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Originally Posted by nogle
Indeed. It is the same mindset that has resulted in governors on all commercial trucks in Canada. Since it isn't legal to speed, there is no reason to go faster than the top posted speed limit.
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I used to wonder, when the speed limit in the entire US was 55mph, why cars weren't equipped with something that just prevented them from ever going faster, with possible exceptions for emergency vehicles.
It'd be easy to phrase a law that says "everything posted on the internet must be approved as not-infringing before it goes live"--it'd just be horrifically expensive to enforce, and it'd shut down a lot of businesses. The problem isn't "how to go after the lawbreakers;" it's "how to find the lawbreakers whose activities aren't objectively different from activity we want to promote, except by measurement against some set of criteria that can't be defined by code?"
Or,
What colour are your bits?:
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In intellectual property and some other fields we're very interested in information, data, artistic works, a whole lot of things that I'll summarize with the term "bits". Bits are all the things you can (at least in principle) represent with binary ones and zeroes. And very much of intellectual property law comes down to rules regarding intangible attributes of bits - Who created the bits? Where did they come from? Where are they going? Are they copies of other bits? Those questions are perhaps answerable by "metadata", but metadata suggests to me additional bits attached to the bits in question, and I'd like to emphasize that I'm talking here about something that is not properly captured by bits at all and actually cannot be, ever. Let's call it "Colour", because it turns out to behave a lot like the colour-coded security clearances of the Paranoia universe.
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