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If i own a nightclub, and charge people for admittance, and some of those people sell drugs and stolen goods, I have the defence that i didn't know they were doing that sort of thing on my property, they were supposed just to be coming to dance.

Actually, it's interesting that you bring up that analogy. In fact, thanks to the 2003 PROTECT Act, club/venue owners in the US can now be held not only financially, but criminally responsible for illegal activity that occurs in their venues, whether or not they are aware of it. The law is designed to be targetted against raves, and has come under fire from the ACLU for its abuse potential by law enforcement.

It's always a tough call, trying to decide how far one can expect the owner/maintainer of a resource to go in order to prevent abuse of the resource, and when it's effectively out of their hands, and therefore the responsibility of society/government.

Who do we blame for nicotine, 02, alcohol, chlorine, fluoride, petroleum, Freon, phosphates, nitrates, nitrites, and the millions of other lethal compounds that we run across every day? Aren't they just as lethal as meth? I guarantee that history will back me up in saying that more people have died from bad booze than meth. When will the feds bust some moon shiner from Kentucky with the wrath they bestow on people who run meth labs?

Look at the case of "Disco" Donnie. If you want to see a host of misguided drug laws click here to see laws that target music and not drugs. In the mid 80's politicians drafted and passed a law nicknamed the "crack house" law (Title 21, USC Section 856). Basically, anyone providing a safe place to do drugs is vulnerable. Good idea in principal, but vaguely worded. This could apply to almost every venue owner or event promoter. For much of the modern era, new musical genres have had the stigma of a related drug. Jazz and marijuana, Rock & Roll and alcohol, Rock and hallucinogens, Disco and cocaine are just a few examples. Now it's electronic music and ecstasy. These days, politicians aren't fighting the drugs, they are fighting the music. Their "logic" tells them that if they stop the music, people won't do the drugs. I don't do drugs, and I don't break laws... but dancing late at night has made me a criminal. Just because you think you aren't breaking any laws now, doesn't mean you won't be a criminal someday either. Most of these laws can't get passed on their own merits. The "RAVE" act was tried 2 separate sessions, and failed. So instead, the author buried it in the Amber Alert law.

The problem here is that the "Patriot" mistake we call a law is that it's being used for things that it was not intended for. It was passed during the flurry of legislation after Sept. 11th as a promise to reduce the chances of another 3000 people dying at the same time. While I agree that meth is bad stuff, and it should be stopped, laws need to be made to deal it with it directly instead of slipping through some back door. We all know this won't stop with drugs either. With the way politicians draft vaguely worded legislation, laws passed today will be used for the most unimaginable things later.

Who do we blame for nicotine, 02, alcohol, chlorine, fluoride, petroleum, Freon, phosphates, nitrates, nitrites, and the millions of other lethal compounds that we run across every day? Aren't they just as lethal as meth? I guarantee that history will back me up in saying that more people have died from bad booze than meth. When will the feds bust some moon shiner from Kentucky with the wrath they bestow on people who run meth labs?

Look at the case of "Disco" Donnie. If you want to see a host of misguided drug laws click here to see laws that target music and not drugs. In the mid 80's politicians drafted and passed a law nicknamed the "crack house" law (Title 21, USC Section 856). Basically, anyone providing a safe place to do drugs is vulnerable. Good idea in principal, but vaguely worded. This could apply to almost every venue owner or event promoter. For much of the modern era, new musical genres have had the stigma of a related drug. Jazz and marijuana, Rock & Roll and alcohol, Rock and hallucinogens, Disco and cocaine are just a few examples. Now it's electronic music and ecstasy. These days, politicians aren't fighting the drugs, they are fighting the music. Their "logic" tells them that if they stop the music, people won't do the drugs. I don't do drugs, and I don't break laws... but dancing late at night has made me a criminal. Just because you think you aren't breaking any laws now, doesn't mean you won't be a criminal someday either. Most of these laws can't get passed on their own merits. The "RAVE" act was tried 2 separate sessions, and failed. So instead, the author buried it in the Amber Alert law.

The problem here is that the "Patriot" mistake we call a law is that it's being used for things that it was not intended for. It was passed during the flurry of legislation after Sept. 11th as a promise to reduce the chances of another 3000 people dying at the same time. While I agree that meth is bad stuff, and it should be stopped, laws need to be made to deal it with it directly instead of slipping through some back door. We all know this won't stop with drugs either. With the way politicians draft vaguely worded legislation, laws passed today will be used for the most unimaginable things later.

The DMCA isn't the only four-letter-acronym'ed law that pisses all over our constitution, as the Reducing Americans' Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act (RAVE) act demonstrates. More information here emdef.org

A rant about it

The RAVE act basically means, if there are any drugs on your property, no matter whether they belong to someone else or whether you knew about it, are your responsibility, and your property may be forfeit and you can be subject to a ludicrous fine.

The full text of the law.

I think some readers thought you were making a joke. RAVE Act. As far as I know it hasn't passed yet, but they're working on it.

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Just what everyone wants, I'm sure: Demand remains high, supply is cut dramatically, prices soar, youths mug people or hold up liquor stores to raise the cash, all the jackals move in to the black-market cash-opportunity they see gathering, and pretty soon gangs are slaughtering each other on the streets over non-Compliant hard drives. Customs officials sieze 400 gigs of Class A disk space (est. street value: $500,000).

The Government then runs Public Service announcements: "PIRACY KILLS" "MP3: JUST SAY NO" "WINNERS DON'T USE NONCOMPLIANT HARDWARE DEVICES" "FRIENDS DON'T LET FRIENDS COPY MOVIES". They also offer tax rebates and other cash benefits to television shows and movies who include significantly pro-Digital Rights Management plotlines in their work.

In the summer movie, "Gone at 60kb/s", Nick Cage has to pirate an unprecedented number of other summer movies in one night in order to save his brother's life; in the more thoughtful "TCP/IP Traffic", Michael Douglas finds himself sucked into the seedy world of P2P after his teenage daughter is involved in a DVD-related incident, the story expertly interwoven with that of Open Source programmers working across the border, trying to stay true to their goals despite their lack of Compliance, trying to maintain their idealism in the face of a lead programmer who secretly is working for a reverse-engineering cartel.

New search-and-seizure laws are drafted to fight the War On Piracy, in order to Clean Up Our Streets And Save Our Children From Evil. All laptop computers are spot-checked at airports and potential employees are asked to undergo a hard-drive scan to ensure they are not "using".

Caffiene mints, copyleft t-shirts, and any item bearing a penguin logo are banned from COMDEX and any other gathering of software developers under Cracking House laws. These things are sure signs of illegal activity.

Far-fetched? Facetious? A little of both. But the general principles have been shown to hold true in the past, repeatedly.

Whee!