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How Will Law Continue to Affect Technology?
WPL510 asks: "I'm writing an article on how law impacts technology and vice versa, and would like to get the opinions of those who use technology every day. So- which laws have most affected your use of technology? Which have tried and failed? Does anyone else foresee any other possible, as yet unknown, problems posed by new technology (just as Diamond's Rio showed the holes in the AHRA)?"
In theory yes, in pratice big business pushes
for most of the laws.
We who believe in open source have won a few
but we have the same problem the indians had
when the amercas were discovered.
The indians believe that land belongs to no-one.
This is why they "sold" land for little or no
money.
The settlers took full advange of this. Now indians live on reserves and "americans" own the land.
Most people on slashdot thank that standards
should be open. However open standards do not
allow big business to leverage markets so
big business will fight this by lobbying for
new laws and patenting every thing in site.
As much as I am voting for companies that promote
open source software and standards (redhat, valinux etc )it seems that companies who make money keeping standards and software development
closed (ala microsoft) will have several advantanages.
Unless our goverment leans real hard to the left
big business will have an advantage.
The real challange for open source is not just
write better software and open standards but
to also learn how to market it and leverage it
better than closed source companies.
Lets face it. Most people that are using open
source are not paying for the software and are
paying little to no money for support.
Everything else being equal closed source comanies
have a lot more money to market there products and
lobby goverment with.
Sadly unless something changes in our laws or
someone finds a way to make open source more
profitable than closed source we have a hard road ahead of us.
AdFuel
Government's primary function is protection of property rights, not the active exercise of those rights. Therefore it is property rights, not activities, that should be taxed. The government should be held accountable for property losses, as is any insurer; particularly losses due to government malfeasance as protector. But the government should _not_ be held accountable for losses to property rights for which it is not paid a tax. Exemptions for taxation naturally extend to the property rights traditionally protected by the head of the household, such as home and tools of the trade (which are also protected from creditor confiscation under traditional notions of bankruptcy).
Such tax exemptions should include patents held by the inventor as they are quite naturally an extension of the concept of "tools of the trade".
The main symptom of activity taxation is the distance created between technology and capital. The legalistic literacy needed to avoid activity taxation is enormous and it is acquired at the expense of technological literacy. The best example of this is the enormous industry of tax accountants and lawyers who sit at the right hand of any corporate CEO. "flat tax" proposals never really go anywhere due to the fact that they are taxing all activity "evenly". Such proposals are the reductio ad absurdum of activity taxation. It is simply impossible to tax all activity. Voluminous exemptions are needed or else the economy would be so impeded that even the government recognizes it would suffer enormously. This creates yet another industry of lobbyists who attempt to off-load their clients of these burdens.
I put out a white paper on a net asset tax in 1992 after having participated in passing a couple of laws to reform technology policy at the federal level, including tax policy. But over the years I've become much more realistic and therefore radical in my thinking. I now believe those that proclaim themselves to be "libertarians" need to take their own rhetoric more seriously by pursuing something like my proposal for Warrior's Insurance. But that's only if they want to be honest with themselves, which is doubtful. Even Ayn Rand couldn't face the fact that at some point the word games have to stop.
Seastead this.
A lot of people are constantly complaining about the law being behind the times and how it cant hope to keep up with technology. Some try to use these complaints as some sort of excuse to not regulate technology in the least. This atitudes show a lack of understanding of how the law works. The law cannot spend its time trying to predict each twist and turn that our culture will take and what actions will be necessary because of these twists. The law places a high value on precedents. So in a sense it constantly looks at the past. Because of this attempting to change the law is hard and will always be hard. This is necessary because a premium is placed on constancy. The law needs to be as constant as posible. What was wrong yesterday cannot out of the blue be right today or vice versa. Changes in the law will for the most part be slower than changes in society since the law is a contractual agreement between all the members of the societal group and it must wait until the societal group is ready to codify its new belief. Sure the law makes discrimination illegal but discrimination still exists. This doesn't mean that the change in the law was not a reactionto changes in society. It was necessary to go through the equal rights movement to get some changes in the law. The law follows society and tries to solidify what most people in that society believe is the correct way of dealing with specific problems. Sure the law will and can be perverted by entities that are powerful in that society (a la M$ employing the son of the chief supreme court justice) but even that shows what the belief structure of the society is. We live in a society where money is one of if not the most powerful entity and those who have can try to mould the society as the will. Sometimes the society will not tolerate those attempts because what they are shooting for is either too alien or contradictory to other values that form the culture of the society. So the law is a part of society and its culture and like any other part of society it can affect the culture and thus directly or inderectly affect itself. As a part of society it also mirrors the greater structure of society within itself.
I think encryption, spread spectrum wireless and other technologies are responses to governments policing (or repressing depending on your opinion)
It's sad, but in the ever present "WAR ON DRUGS" a lot of civil liberties have been thrown to the way side. In the 1930's a "no knock warrant" would have been laughed out of court. Police dressing up in Ninja suits would have cause a public outrage, but not today. The police say they need more information, and thus more weapons. The pursuit of this information and weaposn fuels some technology.
THen there is the other side of the coin. Drug dealers (if they are smart) employ technology to try and stay one step ahead of the police. Anti-bugging technology super fast scanners and so forth are fueled by concerns that people are being "listened in on". Thousands on boats that have low radar profiles and good top speeds. They even use the "Internet" to communicate which technoliges are successful with each other.
In these examples the Law is fueling a duel between police and drug dealers. So far with BILLIONS wasted, and numerous lives lost the battle still rages on. We could legalize drugs and get off this silly damn merry go round but that would stop the people that are making a profit and doing the R&D into NEW technologies, curtail the DEA's budget and put thousands of hard working drug dealers out of work. (Excuse the run on sentence :)
Just one example of laws fueling technology
The law provides a profit motive for some technologies. Some of the highest profit motive is for technologies that allow people to "skirt" the law.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
For example, I'll focus on pornography because it's everywhere and has been a hot issue. Porn has always been around. When the camera was invented, people whined about porn there. When the VCR was invented, people whined about people having or buying porn tapes. (Ironically, porn is one of the reasons that VCRs got so much market penetration so fast...pardon the pun.) When the camcorder was invented, there was complaining that people were using it to tape their sex romps.
For some reason when it gets to computers, people freak out more than usual. When BBSes became popular, people were being jailed (e.g. Amateur Action BBS). When the Internet became popular, the news media, public, and political scum went nuts, passed laws like the Communications Decency Act, made hit-and-run attacks on the Internet such as the "computer pedophile" episode of NBC's "Crusaders" back around 1995.
But look at the change in culture between, say, the mid-80s and the year 2000 in America. Sex is nowhere near as taboo as it was. "Alternative sexualities" (sexual orientiations as well as things like bondage) are tolerated and practiced far more mainstream. It's discussed more openly. It's more prevalent in movies and on TV. This is a pretty massive change. (As a side note, you can tell how tolerated sex has become by observing how readily people like Dr. Laura freak out.
Of course, banning pornography was hard already. Banning it in the future will be nearly impossible with file sharing networks like Freenet. For better or worse, I expect that technology will have some of these effects over the next few years:
Restricting things like child pornography will rapidly become very difficult, if not impossible. (The legality and ethics of this is a completely separate issue, which is more complicated than most people think, involving things like different ages of consent in different countries.)
Intellectual property, in the form of software, music, and video, will rapidly become obsolete. New market models will have to be developed.
Strong cryptography will become more commonplace.
Many "undernets" will spring up across the Internet which use strong cryptography, tunnelling, and have their own email, news, and other systems. I know for a fact that this has already happened, and they have restricted access and fairly complex entrance systems. An infinitely more mainstream but very watered-down version of this is Gnutella.
In these cases, the law could try, but they can't readily enforce, just like they can't readily enforce laws against having sex in positions other than the missionary position. They can't regulate what they can't see. In the latter case, it's your house, curtains, or whatever. In the case of the Internet and technology, it's cryptography, systems like Freenet, and plain old practicality.