Slashdot Mirror
Legal Pundits Pan Internet Exceptionalism
Back in Brown writes: "This article from today's Wall St. Journal (via MSNBC) presents the viewpoints of several legal commentators that the Internet should be treated like any other invention and not subject to novel legal interpretations. 'The steam engine ... probably transformed American law, but the "law of the steam engine" never existed.' Another quote: 'cyberbuffs are afflicted with "insufficient perspective, disdain for history, unnecessary futurology and technophilia."'"
Sounds good to me.
Who the heck needs the DMCA, CDBPTA, and all that other crap anyways?
Oh, I know -- the lawyers that bottom feed off of it.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Like most Slashdot commenters, I have not read the article before writing this comment. However, I feel like posting a quick comment. It describes what I currently feel about the laws and Internet. It's not argumented. It's not great, but I hope it can sparkle interesting counter-comments. :)
:)
Internet doesn't need new laws. There are laws that punish the acts of thievery, of diffamation, of misinformation, of undecency, of conspiracy, etc. They are generally sufficiently abstract to apply efficiently to the Internet. The government and the judges might need to adapt the way they apply the law, but it's no the same as writing new laws.
Internet need new laws. It changes some fundamental aspects of our society. The copyright law is the first one that should be revamped. But it needs a nationwide debate, not a corporal sponsorship. Some assumptions about the act of publishing should be rethought, too. In the Internet age -- my, this sounds so pre-2k! -- everyone can be a publisher. Everyone should have the right to be.
Internet need labels. Everybody can have a role on the Internet that was previously only obtainable by professionals - retailer, publisher, advisor. Yet you can't expect everybody to fare equally well, and you shouldn't expect them to be equally liable. Labels should be instored, allowing someone to say "I am a good quality publisher. I accept that I am more liable than un unlabeled publisher. You can trust me more than un unlabeled publisher".
I'm sorry I can't write something more coherent; I'm so exhausted; I need to sleep.
But the first legislative response to the car was the passing of the red flag act in the UK which required a man to walk in front of a car with a red flag.
The attempts to legislate cyberspace in the US have mostly been as clueless. The CDA, COPA, DMCA, etc. etc. All pushed with the primary goal of making a congressman look cybersavy.
Where the article is wrong is that the technologists are not the ones calling for the laws. It is the army of self appointed experts who think everything is changing, Internet time, etc. etc.
The media thinks that the experts on the Internet are academics who write books on it not the people who write RFCs, architect standards etc. They think that everything is changing at the speed of light only because they have so little grasp of the technology.
It took us six years to get HTTP adopted as a standard. We are currently working on redoing RPC and CORBA in XML syntax. We are doing it better (and the CORBA losers have only themselves to blame), but ten years after it could have happened.
I did two specs in the past 18 months which is pretty much a record for standards work. It is going to take us at least five more years before a significant fraction of commerce transations are e-comerce (but not value, since a small number of transactions account for 90% of value).
The point is that the Internet does not move so fast that the legislature needs to take special measures.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
In Mexico James Michener (the great historical novelist) had an episode take place in 15th century Spain shortly after the discovery of precious metals in the New World (primarily Mexico). A town elder (University Professor) argued that the Romac Catholic church's law against usury, or the loaning of money, was no longer applicable to business ventures in the New World. He argued that the risk and distance (hence the communication feedback time) were too great to not allow lenders to charge interest. He was treated with suspicion and then recanted his opinion in lecture the day after being warned by several visiting scholars that he was courting a charge of heresy (don't forget that the Spanish Inqisition held a lot of political power that could not be crossed at that time).
When cars were widely available, new laws certainly came into effect.
And with steam engines came the locomotives and a need for standardizing time across time zones.
Technology isn't as revolutionary as some make it out to be, but it does change things. A comparison is made to telephone calls in the article, but no RIAA was created to prevent me from playing Van Halen on my phone and letting you record it. Why? Quality, convenience blah blah, etc.
I think in the case of the internet and laws with regard to Intellectual Property, the existing laws are ambiguous and/or insufficient for today's reality.
Deep-linking, terms of use, digital music/video/software are in a new venue with the internet. Owning a song was an easier concept with piano rolls, LP's, tapes and even CD's, but now some companies are trying to take away usage rights from us with the new technology when the new technology makes usage easier.
The right to swing my fist ends at your nose, but the argument can be hard to define when I buy a product from you and you tell me I can only use it a certain way and I have no recourse if it breaks. (Copy protected CD's/DVD's/etc.) I don't recall any book publishers printing books with ink that will fade in a certain number of years or if you cross a regional border.
And I don't recall a phone number having terms of use that were revealed after you dialed it.
I don't want to troll into yet another IP/RIAA/MPAA/KaZaA/Napster/whatever debate, but I just want to acknowledge that there is need for new precedent in the internet media. It's not controllable or accountable in the same way as communication was in the past, and society and the legal systems have to deal with that.
The skeptics start by questioning the very existence of cyberspace, which they say is no more real than a "phone space" involving all the people on the telephone at a given time. They go on to argue that something happening online shouldn't be treated any differently by the law than if it occurred on Main Street.
... probably transformed American law, but the 'law of the steam engine' never existed,"
:-)
:-)
First part makes sense, second part implies that one's use of the telephone in their own home is equivalent to using their telephone on "Main Street".
they all have as a core principle a rejection of the notion of "Internet exceptionalism," or the idea that the Internet is a new, unique thing that requires its own special laws. "The steam engine
Comparing steam engines and telecommunications devices is about as stupid as it gets, anyone should understand that much.
And they certainly deride the ideas behind the "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace," which is posted on many Web sites and poses a "hands off" challenge to government.
I've never heard of this thing before, I don't recognize it, and I think that they're just using it as a straw to hold up and try to cover up their engines to telephones comparison.
And most of the activists continue to see the Internet as a utopian ideal -- despite the fact that many progressives are beginning to worry that the Web is really just a very efficient way for companies to move white-collar U.S. jobs overseas.
Hey, any environment where we can't run up and kill each other in any meaningful sense has some utopian elements to it.
Reducing the internet to the web and defining it as a mechanism whose main purpose is to destroy american jobs is pretty goofy though. Tech has created quite a few jobs locally, as it has about everywhere else. Though I won't argue it overall helped or hurt, I just don't have any figures.
But what about his students? Well, he concedes, they're another matter. Many of them, with the passion of youth, are still enthralled with the whole idea of a separate universe, one they can call their own.
And you wouldn't consider an immersive conference call something to liken to a seperate universe?
Could someone make a picture of a whole bunch of people on "Main Street" talking into steam engines? It would summarize this article nicely.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
I think the author has a very good point to make. Unfortunately, the author misses it. Let us suppose that he is correct, that there should be no special new laws regarding the internet. It is just a bunch of computers linked by cable and fiber, that it is not "cyberspace" any more than telephone users create "telephonespace". There should be no special laws, because it is just people communicating. Then why does the DMCA exist? What about the CDBPTA? These are special laws.
His point is valid, but he misses the mark. All we want is a guarantee of freedom of expression. He selects a difficult case, one that many of us (myself included) do not understand. The author concludes that our misunderstanding of international and French law means that we want special rights. The people who are really pushing for special new cyberlaws are the RIAA and the MPAA. We don't want special laws, we just want our constitutional rights.
Yes, the author is right, there are people who want special rights online. However, he presents the wrong group.
These mainstream people are absolutely correct and we should make it clear we support their argument in every way. There certainly are some radicals who believe that the internet requires fundimental consitutional rights to one's own home and property (4th ammendment), to freedom of speech, and legal concepts like "innocent until proven guilty" need to be overturned because the internet and computing is somehow "different and dangerous". These radicals pass laws like the DMCA.
We need to make the mainstream legal minds understand how radical these notions are and why they should support the same level of consitutional and legal protections we have enjoyed in the past. Rather than ajitating and advocating for a changes in IP law or nice sounding concepts like "code is speech" or new ideas of freedom, we first need to be able to retain the freedoms that had existed for the past 200 years, as this is what is being changed. In this, I believe we can easily find common ground with the established legal thinking behind the people who wrote that opinion piece and find common ground against the real radicals.
Few industries receive as much specific attention from the law as railroads. Railroads, especially in the United States and Canada, were the only heavy transportation that mattered for decades; as a result, they affected just about every industry, the politics of the entire continent, and society in general; and the laws, even today, reflect how influential the railroads were. Ever looked at the United States Code or the U.S. state's typical statutes? American laws were customized for railroads early and often in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Special railroad laws are still all over the place. U.S.C. Title 45 (out of 50) is nothing but railroads, and that's just some of the railroad law. Among lots of other things (if I recall correctly): they get special treatment when obtaining the right-of-way; the labor laws treat railroad workers differently; and they even have separate federal retirement from Social Security. I'm sure the laws in other countries address railroads extensively also.
There are plenty of ways to incentivize the creation of information. We can pay people to create stuff directly, grant them honors, extend special privilages. If copyright was the only incentive for creation, FreeBSD wouldn't exist.
More to the point, copyright isn't very good at creating public works.
How many other alternate systems of incentives have been squashed by clinging to copyright?
-- this is not a
Um, didn't the railroads create a need for the federal government to enforce standardized time zoned. For another example of law applying to a specific information technology, what about the regulation of radio in the early 20th century to reduce interferance.
Trains were not a revolution, just an evolution. People already knew how to get from point a to point b, a train just made the process faster. There's no reason laws for trains would need to be made.
... apply the same law to the net as you would to physical copies of the same crap in the real world.
It could be argued that "the internet is not a revolution, just an evolution. People already knew how to communicate with one another across great distances, the internet just made the process faster. There's no reason laws for the internet would need to be made."
Do we need laws to govern the internet? I would say that it is unlikely that we do, and that at the very least we need to proceed very, very carefully. Far better to pass a needed law too late, than to pass unnecessary, and harmful, legislation too early.
Do we need to restrict speech on the internet? No, not any more than we need to in real life.
What about child pornography? Already illegal
What about commerce? Our existing interstate commerce laws, tax regimes, etc. are more than sufficient and can be applied equally to online commerce as they are to brick and morter commerce. Buying something online should be no different, legally, than picking up the phone and ordering someting by voice.
What about 'online stalking.?' No different than making obscene or prank phone calls in the real world, or verbally harassing someone in person
What about the children?!? They are in no greater danger than they are when they are out on a public street, and just like in the physical world, it is the parent's responsibility to see to their children's safety, not the government, and certainly not at the expense of my constitutional rights.
I could go on and list virtually every subject which gets raised WRT the "need" to regulate the internet, and in each case point out that the application of existing law is more than sufficient to keep society on roughly the same even keel it has generally been all along.
The problem is that the media and copyright cartels see an opportunity to grab immense power, power that the courts (and even congress) has deliberately denied them in the past. However, the ludditism of Hollywood, the digital illiteracy of congress, and the legalized bribery we call campaign financing have all come together to produce a very dangerous mixture of political cluelessness and political will that may just result in these very powers being extended, with manditory DRM technology enshringing Microsoft's desktop monopoly into law and granting those very same Hollywood Luddites veto powers over the deployment of all new consumer technologies.
This should scare the shit out of any clear thinking individual.
You can steal something, without depriving it's owner of his property.
No, you can't. That sentance is in direct conflict with the very definition of stealing, as has been rehashed here and elsewhere numerous times.
Copyright Violation is not theft. It is not recognized as theft by the law or by any of the freely accessible dictionaries online.
In fact, the only place where copyright violation is considered theft is in the minds, and newspeak, of the copyright cartels, and those who thoughtlessly echo their propoganda.
Even in a nation increasingly afflicted with fictitious legal absurdities (like equating a corporation with a real, thinking, breathing person) we haven't even gone so far as to equate copyright violation and theft.
We should not engage in the absurd, legal fiction that communication over the internet is somehow fundamentally different than communication by telegraph, telephone, fax, snail mail, or an in person meeting over lunch. Fundamentally it isn't any different, it is merely more effecient.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Out on the manufacturing end, a server being down really does mean people sitting around waiting for it to come back up so they can do their jobs. We've got three people working full time just entering the parts list and build instructions for new boards we're going to build into the database - if it's off-line, they are twiddling their thumbs. Purchasers might work off their printouts for a while, but pretty soon they are going to need the database to see what parts have to be ordered. And if it's down for more than a few hours, the production line itself will grind to a halt, for lack of the printouts to start a new job.
Now, this is a server on an _internal_ net, quite safe from internet hackers and e-mail viruses. If it crashes for more than a few minutes, it's because corporate management was too cheap to buy redundant hardware, or to arrange an alternate connection from the plants to the server at HQ for when a backhoe hits the T1 trunk. But every time the Windows NT (or 2000) OS on the server takes a dump, we have dozens of people getting an extra coffee break, and that adds up.
"But I think the anti-exceptionalists have a compelling point: it is not sufficient to just walk into every cyberlaw case and whine "but the Internet is different!!!".
In one sense the internet IS different - it DOESN'T EXIST in a legal sense. The "Internet" is a communication means. It only intersects humans - the real object of laws is human behavior, after all - at it's interfaces. A human commits fraud, seduces a minor, sells stolen property, at a keyboard, printer, screen, and does it for real life spoils - money, sex, respect. It's what the actual human beings do at those interfaces that should be judged, not the means by which they do it. As for laws needing to change - no shit, they always need to change, and do change.
The internet is "different" from a legal standpoint just as the dot-economy was "different" from the old economy: just a different way for the unscrupulous to do things they wouldn't otherwise be allowed to do.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson