And here too, the loss of the hush money for the sake of saving additional victims gets dumped on the unlucky woman and not on the public at large. People don’t say that if it’s important to the public that some woman publicize it, then the public should kindly bear the costs of her publication—that is, the loss of the hush money. How to assess that is already another question.

There’s no connection at all. If the public thinks that’s appropriate, it can compensate her. But the obligation to complain/report is on her. When I see a person drowning in the river, I have to save him. Afterward I can perhaps ask the public to reimburse the expenses. When I see Reuven chasing Shimon, I have to kill Reuven, and afterward ask for participation in the cost of the bullet and cleaning the weapon.

When a person receives money in order to act contrary to what he ought or is supposed to do, that is called bribery.
Soon they’ll start calling a minister who takes money from a contractor so he’ll arrange him a tender a “tender agreement.”

Very strange. In order to advance a general public goal that doesn’t especially concern her, she has to pay—meaning refrain from receiving; that’s exactly the same thing—say fifty thousand shekels. The dear public doesn’t see fit to pay that amount for this goal, and it expects some anonymous lady to finance public infrastructure out of her own pocket. Even without traffic lights there will be accidents, and when there is no budget nobody expects the city engineer to pay out of his own pocket and then try his luck asking the municipality for reimbursement. Someone who discovered in a dream a formula for a cure for coronavirus would not give it to the public for free, and nobody would break into his computers to take the information; they would pay him good hard cash.
Your answer is that silence is a crime and not a right of the victim. Another possibility is to view this information as something worth money, and whoever pays more gets it (the offender or the public).

I’m not going to repeat again the distinction between preventing profit and suffering a loss, which you repeatedly refuse to accept. I gave examples from the law of a pursuer.

Why is publishing the information for free not a loss? Because in your view information about a crime is not information over which one has rights. That’s the issue, not the dubious distinction between preventing profit and loss. And that issue is not understood.

Also in the case of a pursuer, obviously and as a matter of course, if there is no law that enforces payment by the pursued person or by the public, then it is unreasonable to expect the fellow to pay a penny out of his own pocket. If the public and the pursued person are not willing to pay, why should specifically he pay?! If anything, he should save him and then be entitled to steal from the public or from the pursued person the amount he invested, plus a premium for the unnecessary bother they caused him by forcing him to steal.

An explicit Torah prohibition: “Then you shall bring both of them out to the gate of that city and stone them with stones, and they shall die—the young woman because she did not cry out in the city.”

This isn’t a question of publishing the information. That’s not what we’re talking about. I’m talking about filing a police complaint under the duty to save future pursued victims.

What’s the difference? A complaint is publication in the sense that it reduces the value of the information to zero. If it’s under the law of saving future pursued victims, then let the whole public kindly pay—what she has to do with that, God knows. For ordinary information, if it saves others, people pay for it and don’t just take it for free. I don’t understand your view unless the point is that information about a crime is somehow some special kind of information that one is forbidden to trade in.

I have information about a crime: Reuven is about to murder someone (it isn’t known who). Reuven pays me a million shekels and I keep quiet. This should be discussed on several levels:
1. Was I okay? Obviously not. Certainly according to your own view that failure to prevent a murder is like murder.
2. Can I notify the police that I have information about a murder and demand a million shekels to reveal it? Maybe yes. According to my view, no, because this is prevention of profit and not a loss. But let us assume, as you hold, that yes.
3. Assuming the police refuses to pay, am I allowed to take the million shekels from the murderer and keep quiet? Obviously not. In doing so I cause the murder.
So we are left only with the question whether to demand the money from the police/the public. But in any case there is an obligation to reveal the information. Except that of course precisely because of this the information is worth nothing, and you also don’t have any leverage that would force the public to pay.

By the way, there is also the option of taking the money from the murderer and then revealing the information (maybe he could sue you). Like someone who borrowed with fixed interest, paid, and then sues the lender to return the interest. He took the loan only on the understanding that he would give interest, and he agreed.

If it is known who is about to be murdered, there may perhaps be room to demand payment from him. In my opinion no—not the whole million, but perhaps only like a cucumber watchman.

And we haven’t even mentioned the law of the kingdom, which obligates preventing crime.

My position is that if something is necessary, then the public must pay. If the public does not pay—that is, for it the money is preferable to preventing the murder—then the public is murderous (a decision it is entitled to make, and does make every day, for various reasons), and the person who kept quiet has only “remove your beam from between your eyes” to say against the public, and nothing more. Exactly like how I do not donate all my savings to the health basket in Israel and around the world (that’s a severe moral crime, of course, but difficult).

But I’ll ask again, because I didn’t absorb your answer on one specific point. I understand that your claim is that it is forbidden to do business with criminals. Fine, I’ll accept that one may not trade in merchandise with them. But why is the victim forbidden to bargain with the state for payment in exchange for the information she has (which is very important, will save future victims, etc.)? It’s no worse than state-witness agreements. Whereas it is obvious that someone who found in his basement information about a vaccine for coronavirus would not be required to donate it to the public, and if they don’t pay him he’ll sit quietly as long as he thinks maybe they will pay him. If so, your view is not that whenever there is great public importance because several individuals may be harmed, the individual must forgo all profit and publish any information he has for free; rather, there is something special here about information on crime. But I don’t see in your words any confirmation of that point. Where one can collect from the public the cost (the full cost, not “cucumber guarding”), obviously he is obligated to publish and collect.

Or are you saying that there is a kind of chicken game here, and the state declares and legislates that it won’t pay, and in any case the victim will give in and publish for free because she no longer has anything to gain? Well, in a situation of such nasty bad faith, it is easy to understand why victims decide to ignore the nasty cheapskates and indeed 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 whether he saves from murder by a person or from death by disease?
(Maybe it’s only by force of the law of the kingdom, but if so then why not make a law that whoever discovers the cure must reveal it to the public?)

There is another question here too, namely how much a person has to sacrifice himself for others. Filing a complaint about a sex offense can drag the complainants into a long and very unpleasant saga. Someone who does this in order to prevent future crimes is certainly doing a commandment, but is he obligated?

Tirgitz (and Eitan),
Just as the public can decide whether or not to pay, it can decide to impose the payment (that is, the prevention of profit) on the complainant. We’re repeating ourselves.
As for the question about the difference from information about a cure, I’ll answer on two levels:
1. Who said there is no moral obligation to reveal the information about the cure?
2. Regarding intellectual property in information, there are two principal ways to explain it: a. The accepted legal explanation is that there is a public interest in giving a person ownership of information in order to encourage people to create patents and useful information for the benefit of us all. If they receive no compensation, they won’t create anything. b. The explanation I proposed in my article on intellectual property in Tehumin, according to which there is ownership of information that you invented just as there is ownership of your objects.
According to a, the basic assumption is that there is no ownership of information, except where there is a public interest in giving you ownership. With medical information there is such an interest because we want to encourage inventions and research, but with information about criminality there is no such interest. Such information reaches you—or doesn’t reach you—by chance; you do not research and invent it. Therefore there the rule remains that there is no ownership of information.
And according to b, there really is ownership of information, but that is only for information that you created by research or thought. Not information that happened to come into your hands by chance. Here one could even say that this information is lost property of the public/the victims that you found, and you must return it. This is somewhat like the difference between lying and deception, as I explained in that same article. Deception is concealing information over which you have ownership rights (for example information about merchandise you bought). Otherwise it is just a lie. Information about a future murder does not belong to you and is not your property. It is lost property that came to you by chance, as above. Medical information that is the result of research and effort is your property.

Avi,
It seems to me that insofar as significant suffering is involved, he is not obligated. A person is not obligated to suffer in order to save someone else. But it depends on the ratio between the degrees of suffering. It is clear that there is a moral value in saving, but it remains up to your discretion.

And if we’re not talking about information but about an object that makes it possible to discover who the offender is (the owner of the object doesn’t know who he is), then there is no obligation to hand it over?

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

Its value meaning if one ignores the value of the information hidden inside it?

Indeed. You made a fine distinction.

One more tiny detail (and what branches off from it), pardon the nitpicking. What if the object contains no information but it enables one to get to information? I found in the street a sophisticated fingerprint reader, and only through it is it possible to read the offender’s fingerprint and identify him. Here too, is it “forbidden” to bargain with the state over a high amount (the amount that exposing the offender is worth to the public; a lower bound is an estimate of the cost of policing)?

If the object is yours, then you can hand it over for payment of its value. As for bargaining over the information—I do not know, but in principle the laws of overcharging apply here.