Send Law Students, Idealists and Grant Proposals. Was: Re: Lawyers, Guns, and Money

[Greg Broiles]

At 12:43 AM 8/24/2001 +0100, r.duke at freedom.net wrote:

>>What exactly is it that you think is new about the Internet, legally 
>>speaking?
>
>I would have thought that new interpretations of things like federal and 
>state jurisdictions would be needed. Given the arguments over the recent 
>decision on Yahoo from France, I'd say there are questions to be answered. 
>Is a company under your jurisdiction as soon as you can see its servers? 
>Are ISPs carriers, or providers? What about their webservers, which store 
>and provide, as opposed to simply carrying?
>
>Tell me if I'm wildly off base - I don't mind, but it seems to me that at 
>the moment, these issues are not obvious and written in stone.

I don't think the answers are obvious or unchanging - but the answers to 
questions like that about meatspace things related to (relatively) 
unchanging media or technology aren't obvious or unchanging, either. 
Really, there aren't a lot of hard-and-fast "answers", because every 
question's got two sides, and there's always someone who wants things to 
work differently, because the status quo hurts them and the difference 
would help them.

I don't think the jurisdictional questions are especially different from 
those raised by postal mail, printed publications, telephones, or fax 
machines - the big difference I see is one of quantity, not quality, 
because communicating over great distances in a machine-comprehensible 
format (well, sort of) allows machines to speed up and automate the 
communicating process, allowing smaller organizations to piss off more 
people in more diverse jurisdictions more quickly.

But the basic questions about the appropriateness of a court in one place 
exercising power over people or property some distance away haven't changed 
at all - and unless there's something really different about one form of 
communications, I don't see any reason to treat it differently from the rest.

Many of the questions currently in the news - including the 
Napster/copyright and jurisdictional/regulatory arbitrage approaches - were 
in the news 200 years ago. (See, for example, "Dickens's 1842 Reading Tour: 
Launching the Copyright Question in Tempestuous Seas" at 
<http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/dickens/pva/pva75.html> for a 
discussion of 200 years' worth of offshore piracy)

>Actually, I stand corrected - it's no more than your average technical 
>training course (Sun, etc). Given that it's something I'd have to pay for, 
>instead of my employer, it seemed expensive. Things always look more 
>affordable when you can get your manager to sign them off.

As Tim mentioned, they're not really priced for people who are 
self-educating - the dollar/learning ratio would be a lot better with basic 
books & periodicals, and the time would be as profitably (or more 
profitably) spent at low-cost or no-cost events like Cypherpunks meetings, 
BAWUG meetings, the Mac Crypto conference, and other efforts more focused 
on peer-to-peer interaction. I have found those high-ticket events to be 
valuable when I was able to immediately use the information gained in my 
work - either because the people speaking had a perspective unavailable to 
me (like one seminar I went to which featured a bunch of people from the 
Dept of Commmerce/BXA explaining how they interpreted crypto export control 
regs), or because they saved me many hours of work collecting and 
interpreting voluminous information into outline/presentation format. But I 
don't bother with those sorts of things unless I can see how they'll pay 
for themselves within 60 days or so, either by speeding up existing work or 
letting me start new projects previously unavailable.


--
Greg Broiles
gbroiles at well.com
"We have found and closed the thing you watch us with." -- New Delhi street kids