> This is why Section 1201(a)(2) needs to be struct from the law
Perhaps it is becoming clearer that the law is an ass, written to serve special interests, and nothing to do with some sort of expression of morality or right and wrong. And that is all it has ever been.
For myself, I cannot conceive of the hybris required in writing down a set of words that I would then expect others to follow. Imagine doing this at a family gathering! (I'm not talking about writing a guide or means to help others learn/improve themselves by their own choice.)
The very idea of law is a false one, imo. Who has the moral high ground, who can relay that in writing to others? Is it not actually a subterfuge to allow others to do harm and yet call it good?
Basically, one needs to find one's heart, and follow that. The law is a merely another control structure.
The primary error seems to be in applying the anti-circumvention ban to fair use and non-infringing use, and tools used for same.
Because most video is encrypted, this effectively reverses Betamax and bans home video recording with DVRs without authorization from the copyright holder.
It's particularly disappointing that the copyright office has flatly refused to authorize 1201 exemptions for non-infringing format-shifting or space-shifting.
In the case where someone kills another (murder is a legal term) and the cases of many other 'crimes' eg stealing, abusing children, etc, these are immoral acts. One's heart knows this. In general, what people refer to as 'common law' is more or less in line with morality - I don't object to that so much.
Now, if you wanted to impose a legal system (an external authority of morality) that doesn't cover these cases, you will fail - people will not accept it's authority and will see it for what it is. The legal system has to encompass these overt, actually immoral cases as bait, in order for the individual to swallow the hook. But, the legal system is not determining right or wrong, it is merely echoing what you already know.
Things like intellectual property rights, speed limits, licensing, tax, etc, are the hook. They are nothing to do with right or wrong. They are merely cash machines for the entities that write the legislation. They could be right, had entered into a contract, where government provided such-and-such a service with explicit agreement. But no one ever did..
Laws are not cash machines for those that write them. Laws are an attempt at solving coordination problems. They will arise in any 'state of nature' because the downsides of not solving coordination problems are so incredibly obvious.
Specifically, people will organize into groups that establish and follow rules. Not (just) through coercion, but because the alternative is untenable.
Obviously at that point you get politics, people vying for power, trying to change the rules to their benefit, etc. But that is not the base nature of laws, it is a highly predictable effect of the lawmaking process.
Laws are (nominally) written for the greater good. Copyright protection, for example, exists so artists get compensated for their work, get to claim credit, and, can control distribution. Now this example has obviously also suffered from politics, to the extreme. But the basic premise still makes sense to me.
> They will arise in any 'state of nature' because the downsides of not solving coordination problems are so incredibly obvious.
Do animals or birds have 'laws'? Ok - not that state of nature...
Do you have laws at a family gathering? No.
I think you are mistaking natural law (innate morality) for a bunch of words some corporate lobbyist has written down. And that confusion is the point. If a controlling group can convince individuals to swap out their sense of morality (where each individual decides what's right and wrong for themselves) for a law book that can be controlled externally (a book that monied interests can write or re-write as they like) - then those individuals are harnessed to do what the controlling group say and call it right. That is domestication.
> Laws are (nominally) written for the greater good. Copyright protection, for example, exists so artists get compensated for their work, get to claim credit, and, can control distribution.
Right - that is the sales pitch. But in fact artists get a tiny fraction of the revenue. And the whole idea of the music industry as we have it, is itself an expression of corporate interests.
What I think you are missing is that music and whatever else, would go on without corporations and government and its laws, if people wanted it. However, if you want to harness that interest for parasitic monetary benefit, you need to make laws, enforce them, educate people into believing they are right, etc.
So, yes you can say that this is for the "greater good" but what is actually meant by "greater" are those corporations! Corporations are bigger (ie greater) than the individuals, right?
> I think you are mistaking natural law (innate morality) for a bunch of words some corporate lobbyist has written down.
Not at all. Innate morality is very different from law. Law, as I explained it, is about coordination problems. Such as solving the tragedy of the commons. In 'the state of nature' (scare quotes because I believe never existed, but I am referencing the philosophical concept). i.e. when society has not yet formed laws or large organization. There are many problems that need a solution that is universally followed. This can be actual tragedy of the commons (i.e. overgrazing the field, chopping down productive forrest, not shitting in wells) or it can be simple coordination problems (i.e. everyone drives on the right side if the track, people climbing have right of way over people descending). These lead to rules that a society agrees on.
People who break those rules get ostracized, those people then complain and argue, which formalizes these rules. At some point, the result of breaking these widely established rules moves beyond ostracizing. Rule breakers have harmed the community, so the community gets to harm back through seizure, imprisonment, pain, or other methods.
At that point you have laws. And they are a good thing. People formed them because it made things better. From here on, laws need changing, probably because of circumstances. They also need expansion, because new problems can also be solved this way. At that point you get a legislative process, with the authority to set and change laws. Hence you get power, politics, other things that are also bad. But that doesn't mean laws are inherently bad. They come from a good place, but they have significant downsides.
Besides all this, laws are required to be a state, and being a state is required to have the military strength to avoid being plundered or subjugated by other groups.
Before we go and enact The Purge IRL, let's step back and think of what actually went wrong.
Hollywood wanted a bill that would make it illegal to make certain copying tools. This was hot off the heels of the music industry getting a technology mandate for copy protection on digital audio tape (which would eventually be mooted by MP3 players, see RIAA v. Diamond). The problem is, technology mandates are difficult to draft and have significant problems (sometimes it's legal to copy things). So instead of banning copying tools altogether, they made them opt-out. If the copyright holder protects a work from copying, you can't sell the tool that makes it copyable.
This created a drafting problem: what constitutes protection? At the time 1201 was drafted the biggest copy protection in force was Macrovision, a system intended to make VCRs copying tapes record an unusable signal. So they just copypasted Macrovision into the DMCA. But there's all sorts of other ways you could copy protect things. Software was the most creative with all sorts of dastardly ways to make nonstandard media, ways to check for that media, ways to check that your checks hadn't been changed, ways to encrypt the binary so you can't disassemble it, ways to check for debuggers so you can't copy the disassembled version of any of the above checks, etc. All of that is way too uncertain to draft into the bill.
Congress's answer was to say that anything can by copy protection as long as it keeps you from copying things. This is extremely, offensively overbroad. And it also triggered a slew of new attempts to turn 1201 into a generalized "contempt of business model" tort. We had lawsuits over printer ink and garage door openers, because it's trivial to just smuggle more software into the design of whatever product you want to 'protect.' Thus nobody wants to touch any sort of adversarial compatibility, because that carries insane liability now, and since everything needs software now we've effectively ended capitalism and regressed to feudalism.
It is a mistake to think of law as a substitute for morality. Obviously criminal does not equal immoral. However, we can think of laws as a solution to coordinated action problems and economic "game balance". If an entity is too powerful and abusing their power, we can use the law to cut them down to size. When Congress makes mistakes in drafting the law, we create the ability to build illiberal empires. But empires are not creatures of the law. They would still exist without it, making their own laws that would be far worse than the ones Congress gives us.
You don't want to know what kind of laws Tim Cook would write if he was freed from having to comply with US law.
> You don't want to know what kind of laws Tim Cook would write if he was freed from having to comply with US law.
You've missed the point I think. Tim Cook is fine with US law. His corporation and other corporations are the ones that draft it!
> If an entity is too powerful and abusing their power, we can use the law to cut them down to size.
You and I do not draft laws. Corporations have no interest in cutting themselves down to size. (What world are you on?!?)
The only interest corporations have is giving us just enough to carry us over the line. They need our acceptance, consent, buy-in to justify their insane nonsense.
All that disappears very easily and naturally, once you realise that one only needs to refer to one's own innate morality over what one can and cannot do.
The only reason why large corporations exist as such in the first place is because the law created the very notion of a legal corporation as an entity in its own right, a "legal person" capable of owning property etc. Without the state to enforce its property (including intellectual property) rights, those entities wouldn't have so much power to abuse in the first place.
Perhaps it is becoming clearer that the law is an ass, written to serve special interests, and nothing to do with some sort of expression of morality or right and wrong. And that is all it has ever been.
For myself, I cannot conceive of the hybris required in writing down a set of words that I would then expect others to follow. Imagine doing this at a family gathering! (I'm not talking about writing a guide or means to help others learn/improve themselves by their own choice.)
The very idea of law is a false one, imo. Who has the moral high ground, who can relay that in writing to others? Is it not actually a subterfuge to allow others to do harm and yet call it good?
Basically, one needs to find one's heart, and follow that. The law is a merely another control structure.