The administration could fix it, or at least ameliorate it, but it would take some leadership from the president and attorney general, something that’s been in short supply.
17 thoughts on “The Worst Law In Technology”
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The administration could fix it, or at least ameliorate it, but it would take some leadership from the president and attorney general, something that’s been in short supply.
Comments are closed.
The worst tech law is ITAR.
Maybe for the space industry. This is more far reaching.
ITAR does extend beyond the space industry. Encryption methods apparently are also covered, for example. And any other technology the appropriate bureaucrats in the State Department decide should be covered by ITAR.
As to the Obama administration’s inaction on this subject, it’s worth remembering that this is the price for having Biden on the ticket. He may be grossly incompetent, but his real baggage are the lobbyists for IP special interests.
The $500,000 fine for unlocking “your” phone falls under “cruel and unusual” in my mind.
Umm.. isn’t this the guy that broke laws with impunity because of his own perceived self importance? Suicide is too good for him.
It is sad he committed suicide. He had some good points about the availability of research and journals but he went about things the wrong way. He could have been a catalyst for change if his persistence and patience matched his determination.
It is likely he wouldn’t have faced the full sentence allowed under the law if he was found guilty. Should have stuck it out and paid the price for having convictions.
Every time I’ve looked at the open access issue I’ve seen nothing but economic ignoramuses. If no one owns something, no one takes care of it. But equally, if everyone owns something, no one has an incentive to take care of it. Of course, defenders are open access don’t really understand the concept of “own” anyway.
The question of ownership becomes more complicated when it comes to research paid for by tax dollars. If we paid for it, then we should have access. Private copyright and privately funded research are very different things from publically paid for research.
As publicly supported research, it was made available – via that web site. However downloading the entire database was a violation of the terms of service, and he certainly knew that.
The maintainers of that database had good reasons to prohibit making copies of the whole repository. For example, making additional copies publicly available on websites outside of their control means that bogus or unverified publications could be added, or publications modified or deleted, diminishing the value of the collection. That there is only one copy of the database makes its reliability and correctness the responsibility of the single maintainer, and there is no confusion as to which of many versions of the database is the “real” one, with the most up to date content.
As to whether he would get the maximum sentence, all the reasons that are cited as to why that maximum sentence would be extreme are exactly the reasons why his sentence, if he was convicted, would almost certainly have been much lighter.
Sorry, in my reply I forgot to close the “bold” tags that were only supposed to be on a couple of words. Nearly the entire text in bold doesn’t mean I was shouting, it just means I messed up the html.
The maintainers of that database had good reasons to prohibit making copies of the whole repository.
And what were those good reasons? It’s not JSTOR’s job to manage other peoples’ databases, just their own. If the database in question could handle people occasionally downloading all articles (which usually isn’t the case, that activity tends to be a vast load on a large database), then there’s no other good reason not to let people do that.
As I see it, if your job is to provide publicly available data, then you should have a means of providing the entire database at cost (say on a zillion USB sticks or such).
“As if to underline the point, last Thursday, federal prosecutors indicted that Matthew Keys, a social-media editor at Reuters, under the same law for helping with an online prank.”
Will the NewYorker call it a prank when their website gets hacked by anon? It is important not to just look at this as an isolated even but in the greater context of anon hacking, which may be for leftist ideals but doesn’t make it acceptable behavior. Anon has hurt more innocents by releasing their private information than they have hurt those big evil corporations.
This is the same way OWS was treated, the media explained away all their nefarious deeds by calling them pranks or mostly peaceful.
What would the NewYorker be saying if the TP were hacking websites?
What would the NewYorker be saying if the TP were hacking websites?
They’d be cheering the drone strikes on the perpetrators. Naturally.
Abuse of any law only happens when adults are not in charge. This is not the only power we should be taking out of government hands. The abuse of malicious hacking had been mitigated both before and after this law. The problem, once again (thank you Mr. Reagan) is government.
The law is ideally crafted to resist abuse, and make it obvious when it is misused by petulant children. The safe assumption is that there WILL be such children in charge at some time. Clear definitions help a lot here, but those apparently take too much work or skill for the average congress critter.
Leadership? Obama? You’re kidding, right?
This law is obviously to broad and too open ended. But the problem isn’t JUST this law, or any other law. The problem is Prosecutors who use the Law and the Legal System like a gunfighter notching the handle of his gun.
If a kid gets caught breaking a window with a sling shot. They take the sling shot and charge him with one count of having a “dangerous, improvised weapon”, then they count the GRAVEL in his parents drive way, before ADDING ON, 13M counts of “projectiles for an improvised weapon”. But it’s actually, 13M and 5 counts, if you add in the slingshot pellets he has in his pocket. And God help him, and his parents, if he gets caught crossing the school grounds, after breaking the window.
In the 21st Century, it’s probably, simply for the piling on efforts and every Prosecutor to make his bones, into Federal Statutes for being on ANY Gov’t owned land, even if it ISN’T owned by the Feds…er, us.
I have no problem with charging criminals, I am in no way soft on crime. But our legal system is supposed to be about fair treatment of even the most heinous criminals. Our Legal System is supposed to be about charging criminals, in levels comparable to the crimes or crimes, in levels of severity based on those crimes.
It’s NOT supposed to be about RETRIBUTION by some onerous bureaucracy, bent on over punishing the criminal, and scaring the plebes back under the thumb of the gov’t! If my history books were right, we fought, not just one, but TWO wars with England to get out from under that system of laws!