to the public, and if they do not pay them, they will sit and remain silent as long as they think they might get paid. So your approach is not that where there is great public importance because several individuals may be harmed, then the individual should avoid any profit and publish any information they have for free, but rather that there is something special about information about a crime. But I don't see your words as confirmation of this point. In a place that can charge the public the full cost (and not the cost of keeping zucchini), it is clear that it must publish and collect.

Or do you say that there is a game of rabbit here and the state declares and legislates that it will not pay and in any case the victim will give in and publish for free because she has nothing left to gain. Well, in a situation of such a vile fairy tale, it is easy to understand why victims decide to ignore the stingy scoundrels and sign a silence agreement.

Rabbi, you still haven't explained why in the case of discovering a cure we would pay him money for the information?
What difference does it make if a person is saved from murder by a human being or from death by disease?
(Maybe it's just by virtue of the Dina de Malchuta, but if so, why don't they establish a law that whoever discovers the cure must disclose it to the public)

There is another question here, and that is to what extent a person should sacrifice himself for the sake of others. A complaint about a sexual offense may entail a long and very unpleasant saga for the complainants. Someone who does this to prevent future crimes is certainly performing a mitzvah, but is he obligated to?

Tirgitz (and Ethan),
Just as the public can decide to pay or not pay, it can decide to impose the payment (i.e., the withholding of profit) on the complainant. We repeat ourselves.
As for the question regarding the difference from information about a drug, I will answer on two levels:
1. Who said that there is no moral obligation to disclose information about the drug?
2. Regarding intellectual property on information, there are two principle directions for Barrow: A. The accepted legal explanation is that there is a public interest in giving a person ownership of the information in order to encourage people to create patents and useful information for the benefit of all of us. If they do not receive compensation, they will not create anything. B. The explanation that I proposed in my article on intellectual property in the fields, according to which there is ownership of information that you have invented just as there is ownership of your objects.
According to A, the fundamental assumption is that there is no ownership of information, but rather that there is an interest for the public to give you ownership. In medical information, there is an interest because they want to encourage inventions and research, but in information about crime there is no such interest. Such information may or may not come to you by chance, you do not research and invent it. Therefore, the rule that there is no ownership of information remains.
And according to B, there is indeed ownership of information, but it is only in the information that you created through research or thinking. Not information that fell into your hands by chance. Here, one could even say that this information is a loss of the public/victims that you found and you must return it. This is like the difference between a lie and plagiarism, as I explained in that article. Plagiarism is the concealment of information that you deserve to own (such as information about goods you bought). Otherwise, it is just a lie. Information about a future murder is not yours and is not yours. It is a loss that came to you by chance, and so on. Medical information that is the result of research and effort is yours.

Father,
It seems to me that to the extent that it involves significant suffering, it is not obligatory. A person does not have to suffer in order to save someone else. But it depends on the ratio between the dimensions of the suffering. Clearly, there is a moral interest in saving, but that is left to your discretion.

And if it is not information but an object that makes it possible to discover who the offender is (the owner of the object does not know who he is), then there is no obligation to hand it over?

It seems to me that only in exchange for compensation of its value.

Its value, that is, if we ignore the value of the information stored within it?

Indeed. Beautiful, indeed.

Another tiny detail (and one that goes beyond that) with apologies for the hassle. What if the object does not contain information but it allows access to information. I found a sophisticated fingerprint reader on the street and only with it can the fingerprint of the offender be read and identified. Is it also “forbidden” to bargain with the state for a high sum (the amount that the discovery of the offender is worth to the public. A lower limit is an estimate of the cost of policing).

If the object is yours, then you can hand it over for its value. As for bargaining over the information, I don't know, but in principle, fraud laws apply here.