Dumb Lawmakers and the Rules They Frame

We often curse our lawmakers (politicians) for being so dumb, for not understanding complex issues, and for coming up with ad-hoc rules based on sheer ignorance. Let’s see if things are better elsewhere.

Let’s start with American Congress(wo)man Eleanor Holmes Norton. Asked how Toyota handled complaints, Toyota’s President said that his engineers started by trying to duplicate the reported problem in their labs. Norton’s response? “Your answer -- we'll wait to see if this is duplicated -- is very troublesome”. I am stumped: how can an engineering company fix an issue that they cannot reproduce? Did the Congressman not understand how engineering is done? Or was she just playing to the galleries?

In UK, they have a law that allows a few other select entities to archive a copy of every printed publication in UK without being charged with copyright infringement. The reason behind that is to preserve articles for posterity. But when it comes to doing the same for British Internet pages, the rules state that the archiving entities need to first get permission from the copyright holder of that website! Imagine that: how many people would they need to employ to get the approval from each site? Come to think of it, why do they even have different rules for the physical and digital worlds in the first place?

Guess from where the greatest threat to the Internet has come in recent times? It’s not from the communists or dictators or military rulers. It comes from an Italian court ruling! Here’s how. Recently, Italy sentenced a few Google executives to prison. Why? Because someone had posted a video of an autistic teenager being bullied by four other boys onto the Google Videos site. Huh? A web site is culpable for the content other people post on it? By this “logic”, we can hold web sites responsible for all comments, blogs and videos that other people post online. No wonder the Telegraph called it the "the biggest threat to internet freedom we have seen".

In UK, France and New Zealand, they are either considering or have already passed what is called the “Three Strikes” law. What is the “Three Strikes” law? If anyone in your house is accused of three acts of copyright infringement by downloading pirated copies of music or books or anything else, then your entire household loses Internet access. Without any proof of wrongdoing, just an accusation would suffice. That reminds me of police states! Did the rule makers consider that multiple people in a house use the same computer? How does one identify which person did the illegal downloads? Their solution: just ban the entire household! (Many of these countries have backtracked on this to varying degrees since then…but that was only due to a huge public reaction).

So the next time you curse our lawmakers for their stupidity, remember what Napoleon said, "In politics stupidity is not a handicap."

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