Henrik in Seattle

Law is weird

April 25th, 2006

I'm just back from a seminar in an interesting course about [society and technology->http://abstract.cs.washington.edu/wiki/index.php/Soctech_seminar%2C_Spring_2006]. And although it is nothing new, I once again feel that law is a weird mix of interesting and incomprehensible. Seemingly simple questions become surprisingly tricky in the hands of lawyers. Or to be fair, I guess the point is that they really are much trickier than they seem.

[Google Book Search->http://print.google.com/googleprint/about.html] (formerly Google Print) is a nice example. While crawling and indexing copyrighted material on web pages is perfectly fine, doing the same thing with copyrighted material in printed books may not be.

And speaking of copyright and those "terms of use" pages you see all over the place. As of 1996, the US has something which is called the [Computer Fraud and Abuse Act->http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/1030_new.html]. It has its root in regulations to protect government data (and later bank data as well), but was when Internet started to get popular generalized to include any computer. This basically means that if your web page states that brown-haired men may not click on any links on that page, I will commit a federal crime if I do so (unless I dye my hair?).

The only limit for the above rule is that in order for them to sue me, they have to lose at least $5000 as a result of me doing that. However, in order to figure out how much they lost, they may hire a consultant to do that analysis. If he charges them $5000 for that, then look… they've now lost $5000 because I clicked on their links! And yes, they may actually do exactly that (according to [the lecturer->http://www.law.washington.edu/Faculty/Laster/], great lecturer by the way).

Entry Filed under: Blabber