Interesting People mailing list archives
CyberLawSeminar Week one
From: David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 1995 08:48:41 -0800
From: CYBER () HULAW1 HARVARD EDU Date: Thu, 02 Mar 1995 03:41:28 -0500 (EST) Subject: CyberSeminar: Week One To: cyber () HULAW1 HARVARD EDU MIME-version: 1.0 WELCOME to the Harvard Law School Seminar on Information, Law, and Technology! If you're reading this message it means you are on the "cyber" mailing list for the seminar. To remove yourself from the list, add a friend, or substantively respond to anything you see here you can send email to cyber () law harvard edu. WHAT IT MEANS TO BE ON THIS LIST The seminar meets in its physical form on Monday evenings at the law school. Each meeting is organized around a particular topic and includes one to three guest speakers. People on the cyber list will receive an initial mailing shortly after the Monday class meeting; the mailing will feature highlights from the previous class along with several hypothetical questions meant to test and explore the issues raised in the class. WHY THIS IS MORE (AND LESS) THAN A REGULAR MAILING LIST The cyber list is more than a mailing list because substantive response is expected from the participants--reactions to the hypotheticals, long or short, formal or informal, are solicited. The list is less than a mailing list because any reactions mailed to the cyber address will *not* be automatically redistributed to other list participants. Rather, responses will be edited into one or two brief followup mailings that follow the hypotheticals as they unfold among the participants. This will prevent our electronic mailboxes from filling up with any number of emails from the list, and at the same time free us to answer the hypotheticals as trivially or deeply as we like--there is no danger that a series of short, snappy emails or long, drawn-out ones will annoy fellow participants, because they'll all be folded into a single followup mailing as appropriate. The editor for our first week is Professor Dorothy Zinberg of the Kennedy School of Government. SUMMARY, THEN THE HYPOTHETICALS Here, then, are some highlights from the seminar's first meeting, which was a general introduction featuring John Perry Barlow (Grateful Dead lyricist, retired cattle rancher, and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), Michael Katz (chief economist for the FCC), and Brian Kahin (Director of the Information Infrastructure Project at the Kennedy School). They are expressed as four elemental claims, followed by the hypotheticals. SESSION ONE: WHAT DOES THE EXPANSION OF CYBERSPACE MEAN FOR LAW? FOR NATIONS? FOR SOCIETY? I. CYBERSPACE THREATENS REAL SPACE. Physical jurisdiction is becoming increasingly meaningless when the only boundaries relevant to information flow are those requiring passwords instead of passports. At the very least this could be a problem for individuals whose musings can travel far and wide in the form of public messages. Someone could violate a rural community's obscenity standards from a downtown skyscraper--and, as has happened to a California couple operating an electronic bulletin board containing pornographic images--be indicted in Tennessee for it. The problem is international, too, since one country's free speech is another's capital blasphemy. As Barlow puts it: in cyberspace the First Amendment is a local ordinance. II. CYBERSPACE CHANGES PEOPLE. And it lets them change themselves. One aspect of this principle is the ability for each of us to adopt multiple--and wildly varying--personalities over computer networks. Katz told the story of a twelve-year-old boy who, masquerading as someone older, had increasingly intimate conversations with an eleven-year-old girl. Who turned out to be an eighteen-year-old boy. (And ultimatley was given someone else's phone number by the twelve-year-old instead of his own.) Without the need for identity the suasive force of responsibility is really attenuated. Another aspect of cyberspace changing people seems rooted in the Internet's original users--elite, desocialized, educated younger men. There appears (at least anecdotally) to be a palpable libertarian bent to the opinions expressed on the Net, and a concomitant brashness and even rudeness, as anyone who has been "flamed" can attest. It's unclear whether recent infusions of a more representative cross-section of society into the Net will make it more like the everyday world, or whether there's something about cyberspace that transforms people into what they might otherwise fear and loathe. III. NOW THAT COMMERCE AND CYBERSPACE HAVE DISCOVERED EACH OTHER, NOTHING WILL BE THE SAME. Within the past month or so several forms of "digital cash" have been made available on the Internet, paving the way for high-volume anonymous cash transactions. Accompanied by a final withering away of the National Science Foundation's original subsidization--and along with it the requirement that the Net be used only for non-commercial purposes--the potential for serious shopping, especially for information itself, now exists. Possible ramifications: 1. Copyright and distribution restrictions will become meaningless. Information--able to be duplicated and shipped around at zero cost--won't be able to help itself from running all over the place. The fact that the Net is a distributed, rather than centralized, network makes this even more likely to occur. Governments will be simply unable to censor anything, and companies will be unable to enforce intellectual property protection for their information wares. The companies will come to rely on the timeliness of their information as a means of retaining its salability in the face of rampant information piracy. 2. Copyright and distribution restrictions will adapt and survive. A few publicized examples of violators--a few LaMacchia's--will suffice to keep most of us in line. This reflects a general debate over the role law will play in the information frontier. Some believe the glacial pace of lawmaking will be replaced by a more organic and dynamic sense of informal ethical rules, keeping up with the pace of technological change and information transfer. Others think law will do just fine so long as it expresses itself at the proper level of generality, not binding itself merely to current applications. 3. Taxes will become voluntary. So says Barlow, apparently since it will be near-impossible to know anyone's net worth much less income. When everything is a tip instead of a paycheck, tax policing is hard. Death survives as the only certainty, perhaps itself threatened by the Net's opportunity for us to have--and share--multiple personalities (see item II). IV. CYBERSPACE IS FREEDOM. CYBERSPACE IS SLAVERY. Perhaps it's both. It's freedom because central governments, so often the source of opprobrious censorship, taxes, and regulation, might be fundamentally--and successfully-- threatened by an entity that effortlessly transcends their boundaries and is designed to respond to censorship as a minor, repairable bug. It's slavery because the potential for invasion of privacy is greatly enhanced. Whatever we do online might leave fingerprints for those skilled and resourced enough to find them--which usually means governments. Whatever we say--or is said about us--can be carried instantly and irrevocably to the far reaches of the world. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- What follows are the hypothetical situations based on the issues brought up in the seminar. Responses are not only solicited but necessary to the functioning of this list, and are most useful within 24 hours of this mailing. (Why not dash off something right now?) Account (and real) names will remain attached to responses featured in the followup. 1. THE DUCHY OF FENWICK GETS A SERVER. A seller of pirated information and software sets up in a country with which we do not have friendly relations or trading alliances; a bazaar of pirated information, including digitized photos that would be highly obscene under American law opens its doors. (1) What should the U.S. do? (2) How likely is the scenario? 2. THOUGHT POLICE/CONSCIENTIOUS ADMINISTRATORS. A university network administrator gives you, the university president, the names of professors who have been accessing, and downloading material from, electronic child pornography sites. The activity does, at first blush, seem to be a criminal violation of federal law. What should you do with that information and why? If the administrator tells you that she feels compelled to release the information--confidentially--to the FBI, what do you do? 3. SALMON RUSHDIE ISN'T THE ONLY ONE. A warrant is sworn out in Singapore for the arrest of an American citizen wanted for making criminally libelous remarks about that country's esteemed leader. The American made the remarks on an Internet newsgroup (alt.countries.social-engineering), and they were carried in the natural course of events to servers in Singapore. Should the situation be handled any differently from one in which an American court swears out a warrant against a Singaporean for making terroristic threats against the U.S. President over the same newsgroup? 4. WE KNOW ABOUT THAT PIRATED GAME ON YOUR HARD DISK--SO JUST HOW DEGENERATE ARE YOU? The advent of electronic cash--and electronic junk mail--brings the following offer to your desktop: *GUARANTEED TAX SHELTER!* Pay us 0.5% in e-cash and we'll be happy to help sequester the rest. Your major assets will be converted to e-cash and through our patented (but lamentably oft-pirated) system we'll bring your official account balances below the 15% bracket. You need not pay taxes on the rest, and you can relax while it earns you interest at the going rate. SURE, it's ILLEGAL. But EVERYONE's doing it! Cryptologically-certified testimonials from enthusiastic shelterees assure you to a metaphysical certainty that the offer is solid and that you could get away with paying thousands of dollars less in taxes. (1) Would you do it? (2) What percentage of people do you think would? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Welcome aboard--replies most useful within 24 hours.
Current thread:
- CyberLawSeminar Week one David Farber (Mar 04)