The Administration, through the EAR, has attempted to maintain

Steve Schear wrote (without any carriage returns, forcing me to do his goddamn editing for him): the fiction that there is a qualitative difference between intellectual works made tangible in paper and those in electronic form. Can a Federal court's introduction of evidence procedure be used to establish the interchageability of IP works in paper and elecronic form and if so can these rules be applied to the EAR? Certainly, if a decent attorney is given sufficient financial incentive to pursue the matter. A lot of 'case law' is based on the bottomless pit of government legal funding setting precedents in cases where short-funded defence lawyers and defendants/plaintiffs cannot afford the time and expense to adequately match the government's ante and/or raises in the legal poker game. i.e. - the government agents 'buy the pot.' (no pun intended) Bad and marginal legal rulings accumulate to establish a base of questionable legal precedent. When a legal concept is later challenged in a case where the stakes are high, the defense/plaintiffs often have the cards already stacked against them. i.e. - the odds are *always* with 'the house.'

The ISBN system was established in 1968 as a standard for books and other monographic publications. Today, the scope of the system has expanded to include other media such as calendars, spoken word audiocassettes, videocassettes and electronic media.

Might this direction a legally fruitful way to overturn the EAR fiction?

Certainly, as long as a challenge is not mounted by a terroist, pedophile, drug-dealer, cryptographer, nigger, queer, or <shudder> <barf> LIBERAL. Not that I'm getting cynical in my old age, but if one wants to make a true difference in this regard they might consider foregoing the usual legal challenges and punching out their spouse's lover on the Jerry Springer show. Nixon was framed! TruthMonger