Law and technology: impedance mismatch by Michael Cordover
- IP lawyer
- Known as the EasyCount guy
- Lawyers and Politicians don’t get it
- Governing behaviour that is not well understood (especially by lawyers) is hard
- Some laws are passed under assumption that they won’t always be enforced (eg Jaywalking, Speeding limits). Pervasive monitoring may make this assumption obsolete
- Technology people don’t get the law either
- Good reasons for complexity of the law
- Technology isn’t neutral
- Legal detailed programmatic specifically
- Construction
- Food
- Civil aviation
- Broadcasting
- Anonymous Data
- Personal information – info from which id can be worked out
- 100s of examples where law is vague and doesn’t well map to technology
- Encryption
- Unauthorised access
- Copyright
- Evidence
- The obvious, easy solution:
- Everybody must know about technology
- NEVER going to happen
- Just make a lot of contracts
- Copyright – works fairly well, eg copyleft
- TOS – works to restrict liability of service providers so services can actually be safely provided
- EULAs
- P3P – Privacy protection protocol
- But doesn’t work well in multiple jurisdictions, small ppl against big companies, etc
- Laws that are fit for purpose
- An ISP is not an IRC server
- VOIP isn’t PSTN
- Focus on the outcome, sometimes
- A somewhat radical shift in legal approach
- It turns out the Internet is (sometimes) different
- United States vs Causby – 1946 case that said people don’t work air above their property to infinity. Airplanes could fly above it.
- You can help
- Don’t ignore they law
- Don’t be too technical
- Don’t expect a technical solution
- Think about policy solutions
- Talk to everybody
