Something to think about here is that overly general laws tend to also arouse the ire of the federal courts. In terms of constitutional law, it is critical for a law to be narrowly tailored to its purpose, and to not have a broad-reaching scope that overreaches its stated purpose.
In this case, I gather that the stated purpose is to protect intellectual property claims. Unfortunately, the way the draft is written it has a number of unpleasant side effects.
1. The potential to have a chilling effect on Security research, as we have already seen in the case of the DMCA.
2. Effectively bars non-commercial developers from writing software that complies with the standards established by industry, since the licensing fees attached will no doubt be prohibitive to private individuals or not-for-profit groups. "Non-discriminatory licensing terms" does not include the inherent discrimination of high licensing fees.
3. Forces non-US interests to attempt to comply with the standards, as it bars the import of non-compliant devices. This provision gives an unfair advantage to US corporations, since non-US businesses will have no input into the standards that they will need to implement in order to sell their products in the US marketplace.
This is simply a layman's take on the overreaching nature of this draft. I would hope that electronic civil liberties groups will be all over this one. The fact that this one isn't being snuck into legislation by a congressional clerk should give the EFF and other groups a better chance to head it off before it comes to fruition.
Slashdot Mirror
Something to think about here is that overly general laws tend to also arouse the ire of the federal courts. In terms of constitutional law, it is critical for a law to be narrowly tailored to its purpose, and to not have a broad-reaching scope that overreaches its stated purpose.
In this case, I gather that the stated purpose is to protect intellectual property claims. Unfortunately, the way the draft is written it has a number of unpleasant side effects.
1. The potential to have a chilling effect on Security research, as we have already seen in the case of the DMCA.
2. Effectively bars non-commercial developers from writing software that complies with the standards established by industry, since the licensing fees attached will no doubt be prohibitive to private individuals or not-for-profit groups. "Non-discriminatory licensing terms" does not include the inherent discrimination of high licensing fees.
3. Forces non-US interests to attempt to comply with the standards, as it bars the import of non-compliant devices. This provision gives an unfair advantage to US corporations, since non-US businesses will have no input into the standards that they will need to implement in order to sell their products in the US marketplace.
This is simply a layman's take on the overreaching nature of this draft. I would hope that electronic civil liberties groups will be all over this one. The fact that this one isn't being snuck into legislation by a congressional clerk should give the EFF and other groups a better chance to head it off before it comes to fruition.