So perhaps we need a third word. Morality is the innate understanding of "right and wrong" (don't kill your family). Ethics are non-innate, rational principles defining "right and wrong" (don't be misleading on your quarterly statements). Something Else is the non-rational, non-innate community- or religion-driven principles defining "right and wrong" (don't be homosexual).
Absolutely. I was trying to point out that an act of self-sacrifice is different from an act of accepting greater (selfless) risk when others are in danger. It's not self-sacrifice if you have no concept of self and no concept of sacrifice, even though your instinctive need to take on additional risk causes you to lose your life.
I don't think we're saying different things. I'm not suggesting squirrels are "automatons", only that they do not exercise rational thought and decide to take steps to sacrifice their own lives. There is no evidence that there exists any sort of emotion or instinct in any species that represents a need to terminate one's own life, only instincts/emotions that drive one to take selfless risks. So despite the fact that genes can be the drivers behind selfless instinct, this still isn't an argument for self-sacrifice, only a tendency to accept greater risk in the face of danger.
The difference, though, between squirrels sacrificing themselves for the good of the group, and a human doing the same thing, is that the squirrels almost certainly don't realize the consequences of their action. They're acting instinctively (because, for animals, there's little else).
Don't confuse all forms of morality with a rational thought process. The non-religious "morality" is far more instinctive. If you have to sit and think and ponder on the morality of something, or go to confession to see if something you did was immoral, that's not the type of "morality" being discussed as having a genetic/instinctive basis.
Few people would outright give their lives to save another, but many would risk their lives to try and save another. Heck, even dogs risk their lives to save their friends/owners. This is a survival trait in socialized species.
The "web" (the HTTP protocol) was designed, as a protocol built on top of TCP/IP, to inherently include and allow caching, mirroring, and other forms of content sharing, from the outset.
This isn't accurate. The HTTP protocol defines how caching should be performed, and lower-layer protocols like TCP and IP define how the HTTP messages should be sent around the Internet. Caching features are necessary and proper for the transmission of your content over the Internet. This is explicitly defined by US copyright law to be a non-infringing use.
HTTP does not, however, describe how "mirroring" should work. To HTTP, mirrored content is simply content. What is "mirrored" and what is not is a matter of human definition and interpretation and is not specified by HTTP. Nowhere in the HTTP specification is mirroring discussed as a possible use of HTTP, much less a mechanism necessary for HTTP content to be distributed. But even if it were, US copyright law makes no infringement exception for this type of use, so it would still be grounds for a civil action.
You could make the same case with television programs. They're broadcast over the public airwaves, available to all. Non-airwave providers like cable, satellite and IPTV must necessary "store and forward" programming. On-demand services will even go so far as to mirror the content (something that HTTP does not specify) so that it can be rebroadcasted to subscribers. That does not, however, grant you license to mirror and redistribute that content merely because you want to call yourself an archiver.
There are two ways to be sure that advertising published with your content remains connected to it as it (legally) propagates in HTTP-land:
Agreed (more or less). Unfortunately, none of this has anything to do with copyright law. You can't just disregard the law whenever it seems undesirable in combination with your planned use of a new technology. That's what the legislature is for. Just because someone elects not to take the best technical route to protect their content doesn't mean it's open season on their rights as protected by law. They don't lose their rights by publishing their work, regardless of how they go about it. That sort of defeats the purpose of copyright.
Clearly you have no concept of "enterprise scale", so I don't think any of my arguments are going to mean anything to you. Come back when you've actually spent time in an IT shop with a billion dollars worth of high-end servers spread across a hundred subnets generating thousands of dollars of revenue a minute.
I believe IT is different because a good development process is more than just keeping your head down and pumping out code. Managers of a project usually don't care how the code is produced, so long as it meets business requirements. There's usually nothing motivating the developer to code according to best practices or to build something in a way that future projects can benefit from it. Development is siloed to that specific project and code is written to the very specific requirements of that project. The programmers that write the code frequently have no say in the design and literally just pump out code by a deadline.
This process differs from a mail room because mail room guys aren't expected and have no opportunity to consider better ways of delivering mail, or of delivering mail in such a way that the next guys delivering the mail can do it more efficiency. It doesn't matter that the mail guys are slow, inefficient, or sloppy in their delivery, so long as the mail gets delivered roughly on time to the right mailboxes, right? There's nothing wrong with that approach with mail delivery because there's no obvious way for a different approach to benefit the business.
In my experience (as an architect in the IT department of a major telecommunications company), the development of a project is tracked completely independently from the maintenance of the project. No quality metrics are assessed for projects that aren't related to the client's requirements. A developer isn't penalized when his applications require twice the maintenance costs of others. A different manager and a different budget deals with that. There's no incentive to do things any better. Likewise, a different manager and probably a different developer are going to be working on the next project, so there's no incentive to do things to help them. Once your project is done, it's done.
Even if you end up with a developer that wants to spend the extra time doing things right, and maybe packaging up a big component he wrote that could be used by others later on, the project manager has an incentive to discourage or prevent him from doing so, because that's extra work that's going to be charged against his project. Nobody will know that 10 future projects would see a cost savings, because that information isn't tracked, because managers don't consider that normal behavior. If the manager lets a developer do this "extra" work, he'll be the manager that went over budget and over deadline for no apparent benefit, and managers are held responsible for these factors.
Here, creativity should be intrinsic, when in fact it's discouraged.
The output of any IT team is driven by the goals, directives and management of the team.
I'm not convinced yet that we're saying anything differently here. IT has some unique properties that require some unique goals, directives and management, that seem to be non-obvious to managers from other organizations. It's entirely likely that well-managed IT departments may get this right, and I've just never come across a well-managed IT department. (I would think companies that are actually in business to produce software would approach this a little differently, since code quality is more closely tied to the bottom line, but IT departments in non-software companies tend to treat IT like any other organization, with the issues I mention above.)
While I am not very sympathetic to this woman at all, I think her real concern here is a real one. She's going about it stupidly, and this "contract" crap is lunacy, but archive.org does something fairly unique that I don't think has been challenged in court yet. It's not a search engine simply spidering and indexing content, it's actually reproducing a web site's content.
What if you made your revenue through advertising on your web site? And then people discovered they could get the same content from archive.org and for those people, you aren't seeing ad revenue. This would appear to be infringement of your copyrights (redistributing her content, in totality, without qualifying as fair use) that caused you to lose money.
On one hand, you have the ability (and responsibility) to mitigate the harm yourself, by using robots.txt or by asking archive.org to stop it. But on the other hand, what if a thousand archive.org copycat sites appeared tomorrow and did the same thing? Is it appropriate to require someone to "opt out" of what would ordinarily be considered copyright infringement? We already know how well the "opt out" approach works for spam.
Granted, there aren't a thousand archive.org sites out there today, and those sites that do exist seem to respect robots.txt, but if the legality of this approach does end up getting addressed by the courts, it would seem to be far more damaging to rule that archival sites should be allowed to reproduce/mirror a site's content without requiring permission first, because it would seem to open the door for abuse in the future.
I'm not sure I understand why people are thinking that she's trying to say they can't spider her site. Typical search engine behavior doesn't involve reproducing/redistributing/mirroring the site, which is what she seems to be pissed off about.
I think you may be missing his point. You and I are subject to the law. This includes both statutory law (written) and case law (precedent). If all we had to care about was statutory law, we would have no need for judges, since everything would be clear and trials would simply be fact-finding events.
Many statutes explicitly defer to case law to establish the boundaries of the situations defined by the statute. Terms like "reasonable", for example, require trial judges and/or juries to think about situations and come up with ways of drawing a line to define where something should or should not apply. This necessarily involves including local customs, conventions and standards. You cannot separate these things from statutory law. Courts do not practice one without including the other.
Why? If a company has a safe version that works just fine, why do they need a different version? They should be moving on to do the next thing.
From a business angle, this is the typical attitude and approach. The problem is that it isolates and compartmentalizes the entire effort (and its costs). Business types like this because it makes projects predictable. They know how much it costs to reinvent the wheel. So the programmers plow through the project, build something that creaks and barely holds itself together, and performs horribly. But it passes its tests, and additional hardware can be purchased to deal with the performance problems, so the company moves forward and onward.
And then when the application has problems, Someone Else has to fight the fires and we end up exactly where this article was suggesting.
You can't manage IT like other organizations. IT is all about creativity and collaboration. When you manage IT like an assembly line, you never get better at what you do. You just churn out widgets. Who cares that Bob's team built a widget already for that other project? They steamrolled through it and produced something hard to maintain and understand, and since we too are due date-driven, it's faster for us to reinvent it than retrofit their solution.
It is possible, however, that IT managers have actually considered all of this, and have determined that buzzwords like "reusability" and "componentization" aren't worth implementing, because it's cheaper to churn out shitty work that just barely meets business requirements than it is to produce good work, because the good work saves us less in the long run than just building something new from scratch and paying more to support it.
programmers have been allowed to be too creative, at least at the design level (I haven't seen their code) chucking in features that look neat (especially at exhibitions and demonstrations) that haven't properly been thought through.
At an enterprise level, programmers don't come up with features. Programmers code the features that the business/requirements types come up with. For many types of projects, programmers are not involved in the requirements phase of a project at all, and only if they're lucky, they might be brought in during the design phase. Commodity programmers are normally handed technical requirements, sometimes even an API, and told to code it. Programmers can't just add random features to an application without fully engaging the bureaucracy of the project.
Even when you consider software development companies instead of general IT organizations in non-software companies, the really interesting thought and planning is done by senior architects, not the bulk of the programmer work force.
How many "kid defaces wikipedia, media reports wikipedia is wrong" cases are we going to see? Haven't people figured out by now that Wikipedia is edited by the public, and might occasionally be vandalized or show inaccurate information? Why are we treating every instance of vandalism as though it were some major media-worthy event?
If anything, this just encourages more kiddies to go do the same thing to more visible entries. "What can we make up about President Bush? Maybe we can get it on CNN like Bobbie did last week!"
While I don't disagree with you in principle, the fact that self-remedies like robots.txt exist, and she elected not to use them, limits the damages she can claim in the lawsuit. If she wins, I'd be surprised if the award covers her legal expenses.
This goes for everyone archived by archive.org. You have the means (industry standard means, at that) to opt out, so it's not going to be economical to sue.
That the web would not work if proxies, routers, and caches did not routinely "break copyright".
Those things are necessary, proper and implied when you transmit information over the Internet. I don't think one could make an argument that the two situations are the same. The Internet Archive republishes, and if they don't have authorization to do so, they are infringing on the copyrights of the copyright holders.
However, given that it is trivial to "opt out" and remedy the harm of infringement yourself, by using robots.txt or explicitly asking them to stop republishing your content, it doesn't make a lot of sense to sue them unless you're just an asshole with money to blow on lawyers.
OK, so "vast majority" in terms of raw bit count - of course you're right. "Vast majority" in terms of pictures? Absolutely http(s)
Fair enough.
If your goal is to filter the Interweb, PICS labels were designed for this purpose,
Great. How many sites use that?
More than the number of sites that currently segregate HTTP content on different TCP ports.
But that really wasn't my point. I'm saying that the solution is superior, because it works with the design of the Internet. It doesn't try to slap arbitrary rules on how the Internet works to make it slightly more convenient for filtering software to work. This solution is bad because it's trivially circumvented and adds additional complexity to anyone designing a network for a content provider or a consumer. How many networks transparently proxy port 80 to let HTTP accesses work across NAT? Now they have to complicate their rules if they don't want to restrict access to items classified by the State of Utah as potentially harmful to children. "Meh, we don't really care to block it, but it's too much work to deal with these special cases."
or if you don't want to wait on sites to label, there's lots of filtering software out there.
And while I'm comfortable with my implementation and management of squid/dansguardian plus custom filters, most parents could not possibly figure out how that works. I work in IT at a Fortune 100 company, and most of my coworkers couldn't do it. (Outside of the small percentage of really geeky ones.)
I'm not talking about setting up a dedicated squid proxy doing your filtering. I'm talking about walking into Best Buy and purchasing a box of software marketed as filtering software for your PC.
These parents should make it clear that the demand exists, and ISPs will offer these services.
Most parents eyes glaze over when geeks start to talk about IP addresses. They are not informed enough to talk about PICS labels.
I'm not suggesting that parents architect the solution for the ISP. I'm suggesting that parents tell their ISP that they would like to see some sort of content filtering services. It would be up to the ISP to figure out how to implement that, be it with squid or some other solution. ISPs performing these services do exist, but they're usually smaller, more rural ISPs.
There frankly is little reason from a technical perspective that this would not be feasible.
This only suggests to me that you do not fully understand the ramifications of the decision. Changing a specific web server to operate on a port other than 80 is a trivial thing to do. There is nothing "infeasible" about this change. It's the effectiveness, side effects, and ramifications of the requirement that are the problem.
Current technology is pretty crappy when it comes to filtering, and it makes sense to me that passing some laws about how to characterize the content is an attempt to address the real issue.
Current technology (e.g. PICS) isn't crappy at all. It works very well. The problem is that few providers implement it. What I'm trying to say isn't that laws shouldn't be written. If a community wants to pass a law that is intended to make filtering easier, I'm all for that. But legislating a poor technical solution (especially when a good technical solution already exists) is just bad lawmaking. If you want to legislate anything, legislate this:
Browsers sold in the state of Utah must support PICS filtering
The State of Utah will set up a PICS-based ratings bureau
Pornographic web sites hosted in the state of Utah must carry a PICS-based rating from the State of Utah
Though, having a rational basis in law (i.e., sufficient power to legislate the thing you are legislating) is different from being a rational law (i.e., a law solving a legitimate problem). The latter was really the point of the discussion.
No, they don't. The law simply must be within the scope of what the legislature is allowed to legislate, which, for all intents and purposes, simply means it can't be unconstitutional. Legislators aren't likely to pass irrational laws, but there is nothing built into the system to prevent it.
Porn providers don't have to lie. PICS works without their cooperation.
If you're going to try to set up a "child-safe" browsing experience, you're probably going to check the box that forbids access to unrated sites. Ratings can act as a whitelist just as easily as they can a blacklist.
Porn sites that explicitly label their sites as non-porn sites are acting with malicious intent, and this is a different problem that has a different solution. (PICS ratings bureaus can also require that the rating be digitally signed, or require that the browser ask the bureau for guidance rather than trusting what the site provided.)
I think you lack a historical context here. Long ago, there was no separation of church and state. The morality of the people was defined by the law of the church. The law of the land reflected this. This was not a coincidence.
It so happens that many forms of religious morality can also be logically defensible, making the subsequent law of the land sufficiently secular, but not all of today's laws are as independent from a moral or religious foundation as you seem to think (see ongoing controversy about marriage).
Legislators are not emotionless, moral-less, robotic automatons. Laws in the US are deemed valid by the courts so long as they do not violate the US constitution (and specific to the religious case, they cannot promote [a] religion). Legislators can pass any law they want so long as it passes this test. It should be obvious that religion-based morals guide the desire of the majority of the populace, and the actions of the legislators reflect that desire of the populace. While many laws (but usually regulation) have rational, logical foundations, that is not a prerequisite for a law, and many most certainly do not.
Slashdot Mirror
So perhaps we need a third word. Morality is the innate understanding of "right and wrong" (don't kill your family). Ethics are non-innate, rational principles defining "right and wrong" (don't be misleading on your quarterly statements). Something Else is the non-rational, non-innate community- or religion-driven principles defining "right and wrong" (don't be homosexual).
Absolutely. I was trying to point out that an act of self-sacrifice is different from an act of accepting greater (selfless) risk when others are in danger. It's not self-sacrifice if you have no concept of self and no concept of sacrifice, even though your instinctive need to take on additional risk causes you to lose your life.
I don't think we're saying different things. I'm not suggesting squirrels are "automatons", only that they do not exercise rational thought and decide to take steps to sacrifice their own lives. There is no evidence that there exists any sort of emotion or instinct in any species that represents a need to terminate one's own life, only instincts/emotions that drive one to take selfless risks. So despite the fact that genes can be the drivers behind selfless instinct, this still isn't an argument for self-sacrifice, only a tendency to accept greater risk in the face of danger.
The difference, though, between squirrels sacrificing themselves for the good of the group, and a human doing the same thing, is that the squirrels almost certainly don't realize the consequences of their action. They're acting instinctively (because, for animals, there's little else).
I think it's all the same thing.
Don't confuse all forms of morality with a rational thought process. The non-religious "morality" is far more instinctive. If you have to sit and think and ponder on the morality of something, or go to confession to see if something you did was immoral, that's not the type of "morality" being discussed as having a genetic/instinctive basis.
Few people would outright give their lives to save another, but many would risk their lives to try and save another. Heck, even dogs risk their lives to save their friends/owners. This is a survival trait in socialized species.
This isn't accurate. The HTTP protocol defines how caching should be performed, and lower-layer protocols like TCP and IP define how the HTTP messages should be sent around the Internet. Caching features are necessary and proper for the transmission of your content over the Internet. This is explicitly defined by US copyright law to be a non-infringing use.
HTTP does not, however, describe how "mirroring" should work. To HTTP, mirrored content is simply content. What is "mirrored" and what is not is a matter of human definition and interpretation and is not specified by HTTP. Nowhere in the HTTP specification is mirroring discussed as a possible use of HTTP, much less a mechanism necessary for HTTP content to be distributed. But even if it were, US copyright law makes no infringement exception for this type of use, so it would still be grounds for a civil action.
You could make the same case with television programs. They're broadcast over the public airwaves, available to all. Non-airwave providers like cable, satellite and IPTV must necessary "store and forward" programming. On-demand services will even go so far as to mirror the content (something that HTTP does not specify) so that it can be rebroadcasted to subscribers. That does not, however, grant you license to mirror and redistribute that content merely because you want to call yourself an archiver.
Agreed (more or less). Unfortunately, none of this has anything to do with copyright law. You can't just disregard the law whenever it seems undesirable in combination with your planned use of a new technology. That's what the legislature is for. Just because someone elects not to take the best technical route to protect their content doesn't mean it's open season on their rights as protected by law. They don't lose their rights by publishing their work, regardless of how they go about it. That sort of defeats the purpose of copyright.
Clearly you have no concept of "enterprise scale", so I don't think any of my arguments are going to mean anything to you. Come back when you've actually spent time in an IT shop with a billion dollars worth of high-end servers spread across a hundred subnets generating thousands of dollars of revenue a minute.
I believe IT is different because a good development process is more than just keeping your head down and pumping out code. Managers of a project usually don't care how the code is produced, so long as it meets business requirements. There's usually nothing motivating the developer to code according to best practices or to build something in a way that future projects can benefit from it. Development is siloed to that specific project and code is written to the very specific requirements of that project. The programmers that write the code frequently have no say in the design and literally just pump out code by a deadline.
This process differs from a mail room because mail room guys aren't expected and have no opportunity to consider better ways of delivering mail, or of delivering mail in such a way that the next guys delivering the mail can do it more efficiency. It doesn't matter that the mail guys are slow, inefficient, or sloppy in their delivery, so long as the mail gets delivered roughly on time to the right mailboxes, right? There's nothing wrong with that approach with mail delivery because there's no obvious way for a different approach to benefit the business.
In my experience (as an architect in the IT department of a major telecommunications company), the development of a project is tracked completely independently from the maintenance of the project. No quality metrics are assessed for projects that aren't related to the client's requirements. A developer isn't penalized when his applications require twice the maintenance costs of others. A different manager and a different budget deals with that. There's no incentive to do things any better. Likewise, a different manager and probably a different developer are going to be working on the next project, so there's no incentive to do things to help them. Once your project is done, it's done.
Even if you end up with a developer that wants to spend the extra time doing things right, and maybe packaging up a big component he wrote that could be used by others later on, the project manager has an incentive to discourage or prevent him from doing so, because that's extra work that's going to be charged against his project. Nobody will know that 10 future projects would see a cost savings, because that information isn't tracked, because managers don't consider that normal behavior. If the manager lets a developer do this "extra" work, he'll be the manager that went over budget and over deadline for no apparent benefit, and managers are held responsible for these factors.
Here, creativity should be intrinsic, when in fact it's discouraged.
I'm not convinced yet that we're saying anything differently here. IT has some unique properties that require some unique goals, directives and management, that seem to be non-obvious to managers from other organizations. It's entirely likely that well-managed IT departments may get this right, and I've just never come across a well-managed IT department. (I would think companies that are actually in business to produce software would approach this a little differently, since code quality is more closely tied to the bottom line, but IT departments in non-software companies tend to treat IT like any other organization, with the issues I mention above.)
While I am not very sympathetic to this woman at all, I think her real concern here is a real one. She's going about it stupidly, and this "contract" crap is lunacy, but archive.org does something fairly unique that I don't think has been challenged in court yet. It's not a search engine simply spidering and indexing content, it's actually reproducing a web site's content.
What if you made your revenue through advertising on your web site? And then people discovered they could get the same content from archive.org and for those people, you aren't seeing ad revenue. This would appear to be infringement of your copyrights (redistributing her content, in totality, without qualifying as fair use) that caused you to lose money.
On one hand, you have the ability (and responsibility) to mitigate the harm yourself, by using robots.txt or by asking archive.org to stop it. But on the other hand, what if a thousand archive.org copycat sites appeared tomorrow and did the same thing? Is it appropriate to require someone to "opt out" of what would ordinarily be considered copyright infringement? We already know how well the "opt out" approach works for spam.
Granted, there aren't a thousand archive.org sites out there today, and those sites that do exist seem to respect robots.txt, but if the legality of this approach does end up getting addressed by the courts, it would seem to be far more damaging to rule that archival sites should be allowed to reproduce/mirror a site's content without requiring permission first, because it would seem to open the door for abuse in the future.
I'm not sure I understand why people are thinking that she's trying to say they can't spider her site. Typical search engine behavior doesn't involve reproducing/redistributing/mirroring the site, which is what she seems to be pissed off about.
I think you may be missing his point. You and I are subject to the law. This includes both statutory law (written) and case law (precedent). If all we had to care about was statutory law, we would have no need for judges, since everything would be clear and trials would simply be fact-finding events.
Many statutes explicitly defer to case law to establish the boundaries of the situations defined by the statute. Terms like "reasonable", for example, require trial judges and/or juries to think about situations and come up with ways of drawing a line to define where something should or should not apply. This necessarily involves including local customs, conventions and standards. You cannot separate these things from statutory law. Courts do not practice one without including the other.
From a business angle, this is the typical attitude and approach. The problem is that it isolates and compartmentalizes the entire effort (and its costs). Business types like this because it makes projects predictable. They know how much it costs to reinvent the wheel. So the programmers plow through the project, build something that creaks and barely holds itself together, and performs horribly. But it passes its tests, and additional hardware can be purchased to deal with the performance problems, so the company moves forward and onward.
And then when the application has problems, Someone Else has to fight the fires and we end up exactly where this article was suggesting.
You can't manage IT like other organizations. IT is all about creativity and collaboration. When you manage IT like an assembly line, you never get better at what you do. You just churn out widgets. Who cares that Bob's team built a widget already for that other project? They steamrolled through it and produced something hard to maintain and understand, and since we too are due date-driven, it's faster for us to reinvent it than retrofit their solution.
It is possible, however, that IT managers have actually considered all of this, and have determined that buzzwords like "reusability" and "componentization" aren't worth implementing, because it's cheaper to churn out shitty work that just barely meets business requirements than it is to produce good work, because the good work saves us less in the long run than just building something new from scratch and paying more to support it.
At an enterprise level, programmers don't come up with features. Programmers code the features that the business/requirements types come up with. For many types of projects, programmers are not involved in the requirements phase of a project at all, and only if they're lucky, they might be brought in during the design phase. Commodity programmers are normally handed technical requirements, sometimes even an API, and told to code it. Programmers can't just add random features to an application without fully engaging the bureaucracy of the project.
Even when you consider software development companies instead of general IT organizations in non-software companies, the really interesting thought and planning is done by senior architects, not the bulk of the programmer work force.
This, too, is a problem, in my opinion.
Unfortunately, the Internet Archive is not a library, and US copyright law already deals (explicitly) with caching and networks: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#512
If the proxies are acting properly, and respecting the caching functions of HTTP, they're doing nothing wrong.
If you want to discuss this further, please review http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#512 (512 (b) specifically) first.
Fine, don't believe me. Read the law yourself or talk to a lawyer: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#512
How many "kid defaces wikipedia, media reports wikipedia is wrong" cases are we going to see? Haven't people figured out by now that Wikipedia is edited by the public, and might occasionally be vandalized or show inaccurate information? Why are we treating every instance of vandalism as though it were some major media-worthy event?
If anything, this just encourages more kiddies to go do the same thing to more visible entries. "What can we make up about President Bush? Maybe we can get it on CNN like Bobbie did last week!"
While I don't disagree with you in principle, the fact that self-remedies like robots.txt exist, and she elected not to use them, limits the damages she can claim in the lawsuit. If she wins, I'd be surprised if the award covers her legal expenses.
This goes for everyone archived by archive.org. You have the means (industry standard means, at that) to opt out, so it's not going to be economical to sue.
Those things are necessary, proper and implied when you transmit information over the Internet. I don't think one could make an argument that the two situations are the same. The Internet Archive republishes, and if they don't have authorization to do so, they are infringing on the copyrights of the copyright holders.
However, given that it is trivial to "opt out" and remedy the harm of infringement yourself, by using robots.txt or explicitly asking them to stop republishing your content, it doesn't make a lot of sense to sue them unless you're just an asshole with money to blow on lawyers.
Fair enough.
More than the number of sites that currently segregate HTTP content on different TCP ports.
But that really wasn't my point. I'm saying that the solution is superior, because it works with the design of the Internet. It doesn't try to slap arbitrary rules on how the Internet works to make it slightly more convenient for filtering software to work. This solution is bad because it's trivially circumvented and adds additional complexity to anyone designing a network for a content provider or a consumer. How many networks transparently proxy port 80 to let HTTP accesses work across NAT? Now they have to complicate their rules if they don't want to restrict access to items classified by the State of Utah as potentially harmful to children. "Meh, we don't really care to block it, but it's too much work to deal with these special cases."
I'm not talking about setting up a dedicated squid proxy doing your filtering. I'm talking about walking into Best Buy and purchasing a box of software marketed as filtering software for your PC.
I'm not suggesting that parents architect the solution for the ISP. I'm suggesting that parents tell their ISP that they would like to see some sort of content filtering services. It would be up to the ISP to figure out how to implement that, be it with squid or some other solution. ISPs performing these services do exist, but they're usually smaller, more rural ISPs.
This only suggests to me that you do not fully understand the ramifications of the decision. Changing a specific web server to operate on a port other than 80 is a trivial thing to do. There is nothing "infeasible" about this change. It's the effectiveness, side effects, and ramifications of the requirement that are the problem.
Current technology (e.g. PICS) isn't crappy at all. It works very well. The problem is that few providers implement it. What I'm trying to say isn't that laws shouldn't be written. If a community wants to pass a law that is intended to make filtering easier, I'm all for that. But legislating a poor technical solution (especially when a good technical solution already exists) is just bad lawmaking. If you want to legislate anything, legislate this:
This gives par
Though, having a rational basis in law (i.e., sufficient power to legislate the thing you are legislating) is different from being a rational law (i.e., a law solving a legitimate problem). The latter was really the point of the discussion.
Fair enough.
No, they don't. The law simply must be within the scope of what the legislature is allowed to legislate, which, for all intents and purposes, simply means it can't be unconstitutional. Legislators aren't likely to pass irrational laws, but there is nothing built into the system to prevent it.
Porn providers don't have to lie. PICS works without their cooperation.
If you're going to try to set up a "child-safe" browsing experience, you're probably going to check the box that forbids access to unrated sites. Ratings can act as a whitelist just as easily as they can a blacklist.
Porn sites that explicitly label their sites as non-porn sites are acting with malicious intent, and this is a different problem that has a different solution. (PICS ratings bureaus can also require that the rating be digitally signed, or require that the browser ask the bureau for guidance rather than trusting what the site provided.)
I think you lack a historical context here. Long ago, there was no separation of church and state. The morality of the people was defined by the law of the church. The law of the land reflected this. This was not a coincidence.
It so happens that many forms of religious morality can also be logically defensible, making the subsequent law of the land sufficiently secular, but not all of today's laws are as independent from a moral or religious foundation as you seem to think (see ongoing controversy about marriage).
Legislators are not emotionless, moral-less, robotic automatons. Laws in the US are deemed valid by the courts so long as they do not violate the US constitution (and specific to the religious case, they cannot promote [a] religion). Legislators can pass any law they want so long as it passes this test. It should be obvious that religion-based morals guide the desire of the majority of the populace, and the actions of the legislators reflect that desire of the populace. While many laws (but usually regulation) have rational, logical foundations, that is not a prerequisite for a law, and many most certainly do not.