[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

How? Details, please.

The only way to substantially attack the amount of copying going on online, would require restrictions rather more intrusive than are used in China. China, of course, does not have a couple-hundred years' practice with freedom of speech and a free press, and does not have many thousands of businesses that rely on on open information exchange for their income.

Are you really unaware of how entertwined free speech and free business are? Of how DEAD the internet would be if the government shut down YouTube (for hosting "pirate videos") and Google search (for linking to infringing content)? Shut down Flickr for hosting photos that include copyrighted & trademarked images; shut down Facebook for all those user images that are stolen from video games. And that's before we get into shutting down all those Wordpress blogs that repost news stories or half-chapters of their favorite books--it's not like there's a minimum amount that's verifiably not infringement.

Where does it stop--does the gov't inspect every email attachment? Do they require inspection of every file hosted on a remote sharing service--in which case, do businesses get an automatic exemption for the claim "trade secrets?" If so, the pirates have an easy exemption; not, well, plenty of businesses won't be moving data quickly between locations.

What law could allow private information to be exchanged, without allowing "infringing" information to be exchanged? Who would have the right to look at which files, and who would pay for the inspections?

What just happened to Megaupload?

A site known for hosting bootleg files got shut down. Shrug. Are you under the impression that Megaupload hosted a substantial portion of the pirated content on the internet? That it hosted even 1% of the unauthorized digital copies available today?

I didn't say "the government can't go after large-scale infringers." I said that governments and software developers aren't going to "join forces" to eradicate or even impede copying online. That "software makers" are not a unified group with a singular goal.

Supposition.

Indeed. Most of my friends don't think it's possible at all. I posit that the gov't could demand the right to inspect every packet exchanged on the internet; it'd just cost a lot of time and money, and slow down business along with a lot of entertainment.

Entertainment would find a way to go elsewhere; business can't.

Controlling where copies can go, and who can access them, CAN get harder.

Do you have any evidence of this? When and where did it get hard to access data that once was widely available, other than by oppressive totalitarian regime?

Where has it gotten harder to get copies-in-general to the people that want them, rather than the occasional attempt to block a very specific type of data? Religious texts and anti-government entertainment are the two big ones subject to this kind of law; data-in-general has always gotten easier to distribute.

Exactly this.

Assuming that governments cannot enact laws and enforce them... assuming that legitimate businesses cannot create ways of functioning within those laws... assuming that life will somehow grind to a halt if this takes place... is ignoring thousands of years of established history. The web is just another tool, and it can be controlled and regulated.

The theory is sound; the practical side is nonexistent. The web *could* be controlled and regulated, if the government had taken an active role in its creation and development, instead of leaving that up to private companies and random individuals. As it stands, our lawmaking committees are full of people who think the internet is a set of tubes that you can put valves on to control what goes into or comes out of them.

They could destroy most of the commercial uses of the internet by demanding to inspect all data between sender and receiver. They can't come up with a program to detect "legitimate data" and only allow that to go through.

Sorting data still takes human consideration, especially since what they're interested in is not the data itself, but the metadata: is this a "legit" use of this data? No program ever invented will tell you if I authorized a particular copy of one of my stories to be shared by or with a particular person.

Even more importantly: No one likes laws on the surface, especially when they seem to restrict things they can do. However, if those laws prove to be beneficial to them, in the form of improved personal security, easier use or lower costs (or all of the above), people tend to accept and eventually support those laws.

Well, yes. Whose security will be better, and whose costs will be lowered? If the laws improve life for the general public, they'll be accepted. All the laws I've seen proposed are a pack of restrictions the general public is supposed to put up with, in order to punish a shapeless group that nobody can prove is doing any real harm.

Assume better copyright infringement control: Who benefits? How does that make *my* life better?

Will I be able to put a statement on my blog posts, "I do not authorize these posts to be copied onto AOL servers," and sue the company for infringement if they are?

None of the stricter web laws we have discussed here will automatically result in the crash of civilization that so many people seem to expect. That is an over-reaction to the possibility of any new laws that is completely expected of people, but in the long-run, usually unfounded.

I wouldn't expect a crash of civilization. I expect more attempts like SOPA and PIPA, badly-written fiascos attempting to foist the job of policing copyright onto people who have no stake in the matter one way or the other, because big corporations have decided they must be losing money through unauthorized copies even though they can't prove it.

The people who most strongly advocate stricter copyright laws seem to forget that not all copyrighted material is registered. That every copy-and-reply email or forum post is potentially "infringing." There is no way to stop "infringement" without crashing the internet.