Ask Mike Godwin About Internet Law

Mike Godwin is probably best known to Slashdot readers for Godwin's Law, but that's one of the most minor reasons you should know him. In this blurb for his book, CYBER RIGHTS, he's (correctly) described as "one of the first lawyers to 'live and work in cyberspace.'" Naturally, Mike can't give specific legal advice, but he's certainly about as expert as they come about the development of law and legal hassles surrounding the Internet. We'll send him 10 of the highest-moderated questions, and publish his answers as soon as we get them back.

Let's get this over quickly...

[griffjon]

Speaking of Mike Godwin, and Internet 'laws', I think /. editors will no doubt be comprable to Nazis when judging responses to send to Mike.

(Godwin's Law [wired.com], for those needing a clue)

So, this discussion has therefore ceased all useful content. But that's not surprising, really, is it?

Re:Gotta ask

[happyfrogcow]

please.

You're connecting "piracy", something inherantly illegal by definition, with peer-to-peer. p2p is a technology that can be used for so many different things, that lumping them together is naive.

so many geeks want what to be legal? piracy? sharing mp3's? p2p? they are 3 separate things, only one of which I care about, as a geek, and that is p2p. Which I don't even use. Once i tried bit torrent to d/l slackware, but it didn't work.

please, for the sake of reality, don't lump 3 vastly different things into one thing that the general public sees as illegal. p2p != sharing mp3s. p2p != piracy. sharing mp3's is not always even equal to piracy.

generalizations are like premature optimizations... the root of all evil.

Re:Sedition and Internet free speach

[Rebar]

Parent is a troll. I've got mod points, but I'd rather point out the fact that it is a troll than to mod it as such.

I propose Rebar's constraint: Do NOT make a Hitler comparison in general conversation with Mike Godwin, no matter how valid your point.

Re:Gotta ask

[happyfrogcow]

Just because it CAN be used for something else doesn't mean it is.

which doesn't mean it won't be in the near future. if you want to regulate or in some way crack down on the software implementations of p2p that are used for violating copyrights, that is fine as long as it is done in a respnosible manner. But if you want to make it illegal for me to write a p2p software system that is not in any way related to unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials, then that is absolutely wrong.

No, this statement is naive.

explain why, i'm listening...

Re:Intellectual Property...

[cellocgw]

Hey that's a great question. And how does linking to an offsite image constitute a copyright violation? It's not actually being "reproduced" without permission.
Well in reality ANY image you see on your computer is a reproduced image. So far as I know all browsers cache everything on the page that you see, and even if they didn't, the image sure is in your RAM or VRAM while you're looking at it. So at the very least copyright presumably only applies to non-ephemeral copies.

Re:Individuals vs. Major ISPs

[Zordak]

Think about this one for just a minute. If some gang banger breaks into your house and steals a gun, and then uses it to rob a bank, and it the process kills a police officer, with whom does the fault lie? Is it with you for not having your gun properly secured against all possible kinds of break-ins? Is it with the manufacturer of the house or the manufacturer of your gun safe for not building a system immune to all types of breaches? Or is it with the guy who broke into your house, breached whatever security you had in place, stole your gun, and used it to commit capital murder? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'm sure many Slashdotters would read your post and think, "That's right, make those stupid Windows lusers responsible for not keeping their machines patched, and while we're at it, let's send Bill Gates to prison for his crap OS too!" That same line of thinking, applied to the scenario above, would land you strapped to a gurney in recompense for somebody else's crime. Let's be a little more realistic.

Re:Copyright Bullying...

[actiondan]

Isn't copyright law intended give the author of a work the right to withhold publication and the right to decide how the work is published as well as the right to benefit from publication?

Re: and prevent copying so easily

[killmenow]

Wiser men have said it: If it can be read, it can be copied.

This is why the corps with $$$ to lose are after the legal system. The only way they can hope to control it is to make legal punishment harsh. They will also need to make the same laws around the world because if it's illegal everywhere except BFE-kistan then the point is moot.

This is also why there have been attempts to "close the analog loophole" as they say. So you can't even aim your camcorder at your HDTV and copy it that way.

Finally, this will not go away IMHO until enough people get "mad as hell" and decide they're not gonna take it anymore. Which brings me to the questions I'd like to ask Mr. Godwin:

1. What likelihood is there that the interests "of the people" can prevail over the interests of our current plutocracy? [google.com]
2. Where does the idea that a thought, expressed into the world, can be controlled and owned like physical property? It's idiotic...so where did the notion come from originally? And why?

No

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes, overrated is exactly the correct moderation. Is a comment like the grandparent here redundant? Flamebait? Not really. But it's certainly useless and there's no reason for it to have a positive score. The goal of moderation is to get the comments people want to read higher and the ones they don't lower, not to play guess-the-right-category with the mod system. Sometimes a comment doesn't fit into one of those categories, and under/overrated is the catch-all.

And they could fix the metamod problem if moderating with over or underrated would save the score at the time.

This is scary...

[mykepredko]

I'm halfway through Len Deighton's "Blitzkrieg" in which he explains Hitler's rise to power and how it was used. I was going to attempt to write a humourous response to the parent, stating that Hitler took away many of the rights of his own citizens, wrongly imprisioned and tried citizens of other countries, manipulated England and France into supporting his attacking other countries when I realized that the parent wasn't all that fallacious.

We live in scary times,

myke

Re:Individuals vs. Major ISPs

[Zordak]

Fortunately, there is a difference between criminal proceedings and civil proceedings. Yes, the family of the victim may sue you for any number of things, because basically anybody can sue anybody for anything. However, they will have an uphill battle for two reasons:
1. No lawyer is going to want to touch it, because you are a private citizen who is presumably not ridiculously wealthy, so there really is very little chance of the lawyer's cut being worth the time. If you are very obviously somehow in the wrong, he may try it, hoping to get a payout from your home insurance policy. However, that brings us to point two.
2. Unless he can show some kind of obvious and gross negligence, he's going to have a hard time convincing the jurors that you are responsible.

The fact that somebody can file a frivolous law suit does not guarantee an automatic payout. In this case, your hardest battle is probably trying to get a lawyer to take your case. Now, if you happen to be a huge, monied corporation, or a grossly wealthy individual, then everything changes and you have shady lawyers beating down your door begging to take the case, hiring all sorts of "experts" of dubious reputations and paying off jurors when they get the chance. See, it's all about the money, and unless the lawyers smell a lot of it, they're not going to bother.

No , we don't

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I'm sick of people comparing our life and times with those under the Nazi Regime. The iherrent implication with all of theses stupid claims is that because there is a small simularity with something that the Nazis did, that the Government will end up Killing 6+ Million of us.

Seriously, this is Freakin' slashdot. Aren't we supposed to be somewhat intelligent? Basically all of the arguments can be boiled down to the following exagerations. They are obviously exagerations, but they expose the logicall fallacies used in the real stupid commments that are always made.

The Nazi's taxed their citizens and then Killed them, therefore our governemnt, because it had taxes, is going to Kill us. The Nazi's digested food that gave them the energy to Kill millions of people, Our governement officals also digest food!!!

Re:Internet "Piracy"

[pb]

Sounds good to me. Now all you have to do is convince governments that they can't tax online purchases, and the like...

Re:Godwin's law at work?

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be the idea, since it was a joke - not about the current American administration, but about Godwin's law. Note the link to another definition cunningly concealed in the story blurb.

Thank you for explaining it! Jokes never work unless they're fully explained. Especially to those people who not only don't RTFA, but don't RTFS either (I think if there's anything to say that can't be completely contained in a headline or HTML title, it's not worth saying).