
Why Is It Rocket Science That Laws Should Apply Online Too? - Uncle_Sam
http://torrentfreak.com/why-is-it-rocket-science-that-laws-should-apply-online-too-110402/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Torrentfreak+%28Torrentfreak%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
======
pwg
To quote Bruce Schneier:

"trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not
wet." ( <http://www.schneier.com/essay-126.html> )

And that is what scares the current content industry. And that is why they
want such draconian laws applied to the Internet, when such laws, as the
author of the subject article accurately points out, would never fly in the
non-internet realm.

~~~
praptak
> [...] such laws, as the author of the subject article accurately points out,
> would never fly in the non-internet realm.

The logical conclusion is that the non-internet realm is actually enough to
make copyright unenforcible.Suppose the internet has been shut down. I can
still hand my neighbor a USB stick. I can still snail-mail my buddy an
external drive.

The intellectual "property" lobby knows that. That's why they wanted to push
something as ridiculous as the SSSCA. For those too young to remember, here's
the gist of it: _"It is unlawful to manufacture, import, offer to the public,
provide or otherwise traffic in any interactive digital device that does not
include and utilize certified security technologies"_ More here:
[http://xenon.stanford.edu/~ruchika/dmca/theFairyTaleGetsWors...](http://xenon.stanford.edu/~ruchika/dmca/theFairyTaleGetsWorse.html)

~~~
bigiain
"Suppose the internet has been shut down. I can still hand my neighbor a USB
stick. I can still snail-mail my buddy an external drive."

As I see things, there's an important difference there.

Just like home taping didn't kill the record industry, and videotapes didn't
kill the tv/movie industry, sharing usb sticks or hard drives with your circle
of friends isn't going to kill any creative industry either.

As is common with computers, the sheer difference in scale of digitally
sharing over the internet _does_ make a difference.

With physically sharing storage media, there's a small but not zero marginal
cost each time you share something. A few bucks worth of usb stick or a few
tens of dollars worth of hard drive, which you no longer have use of while
your friends has it or it's in transit. That's going to practically limit the
sphere of your sharing - think about your own social graph, how many of your
"facebook friends" would you actually send a drive full of tunes or movies to?
I know the subset of my friendlist that I'd go to the trouble to send a few
bucks worth of usb stick is a reasonably small portion of the people that
Facebook calls "my friends".

That's a _very_ different thing to what happens when you dump your entire
media collection into the /torrent directory on your always-on campus network
connected machine. The internet enables zero marginal cost sharing, which
inevitably leads to orders of magnitude wider sharing. I suspect the Dunbar
number of ~150 real social connections is the very top end of what most people
would consider to be a sensible sized physical-media-sharing-network, and
realistically most people would probably stop short at 10 or 15 individuals
you'd expend the effort to share with if sharing required you to actually send
real-but-small-cost atoms to do it.

(curiously, or perhaps obviously, these suspicions about sharing network sizes
closely map my personal experience ~30 years ago with sharing compact
cassettes and vinyl LPs in highschool in the early/mid '80s. There were 6 or 8
people who I'd lend/borrow LPs between, and perhaps a dozen more that I'd lend
or copy tapes for.)

~~~
zinkem
The record industry rose up to solve a problem: artists needed their music
recorded and distributed. Those problems are solved by computers and the
internet. It's so cheap to record an album these days its ridiculous, as
opposed to 40 years ago when you needed half a million dollars just for a tape
machine. The overhead to make music has gone down, and so should the price to
listen to it.

------
showsover
I might have missed it, but did he specify _whose_ laws should apply?

Say I send his postcard from Sweden to America, and it goes via China. Whose
laws apply?

~~~
rokhayakebe
Wherever the letter is at the moment the laws of that country will apply.

~~~
masterzora
I can't really argue that that doesn't make the most sense, but, at the same
time, I also find it kind of scary. In essence, I obviously choose the start
and end points of the transit, but I have no control over where my packets go
in between.

------
endtime
Bandwidth is so cheap that data/IP are effectively non-scarce. We've never
before written laws governing the exchange of non-scarce goods. So the old
laws often seem not to fit.

~~~
cabalamat
What's the betting that when replicators like reprap get good/useful,
traditional manufacturing industries will try to get them banned?

------
tzs
So, basically, they want privacy laws online to work similar to privacy laws
offline--so that they can ignore copyright laws online that they would not be
able to so easily ignore offline?

~~~
hxa7241
No, not quite. They/we want the same kind of justice so our fundamental
expectations or rights preserved -- and if that does not suit copyright, then
it is _copyright_ that must give way.

Of course it may not be easy to square the two. But the relative priority
really ought to be rather clear. Copyright as it is is only a _particular_
choice, but matters of personal freedom are things we take to be deeply
rooted, and not submissive to merely commercial expediency.

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
Copyright is actually more deeply rooted in the Constitution (of the US) than
those other rights; the Bill of Rights happened later, after all.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause>

~~~
DougWebb
Not exactly. The Bill of Rights was added later to explicitly identify a
number of the most important rights of the people. These were originally
implied; everything not mentioned in the Constitution is a right of the
people.

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
>everything not mentioned in the Constitution is a right of the people.

Prior to the Bill of Rights, that was not the case. As I mentioned elsewhere,
the "everything else is a right of the states or the people" clause is in the
tenth amendment.

Edit: AND in the Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution of
certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by
the people."

~~~
DougWebb
Yes, the 10th Amendment makes explicit the fact that all rights not mentioned
in the Constitution are inherent rights of the States and the People. This was
implicit before the Bill of Rights, but it lead to a lot of confusion. At the
time, most governments had all rights implicitly with a sovereign, and the
people only had the rights that were explicitly granted to them. Our founders
intended to flip that relationship, but since many people didn't get it, they
had to add the Bill of Rights. Unfortunately many people still don't get it,
despite what the 10th Amendment says.

------
Paulomus
"These are civil liberties that our forefathers fought, bled, and died to give
us."

The poster is Swedish. Sweden's last war was fought in 1814 to occupy Norway.
Before that it fought in the coalition against Napoleon so that it could
demand Norway in the peace settlement. Previous to that Sweden fought in the
Great Northern War of 1700-1721 to maintain and extend its Baltic empire and
in the 30 Years War to defend Protestantism in Germany and to seize the basis
for said empire.

I suggest that the existence of civil liberties and democracy in Sweden has
more to do with peaceful activism and good government that with bloodshed and
violent struggle.

~~~
ignifero
haha. bashing the swedes for their neutrality. classic

~~~
pyrhho
... I believe you are thinking of the Swiss.

~~~
ignifero
no, the Swedes

------
Xodarap
I have to say, I'm not smart enough to understand this "rocket science." Laws
exist because they accomplish the goals that we as a society want to
accomplish.

There's nothing intrinsically valuable about writing your name on a certain
piece of the envelope - it just helps us accomplish our goals of privacy, etc.
If changing technology means that we need new laws to accomplish our goals
then there's nothing wrong with that.

------
Goladus
Because exchange of information over the internet fits more existing models
than mail delivery, that's why it's a hard question to answer. It's a bit like
mail delivery, but also shares characteristics with radio and television
broadcasting, manufacturing, and distribution.

~~~
hxa7241
There is some truth there, but let us be clear about something:

The hard question to answer is how best to arrange cultural production. The
easy question to answer is whether we should surrender fundamental
expectations/rights to a few corporate interests.

------
Rhapso
This analogy seems a bit poor, The laws preserving the integrity of postal
service in most countries stem from the fact the government manages the post.

If the government managed the internet to the same degree perhaps the analogy
would hold. The question this begs is: Do you want the government to run the
internet versus provider companies?

------
zwischenzug
This guy's obviously never tried posting anything to Italy.

------
chegra
//Independently discovering all music and movie under

//a Tera-byte of data

for(int i=0; i < 2^(1099511627776x8); i++){

Node *binary = convert_to_binary(i);

write_raw(binary);

send_email_to_friends("I own number: %d".i);

}

Implicitly, they are claiming they own a number.

~~~
tzs
No, that is incorrect. The number produced above is not a copy of any
copyrighted work. You would in fact be free to distribute it with no risk at
all of liability for copyright infringement. Let's call your number S.

Yes, somewhere in S is a bit string that happens to match the bit string of
almost any particular encoding of almost any particular movie or musical
performance. If you just distribute S to someone, they have no way
practically, or even reasonably theoretically, to actually find those strings.

Now, if you gave a copy of S to someone AND told them "start at offset X and
take Y bits and save these as a file with the extension .mp3", and the result
of that matched a particular copyrighted piece of music then guess what--
copyright infringement (depending on how you found X and Y). Specifically, if
the procedure was to start with the copyrighted piece of music and somehow
search the string for it to determine X, then distributing (X,Y,S) would be
copyright infringement.

No one is claiming, even implicitly, to own S.

~~~
hasenj
Indeed the number itself does not necessarily infringe copyright.

A really simple example is to imagine giving the number "N" encoding a movie
in divx format to someone in the year 1995, since they have no means of
converting the number to a continuous stream of video and sound (a video
animation), the number is useless to them.

On the other hand, you can give them _the same movie_ encoded in an older
format (mpeg2?); this will be an entirely different number "Q" bearing almost
absolutely no relationship to "N", but it will still be the same movie.

The presence of different encoding formats is a proof that copyright does not
restrict what _number_ you reproduce.

This could be kinda worse though, because it could imply that copyright
restricts the distribution of ideas.

~~~
burgerbrain
The various numbers that represent the work in different formats would all be
related through a single mathematical property (in that when they are
processed with various algorithms, the results are all approximations of each
other). It's turtles^Wmath all the way down.

~~~
hasenj
Not necessarily so.

Consider a loss-less encoding represented by A: it can be encoded in a lossy-
manner in two different ways, one would produce B, the other would produce C.

Without know what A was, there's no way to link B to C.

Consider also that different versions of the same movie could different (hard-
coded) subtitles, extra/deleted scenes, different resolutions, etc.

If you consider all the different permutations of the movie and then consider
that each one can be encoded in many different ways (lossy encoding), you'll
see that there's no single number that can be said to represent the movie.

~~~
burgerbrain
I didn't say there is a single number, I said they all share a similar
mthematical property: when processed by there respective algorithms, then
processed again by another complex algorithm (you), they are seen to be
related.

If we have a lossy encoding so poor that you can no longer recognize it, then
I'm fine with saying it is "no longer that movie".

------
jister
I got confused with the title. Why is "IT" or "IN" Rocket....?

~~~
joelburget
It's not rocket, it's rocket science. I.E. a complex or difficult mental
exercise or field or study, used frequently in an ironic sense to suggest that
a task should be easy or simple because it is not rocket science. (definition
from wikipedia)

~~~
VB6_Foreverr
Why do people use this tired old cliche. Surely it's not heisenberg debugging
to come up with something other than rocket science (or brain surgery?)

~~~
kiiski
Because people don't know what "heisenberg debugging" (or whatever you use)
is? After all, your primary objective is not to be original, but to be
understood.

~~~
VB6_Foreverr
Point taken. What people should say is "it's easy" or "it's not difficult".

~~~
burgerbrain
Continue with that line of reasoning very far at all and you'll be left with
something that lacks any flavor or passion. Something very close to Newspeak.

What people _should_ say is what they _already_ say. English doesn't have a
central authority, it's defined by common usage.

------
ignifero
Analogies with the past are not a good guide. The internet is nothing like the
previous broadcast/communication mediums. Imho, we don't need to look back
into the old practices to create the laws of the digital realm. This is
uncharted territory . People need to step back, look at the broader picture
and figure out the new laws that will allow having a functioning economy in
the online world. In the process, the current content industry will have to
die, sorry

~~~
dwc
The partial truth of this leads to some major fallacies. There are some things
that good techies understand, like abstraction, that lead to more general
solutions. Laws on the books tend to be tied very closely with specific
implementations. Here's an example that's been with us for a long time: junk
fax laws v. spam emails. Junk faxes and spam are essentially the same problem,
but with different coefficients in the equation. What spam is _not_ is a whole
new problem never before encountered, requiring novel and special legislation.
By treating each technological innovation as completely unique, each
"solution" takes a NIH approach. This also provides a yet another venue for
special interest groups (MPAA, RIAA, et al) to advocate their agendas _on
every new issue_ even though the core ideas have already been explored.

Yes, the internet has given us true revolutions and more will come. But not
every issue is a unique special case, but rather many are new twists on old
themes.

~~~
joe_the_user
Good point and rundown of the situation but I'd say the expectation of a new
approach to law appearing will only be fallacious _if we let it be_ by
accepting the way things are going.

 _Laws on the books tend to be tied very closely with specific
implementations._

Yes, the law as it currently exist is based on being able to preserve
"differences that don't make a difference". It's developed incrementally,
inductively and by analogy. The phenomena of generic information, of
information that isn't tied to a physical manifestation, is anathema to the
whole English Common Law tradition, the basis of our system of laws. Is a
string of bits a song? a device for circumventing security? Hate Speech?
Protected Speech? The law as it exists needs to answer this and yet can't
answer this because the law needs a context and the free flow of information
implies there no set context.

And so the legal system is going to be either be further and further removed
from reality or institute an entirely totalitarian system to maintain its
expectations.

Because generic information really doesn't consist of a series of "new
devices" and "new contexts" but rather is a single, abstract and indivisible
process; _either every unique string of bits is free or it has an owner_ \-
which is it?

------
tkahn6
> When I write a letter to somebody, nobody has the right to intercept the
> letter in transit, break its seal and examine its contents unless I am under
> formal, individual and prior suspicion of a specific crime. In that case,
> law enforcement (and only them) may do this. Of course, I am never under any
> obligation to help anybody open and interpret my letters. It is perfectly
> reasonable to demand that this applies online as well.

I would be willing to bet that 90% of the readership of TorrentFreak have run
wireshark at one time or another.

~~~
ori_b
I would argue that unencrypted communication is the equivalent of sending a
postcard. There's no envelope or anything protecting the contents, so it's
hardly a crime if someone happens to see the contents while it's in transit.

If you don't want someone to see what you wrote, encrypt it. And yes, this
will take a massive amount of user reeducation.

~~~
elliottcarlson
There is a difference in passively trying to intercept unencrypted
communication and accidentally seeing a postcard in transit. It is illegal to
look in someone's mailbox and it's illegal to remove contents from someone's
mailbox to possibly read mail even without opening it. The points of contact
for a postcard are minimal and generally would only be by employees of the
postal service. I would argue that snooping on unencrypted communication would
still be a crime because the user made a passive decision to do so.

(I'm not preaching what to do or not to do - I'm no angel and have done my
share of deeds - but this is to point out what it really comes down to when
you compare analog and digital actions...)

~~~
nightpool
I would say using someone else's network is like giving them your mail to put
in your mailbox 'cause you're lazy. Using an unsecured public wireless
connection is like shouting to a friend across the park. The problem really is
that people think of a line to the internet as just a line to the internet, no
matter where it comes from or who it goes through, not considering that some
of their communications are public

~~~
elliottcarlson
Your focus is on public networks though. While the ratio of unsecured private
networks are slowly dwindling, there are plenty still out there. It could be
argued that it's the owners responsibility to secure the network, just like
it's their responsibility to lock their doors at night - but there are plenty
of people not tech savvy enough to know how to do this - or to even
distinguish that leaving your network open is equivalent to leaving your door
unlocked and possibly wide open.

The problem is - are they wrong in assuming that their personal network should
not in normal circumstances be invaded? Just because we know there is a risk
of someone entering our house far easier if we leave the door open, they
should not in normal circumstances be entering without obvious intent to do
something, anything. The same could be said for someone going on to an open
network. While it's easy enough to join said network to just use free WiFi,
one could also be snooping on communication, or other possible actions on the
person private network.

My point really comes down to reasonable expectation of privacy (with possible
complete ignorance on such matters) from the network owner, and the possible
intent of the person on the network. While it might seem like nothing, I think
it's an important topic if we are discussing analog laws in a digital world.

------
Tycho
It's a bit like a drug-dealer saying 'why shouldn't I be able to ship drugs
drugs through customs? - I know the drugs are illegal, but my crates are
supposed to be private anyway.'

~~~
warrenwilkinson
The author claims a right he doesn't have (a right to private correspondence).
Something I've never seen mentioned anywhere before. I know most war time
letters are censored, and I've never seen rights activists even mention (let
alone protest) that.

Your ISP analyze packets, sometimes deeply. Google opens your mail to look for
spam (does this violate the spammers right to private communication?). Norton
opens your email attachments, and it might be mandated by your employer. A
post office might scan or open suspicious packages to ensure they are safe for
the receiver. These all involve 3rd parties analyzing and modifying messages.

~~~
dexen
As far as wikipedia can be trusted, there _are_ explicit rigits to privacy &
secrecy of correspondence [1] in western countries.

The examples you give fail flat out -- mechanical sorting & filtering of
email, without any direct human intervention -- has no way of breaking
privacy. No person learns anything private, and nobody will ever get pestered
by the spam filters of google or other such.

Also, there's no crates of illegal drugs there being moved around. There is
opaque electronic correspondence. Paper correspondence is by default secret,
unless interceped by law enforcement officials under court order. No
provisions out there for private parties for wildcard checks if their rights
are infriged somehow by paper mail -- and you can be sure every now and then
somebody slanders someone in paper mail. Rumors and whatnot.

The point of the article is, why are there blatant double standards when it
comes to electronic correspondence?

EDIT: also note the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz_v._United_States>

In short, ``[[SCOTUS interpreted the Fourth Amendment]] to count [[also]]
immaterial intrusion with technology as a search''.

\----

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence>

------
known
I believe offline laws should not be applicable to online till a credible face
recognition software is developed. e.g. <http://www.riya.com/>

