Pleading the 5th

[Tim May]

At 1:26 PM -0700 4/12/01, David Honig wrote:
>At 02:21 PM 4/12/01 -0400, Sunder wrote:
>>
>>While he can't really enforce what people do with the emails that they
>>receive from him, if he sees his posts printed in full in the next issue
>>of WIRED, he could sue.
>>
>
>Quite salient coming after Tim's post about the vulnerability of
>centralized, publicized spaces/assets.  Its precisely this that would make
>it practical to sue a copyright infringing entity.
>
>Except when the centralized entity its a state selling your DMV records, of
>course.

"Sovereign immunity" is their salvation.

Fact is, we as a nation have done several things to make it a great 
place for lawyers:

-- nearly everything can be sued over. If Alice doesn't like a book 
that Borders sells, finding it "offensive" in some way, she sues. (It 
usually helps her case move through the system, generate publicity, 
collect contingency fee lawyers) if she claims the book in question 
belittles her aspirations as minority, or contains sexist terms, or 
caused her to suffer post-bookstore traumatic shock syndrome (PBTSS).

-- deep pockets. Damages are not awarded based on objective standards 
(such as they are) but on how much money Borders, for example, might 
have in its coffers. McDonald's has a lot of money, so award an old 
lady a lot of money for trying to drive her car with a hot cup of 
coffee between her legs. The hospital is a Giant Corporation, thinks 
the jury, so award a woman a bunch of money when she says a CAT scan 
caused her to lose her psychic powers.

-- a massively complicated legal system that requires expensive 
lawyers just to act as special scribes and priests who can interpret 
the Latinisms and complicated precedents. Those who act "pro se" (a 
la Parker, Henson, Bell, etc.) often find themselves chewed up and 
crushed by the machine. And those who rely on the "ditch diggers" of 
the legal industry, the court-paid shysters and hacks, find this is 
all part of the Plan.

I once heard that a leading chip company was no longer pushing to 
reform the legal system, as they once had in the 1970s. Seems that by 
getting very big and having the resources to hire several hundred 
lawyers and entire floors of people to fill out required forms, 
permits, documentation, requests, etc., they were well-equipped to 
simply *outlast* the new chip companies which tried to be nimble--as 
Giant Chip Corp had once been--and to wait until the upstarts found 
themselves roadblocked by not having properly completed Permit 
Request 466-571 A,  "Determination of Sufficient Burritos and Other 
Frozen Items in Company Break Rooms, pursuant to Fair Labor Standards 
Act, Sub-part B, revised 11/99." In other words, legal red tape 
helped those who had invested earliest in lawyers and hurt those 
trying to innovate.

(By "rules" and "forms" I included taxes and accounting rules as 
well. Giant Chip Corp had more accountants and CPAs filling out 
endless mounds of paper required by local towns, counties, Regional 
Water Districts, Southern District MUDs, states, Feds, and 
international agencies and jurisdictions than it had design engineers 
working on its chips. And it came to _like_ the welter of laws and 
forms, as it raised the bar for upstart competitors.)

This is all part of the rent-seeking process. Thugs shaking down 
those they can. Transactions by coercion.

I would not be willing to set up any kind of on-line business. I 
would know that busybodies would be suing, lawyers would be sniffing 
around looking for "rent-seeking" (shakedown) opportunities, and 
hundreds of state and federal regulators and watchdogs would be 
searching for ways to either make a name for themselves or to finagle 
a way to be guaranteed a lobbying job after leaving government 
service.

And then there are the "aggrieved" groups, the Holocaust Lobby being 
only the most vocal at the present time.

It seems that every time I see a press release from ZKS they have 
added to their payroll or Board more lobbyists, more ombudsmen, more 
former Canadian government "privacy experts." Sure looks like they're 
being shaken down. Doesn't seem likely to me that all of these 
privacy czars and Ottawa Privacy Commission guys are going to be 
pushing for FreedomNet to be used for liberating communications from 
all traceability and accountability, does it?



--Tim May
-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns