-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- uunet!qualcomm.com!karn (Phil Karn) writes:
This got me thinking about the impossibility of regulating and taxing the international transmission of information. At the time I was thinking more in terms of the impossibility of enforcing US import duties; who's to say what a particular magtape is worth? If this guy is still in business I suspect he has long since replaced physical magtape shipments with electronic transfers, which bypasses Customs completely.
Last summer I needed to send a magtape with custom-written software to Oman, and needed to declare a value for customs; neither the State Department nor Customs nor Federal Express nor DHL had any idea whether I was supposed to declare the value of the software or the value of the tape carrying the software. I settled on the value of the tape if it was blank, based on the notion that a copy of the software wasn't worth much; it was the legal right to use the software which was valuable, and that wasn't being shipped. (Electronic transfer wasn't possible as the Omanis were very particular about which modems could be used with their telephone system, and it took longer to find an approved modem than it did to ship the magtape.) As far as I could tell, the thing the Omanis were most concerned with was preventing the import of pornography or other forbidden data; I don't think many of the people involved in processing the shipment understood that the tape could easily have contained those forbidden images. - -- Greg Broiles "Sometimes you're the windshield, greg@goldenbear.com sometimes you're the bug." -- Mark Knopfler -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.4 iQCVAgUBLTcLZH3YhjZY3fMNAQHOfAP+I9+gSLfv8gSyMgZhwg7bJga/mA8MVFX1 GsUR+y4av3QLgz+gbWSnbymo77tvpcTjzmGn6gZemlaifgEQMFFByMdooK9wSMgX 72lFSGnko12lX44StWI6VCIbg3uQvCpE05cK9Cs0b2aJ/bnmoaghUIClKf/YovZy c/mKDHNu/HY= =BGBS -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----