Why Is It Rocket Science That Laws Should Apply Online Too?

I don't see how an article about water encased in silica is relevant. Is it just because it contains the words "dry water" or is there something else?

"Suppose the internet has been shut down. I can still hand my neighbor a USB stick. I can still snail-mail my buddy an external drive."

As I see things, there's an important difference there.

Just like home taping didn't kill the record industry, and videotapes didn't kill the tv/movie industry, sharing usb sticks or hard drives with your circle of friends isn't going to kill any creative industry either.

As is common with computers, the sheer difference in scale of digitally sharing over the internet _does_ make a difference.

With physically sharing storage media, there's a small but not zero marginal cost each time you share something. A few bucks worth of usb stick or a few tens of dollars worth of hard drive, which you no longer have use of while your friends has it or it's in transit. That's going to practically limit the sphere of your sharing - think about your own social graph, how many of your "facebook friends" would you actually send a drive full of tunes or movies to? I know the subset of my friendlist that I'd go to the trouble to send a few bucks worth of usb stick is a reasonably small portion of the people that Facebook calls "my friends".

That's a _very_ different thing to what happens when you dump your entire media collection into the /torrent directory on your always-on campus network connected machine. The internet enables zero marginal cost sharing, which inevitably leads to orders of magnitude wider sharing. I suspect the Dunbar number of ~150 real social connections is the very top end of what most people would consider to be a sensible sized physical-media-sharing-network, and realistically most people would probably stop short at 10 or 15 individuals you'd expend the effort to share with if sharing required you to actually send real-but-small-cost atoms to do it.

(curiously, or perhaps obviously, these suspicions about sharing network sizes closely map my personal experience ~30 years ago with sharing compact cassettes and vinyl LPs in highschool in the early/mid '80s. There were 6 or 8 people who I'd lend/borrow LPs between, and perhaps a dozen more that I'd lend or copy tapes for.)

I can't really argue that that doesn't make the most sense, but, at the same time, I also find it kind of scary. In essence, I obviously choose the start and end points of the transit, but I have no control over where my packets go in between.

Probably no one, since people copying DVDs offline generally only give them to a handful of friends, tops.

Try making many thousands of physical copies of DVDs and handing them out to random strangers, and I'll bet you'd get sued--and almost no one would be outraged that you got sued.

Do it on the internet, and suddenly people think you are a victim.

The same thing happens with defamation, too. If I printed out a bunch of flyers accusing you of something horrible and not true, and posted them around your town, very few people would have a problem with you suing me, and with me losing.

However, if instead I post the same things about you on an online forum, and you sue, then to a lot of people will think you are the bad guy trying to stop free speech.

The general principle in the article, that law should really be the same online and offline, is a good one. After all, law is mostly about how people interact. The medium should not matter. All the internet really changes is that our actions can have a wider impact, and that some things are a lot easier to do on the internet.

Copyright is actually more deeply rooted in the Constitution (of the US) than those other rights; the Bill of Rights happened later, after all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause

>No, not quite. They/we want the same kind of justice so our fundamental expectations or rights preserved -- and if that does not suit copyright, then it is copyright that must give way.

it is somewhat false dichotomy - the copyright itself has no conflict with the fundamental rights. It is the modern way of enforcing the copyright on the Internet and investigating/prosecuting the copyright violations there that is violating fundamental rights.

Somehow due process gets relaxed when it comes to copyright violations. Though may be the strength of the due process was only perceived as such if one considers all these cases when an Afro wearing guy would get arrested a week later and get a life (or even death) for the crime committed by a bald perpetrator. 30+ year ago society felt that these guys weren't worth the due process and looks like today the society thinks that "the ones who copy from the Internet or the ones who have something to hide" aren't worth the due process.

... I believe you are thinking of the Swiss.

A being in the 7th dimension wouldn't think nothing of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySBaYMESb8o&NR=1&feat...

Are you discriminating against me cause I'm a 3 dimensional being?[Being facetious, I actually was trying to come up with a good argument to defend against a argument like the one given before posting.]

IANAL, but from what I've read, the original legislative intent, in most jurisdictions, is that the process by which an artefact is created (including a stream of bits sent over a network or data sent on a block device) rather than the data itself which makes something a protected work - and it is the process of copying that is restricted.

If you invent the exact same sequence completely independently, you own it. However, the problem of looking at data and saying that copying happened is one of inference; if I posted exactly the same comment you just wrote, I could have independently come up with your copyrighted comment, and hence own the copyright, but the much more likely explanation is that I copied your comment, and so judges and juries infer copying from similarity that they believe is statistically unlikely.

So if person A generates a random string from the uniform distribution, and communicates it securely to a trusted person, B, who XORs the string with your comment, and A shares the random string with the public, while B shares the XORed string, technically only B commits direct copyright infringement, because B created a derivative work by XORing, and broadcast that work (copying). If done properly, no one could prove which person was A and which was B however. In practice, however, it is likely that if both people acted with intent to distribute the work, they would both be at least secondarily liable.

You have only begun your journey of understanding why "owning" information is ludicrous. Give it time.

Indeed the number itself does not necessarily infringe copyright.

A really simple example is to imagine giving the number "N" encoding a movie in divx format to someone in the year 1995, since they have no means of converting the number to a continuous stream of video and sound (a video animation), the number is useless to them.

On the other hand, you can give them the same movie encoded in an older format (mpeg2?); this will be an entirely different number "Q" bearing almost absolutely no relationship to "N", but it will still be the same movie.

The presence of different encoding formats is a proof that copyright does not restrict what number you reproduce.

This could be kinda worse though, because it could imply that copyright restricts the distribution of ideas.

Why do people use this tired old cliche. Surely it's not heisenberg debugging to come up with something other than rocket science (or brain surgery?)

Good point and rundown of the situation but I'd say the expectation of a new approach to law appearing will only be fallacious if we let it be by accepting the way things are going.

Laws on the books tend to be tied very closely with specific implementations.

Yes, the law as it currently exist is based on being able to preserve "differences that don't make a difference". It's developed incrementally, inductively and by analogy. The phenomena of generic information, of information that isn't tied to a physical manifestation, is anathema to the whole English Common Law tradition, the basis of our system of laws. Is a string of bits a song? a device for circumventing security? Hate Speech? Protected Speech? The law as it exists needs to answer this and yet can't answer this because the law needs a context and the free flow of information implies there no set context.

And so the legal system is going to be either be further and further removed from reality or institute an entirely totalitarian system to maintain its expectations.

Because generic information really doesn't consist of a series of "new devices" and "new contexts" but rather is a single, abstract and indivisible process; either every unique string of bits is free or it has an owner - which is it?

Yet sometimes the medium defines the message. Until the 19th century, you would pay to watch a theatrical or listen to live music because it was the only fair price available. When you wanted a picture of yourself, you had to pay Renoir to make an original portrait. The 20th century brought us the selling of copies. That was a weird mixture - you paid for the vinyl disc , or the print poster, but you knew the price was not the price of the material alone. I think the digital world provides so much opportunity to create original content, that we no more need copies. I like how economies arise in digital worlds that are based on original content or services, like online game worlds, virtual goods, software-as-a-service and web site design. I believe slowly but surely we 'll get over the economy of copies. It's like going back to pre-19th century really, but in a good way. Not arguing my case strongly here, it's just a certain point of view (after all it's Saturday)

p.s. i dont really believe SMTP,FTP,or HTTP were based on the real world ontology. they were engineered out of necessity

that's the sad part

There is a difference in passively trying to intercept unencrypted communication and accidentally seeing a postcard in transit. It is illegal to look in someone's mailbox and it's illegal to remove contents from someone's mailbox to possibly read mail even without opening it. The points of contact for a postcard are minimal and generally would only be by employees of the postal service. I would argue that snooping on unencrypted communication would still be a crime because the user made a passive decision to do so.

(I'm not preaching what to do or not to do - I'm no angel and have done my share of deeds - but this is to point out what it really comes down to when you compare analog and digital actions...)

As far as wikipedia can be trusted, there are explicit rigits to privacy & secrecy of correspondence [1] in western countries.

The examples you give fail flat out -- mechanical sorting & filtering of email, without any direct human intervention -- has no way of breaking privacy. No person learns anything private, and nobody will ever get pestered by the spam filters of google or other such.

Also, there's no crates of illegal drugs there being moved around. There is opaque electronic correspondence. Paper correspondence is by default secret, unless interceped by law enforcement officials under court order. No provisions out there for private parties for wildcard checks if their rights are infriged somehow by paper mail -- and you can be sure every now and then somebody slanders someone in paper mail. Rumors and whatnot.

The point of the article is, why are there blatant double standards when it comes to electronic correspondence?

EDIT: also note the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz_v._United_States

In short, ``[[SCOTUS interpreted the Fourth Amendment]] to count [[also]] immaterial intrusion with technology as a search''.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence

The International Declaration of Human Rights establishes secrecy of correspondence as a basic human right (article 12). It is echoed in the constitutions of many countries.

Shallow packet analysis is akin to reading the address of a letter in physical mail. It does not violate the secrecy of the message. When you sign up for an ISP or create a GMail account, you allow the company to inspect your correspondence and they assure you they will keep it secret under the terms of the law. The agreement is binding. You can sue if your communication is arbitrarily violated.

The content of packages might be subject to customs and taxation. Goods are not correspondence (from the p.o.v. of those laws).

Of course, laws are written taking good faith as a premise...

Yes I'm entirely aware of that. My point is he's still a drug dealer and his attempt to shift the moral debate to something else is entirely transparent.

Yeah, if you ran a blog called ShopliftFreak.