Directed at the 4C group:
What sort of legal resources do you intend to
devote towards defending yourselves as businesses and consumers start suffering damage from being unable to use drives that have been intentionally engineered this way.
Folks who are technologically enabled look to technology to solve
problems, improve life, whatever. Lawyers look to legal
remedies. Legislators, (mostly lawyers), do what they have been
trained to do when solving problems. Lawyers (particularly those of
the political persuasion), tend not to be technologically
enabled. That, to me, is the crux of the problem. Legal remedies are
not the only (and often not the best) way to solve problems. Life
becomes more difficult and complex because of this huge and ever
increasing load of laws created to address specific technologically
spawned issues.
Instead of solutions, we get legislative junk which doesn't fix the
problem, conflicts with other laws (call this job security if you are
a lawyer), has immediate unintended side effects (which can be large
and onerous), becomes obsolete (embarrassing, but still lending to
making life overly complex).
An example of lame legislation:
Laws were passed making it illegal to manufacture radios that are
capable of receiving frequencies used by analog cell phones. This
legislation was later "enhanced" to prevent selling the same sort of
radios, or the manufacture of radios that are capable of being modified
to receive those frequencies. All this to provide the illusion of
privacy to cell phone users. Years from now, when cell phones evolved
to some new type of wireless technology and have migrated to other
frequency bands this weird piece of legislation will still be hanging
around. Maybe our grandchildren (or children) will laugh at us.
The correct, technologically based solution is pretty obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
Thus encouraging content providers that get revenue from collecting info from ignoring the request (by default)
Directed at the 4C group: What sort of legal resources do you intend to devote towards defending yourselves as businesses and consumers start suffering damage from being unable to use drives that have been intentionally engineered this way.
Folks who are technologically enabled look to technology to solve
problems, improve life, whatever. Lawyers look to legal
remedies. Legislators, (mostly lawyers), do what they have been
trained to do when solving problems. Lawyers (particularly those of
the political persuasion), tend not to be technologically
enabled. That, to me, is the crux of the problem. Legal remedies are
not the only (and often not the best) way to solve problems. Life
becomes more difficult and complex because of this huge and ever
increasing load of laws created to address specific technologically
spawned issues.
Instead of solutions, we get legislative junk which doesn't fix the
problem, conflicts with other laws (call this job security if you are
a lawyer), has immediate unintended side effects (which can be large
and onerous), becomes obsolete (embarrassing, but still lending to
making life overly complex).
An example of lame legislation:
Laws were passed making it illegal to manufacture radios that are
capable of receiving frequencies used by analog cell phones. This
legislation was later "enhanced" to prevent selling the same sort of
radios, or the manufacture of radios that are capable of being modified
to receive those frequencies. All this to provide the illusion of
privacy to cell phone users. Years from now, when cell phones evolved
to some new type of wireless technology and have migrated to other
frequency bands this weird piece of legislation will still be hanging
around. Maybe our grandchildren (or children) will laugh at us.
The correct, technologically based solution is pretty obvious.