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Lying Online No Longer a Crime In Rhode Island
stevegee58 writes "In a sudden outbreak of common sense, Rhode Island repealed an obscure law enacted in 1989 that made it a crime to lie in online postings. Violations of this law carried a maximum penalty of $500 and up to a year in prison. From the article: '"This law made virtually the entire population of Rhode Island a criminal," said Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island American Civil Liberties Union. "When this bill was enacted nobody had any idea what its ramifications were. Telling fibs may be wrong, but it shouldn't be criminal activity." The law aimed to stop fraud, con artists and scammers, but also outlawed the "transmission of false data" regardless of whether liars stood to profit from their deception or not.'"
Bakeries across the state would have a problem. At least the ones that make cake...
One wonders if this would have covered all of those "Campaign Promises" made by politicians in their zeal to get elected... or any of the other spewage which regularly emanates from their persons...??? If so, this law might have had a useful purpose after all. What would it take to get such a law enacted in Washington D.C.?
Is that actually true? Because I read it online in a blog from Rhode Island...
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
I suspect that it wouldn't have stood up in court anyway. Surely it would be unconstitutional. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to lie.
Well, I for one have never lied on the internet!
"Does this make me look fat?"
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; ..."
One part of protecting one's privacy is not to give real data on registration forms. Technically, a sort of lying.
The common sense is that most of the consequences that can come from lying (betrayal, fraud etc.pp.) are already punishable, and this law would then just penalize those lies which had no further consequences. And the common sense was that about everything smalltalk can be deconstructed to be purely lying: "Good Morning". We lie all the time, imagine contractual talks without small or big lies ("$1000 will be my last offer.", and then they finally agree to $1100). Why this should be punishable per se if it happens online is not clear.
RI resident here...
Let me think about what we had back in 1989...
In South County RI, we had a handful of BBSes and URI's access to Bitnet if you had an academic account or begged for one, not even the Internet. Everyone was still at 300, 1200, and a few at 2400, and almost nobody had v32 (9600bps) modems because they were new in 1989 and ridiculously expensive.
If you had more money than sense, you subscribed to CompuServe, Prodigy, or GEnie (to be called AOL later) and paid by the minute and also paid for the long distance to the Warwick or Providence numbers (Yay in-state long distance in a state only 47 miles the long way!). BBSes were free.
The community was so small. You could literally visit all the boards from Block Island to East Greenwich and read all the messages in an hour if you ignored the redialling. We also didn't have OmniNet or LOCNet yet to tie north/south RI and the Islands/East Bay together yet. That had to wait for the heyday of BBSes in the early 90s, and even then, you could fit everyone who cared about OmniNet administration (north AND south!) into one Baskin Robbins ice cream parlor (we couldn't meet at Casey's because half of everyone was under-age).
And everyone knew each other.
There wasn't much to lie about online at all. Really, there wasn't. It puzzles me as to what prompted this legislation that far back.
The only big whopper of a lie I remember was Matt saying his BBS couldn't be hacked, some time in the early 90s. This was a challenge to everyone at the meeting and pissed off his co-sys, who gave him up to the rest of us hyenas.
Shout out to LizardKing on here, who is the only RIer I know on here from that era.
--
BMO
Someones breaking out Hume rather early.
Clearly lying is a morally un-praiseworthy activity since lying is most likely to harm you in the long run while also harming the general good. Lying benefits no one except the person telling the lie (making it a selfish act) and always harms at least one other person. It is, at best, a more or less neutral act, and more often then not, an un-praiseworthy moral activity.
It was one of many examples of democracies trying to "simplify" our decisions with a rule or law. If you ask a majority of people what should be "allowed" they will create a set of rules which not even Nazis and Maoists can successfully regulate. Three strikes and you're out laws lead to medical marijuana and Supreme Court "cruel and unusual" laws overturned. Society desperately needs "depth perception", the ability to implement laws and regulation based on 1) priority of risk, and 2) feasibility of regulating. The "risks" posed by X (lying on the internet, gay or interracial marriage, immigration, piracy, smoking pot) are nothing compared to the risk of society with a power to ban them or the power of the mafia to corrupt that regulation. Society's cognitive risk dissonance has created thousands of laws just as silly as this Rhode Island example. We need to start at the top and prioritize real risks and feasible enforcement.
Gently reply
When I teach my child about why she shouldn't lie, what I tell her is this:
Yes, when you lie, your peers will punish you when they find out. But that's not the real issue.
When you're a liar, you're projecting a false self as a problem solving tool. This forces you to keep multiple versions of reality in your head.
Carried systematically across a lifetime, this will cause you to become a person made up of many people, none of whom are you.
Eventually, you will not know who you are, or what you believe, and when you meet a strong person with integrity, you will be unable to hold a form of your own in their presence.
This is a road to hell on earth, a hell contained within ones own mind, where the wind can blow your identity to and fro at a moments notice, and you live in a constant state of fearful reactionary adjustment of self.
What it all boils down to is this: people are not worth lying to.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
While I know that some companies would like to push this notion on everybody, this probably depends on where a person lives, and whether or not violating terms of an EULA is considered to be against the law. In most places, afaik, it is not... and *CERTAINLY* does not cause every use to be copyright infringement... it only causes the usages to be unauthorized. Copyright infringement involves unauthorized copies, not unauthorized use.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
He's wrong, to boot. As a former Rhode Islander I can say we were mostly all criminals before this law was enacted anyway.