It's a slightly different point, and it might be more important. Most of us break the law, right now, and not even including examples of ridiculous laws. A lack of privacy on the data we generate could incriminate us in ways that we didn't set up our justice system to handle.
Devil's advocate: if lack of privacy was a level playing field (i.e., nobody has privacy from anyone else) maybe we will finally start looking at all of the illegal activities in the lawbooks and start narrowing them down to actual activities we'd like to make illegal.
Bear in mind that most of those are drug-related. Stuff that the people involved are well aware is illegal. This means that our prison populations are not really good examples to wield in the service of reducing the number of obscure laws that could be used to convict anyone at any time.
Unfortunately even when we know of a law being stupid, against the will of the people and against its own initial intent- we still continue to enforce it and ruin people's lives. Hoping for understanding judges isn't a good answer and if they strike down a law many will say they are "legislating from the bench" and bring politics into it.
You don't have to look further than the cases of teens currently being branded as sex offenders for sending each other photos of themselves.
The problem is that these stupid laws are selectively enforced. There are so few people that are prosecuted that the normal population doesn't care enough to throw a fit. We would need an auto-prosecute system so that whenever anyone breaks a dumb law they are inconvenienced (at least), then enough people will be affected to changes things.
The other point is that with 100% lack of privacy, hopefully this means that the public can now also policy the government. (e.g. with cameras being cheap and everywhere, now it's no longer my word against some random-police-officer-with-a-chip-on-his-shoulder's word)
The problem being that the keeper of the records and the random police officer know one another, and those records "unfortunately" get lost. Unless somebody's got a grudge against the random officer, of course. But you're still dependent on the guy with the power.
I'm not talking 1984-the-police-own-all-the-cameras. It becomes cheap enough that some random person walking down the street can point a cellphone at the event as it happens, or a store owner's security camera can catch it on film, etc. Unless you are trying to imply that every random person will just happen to be friendly with any random police officer that gives you trouble.
I've heard (though I can't substantiate) that in some locations it is illegal to record, film, or photograph a police officer performing his or her duties. So, if this is true, in your scenario evidence of officers misbehaving wouldn't help you because it was obtained illegally.
YouTube changes the balance of power though. Before the case goes to trial, the entire jury pool has seen the police officer do whatever it is they did.
I wish people would stop bringing up file-sharing in the privacy debate. It's a terrible example, for the simple reason that a lot of people are breaking the law and hiding behind legal technicalities to get away with it, and the law itself is not self-evidently unreasonable in providing the concept of copyright.
Yes, there have been miscarriages of justice, and there have been abuses of the legal system (particularly in the US, which in my studious and considered opinion has a dumb legal system that encourages such actions by the big boys with vast legal warchests). Of course these things are bad and legal systems that allow them would be better if they had stronger safeguards to protect the innocent.
But if you look at the big picture, there are a lot of people (mostly young ones) growing up with this unhealthy attitude that anything you can physically do is OK and you can take what you want for free because you'll get away with it. Shielding those people from being held accountable, on a pretense of defending privacy, is not going to make society any more enlightened, it's just going to raise a generation of people who don't think about anyone but themselves.
potatolicious argued that perhaps if we saw injustice, we'd move to correct things.
I'm arguing, simply, that the RIAAs lawsuits are chock full of injustice: a flawed core conceit (that IP addresses can identify individuals), lawbreaking (unlicensed PIs) and piles of collateral damage (file-sharing grandmothers?).
It's not that I think file-sharers should be able to violate copyright law. It's that I see no evidence that the public is particularly motivated by injustice to seek change.
> I'm arguing, simply, that the RIAAs lawsuits are chock full of injustice: a flawed core conceit (that IP addresses can identify individuals), lawbreaking (unlicensed PIs) and piles of collateral damage (file-sharing grandmothers?).
The problem I have with this argument is that, despite all the legal chicanery, the chances are that most people the RIAA are going after really did do it. I understand the desire not to punish the innocent, and the reaction of the public when such stories make the headlines, but don't forget the other perspective: big media companies may adopt naive policies in an attempt to reduce piracy, but the guys running them are staring at 10 people, knowing that 9 of them are ripping them off, and listening to lawyers telling them they can't have any money back because no-one can prove to some practically unachievable degree of certainty who the 10th is.
> It's that I see no evidence that the public is particularly motivated by injustice to seek change.
This is a big problem with a lot of legal issues relating to modern technology and the new abilities it gives us. The implications of fundamental shifts like having the Internet or being able to store and analyse vast quantities of data probably won't be fully understood even by interested parties or expert observers for several years.
The average guy on the street will probably never appreciate some of the subtleties in any given area of law, even if it does affect him, because unfortunately people don't always think things through and research the facts before forming opinions. For example, how many people in any given copyright debate on a geek-friendly forum will ignore the fact that big business is mostly owned by institutional investors who run things like pension funds?
Mass copyright infringement is not a "victimless crime", and it doesn't just hurt "those big studios who were ripping us off for years". It hurts people's savings accounts, and pension funds, because when profits are reduced at the big media companies, the values of the investments goes down. At this point, someone traditionally trots out the old "illegal copy != lost sale" argument, again invoking something that while true some of the time is clearly not true of a lot of illegal ripping. And so the argument continues, with the critics using individual cases that appeal to emotional responses, wilfully ignoring the big picture because it's "just greedy businesses taking the hit, not real people".
This is why it is important for laws to be made by people who have spent the time to look at the facts, think through the implications, and then adopt a policy that is consistent with principles the general public support when fully aware of the implications. But it is then incumbent on those who make the laws to justify them on demand to a sceptical public, and right now this is where the copyright brigade are failing miserably.
> "the chances are that most people the RIAA are going after really did do it"
Unfortunately, our legal system isn't supposed to tolerate that sort of process. 'Better guilty men go free than an innocent man be punished' and all.
Very real, very serious consequences are befalling innocent people. Very real laws are being broken in this process with little to no repercussion.
If my store is looted during a riot, we don't simply round up 10 people without proper evidence and due process, just because it's extremely likely that 9 of them really are guilty. That just is not how our system is supposed to operate.
Which is all very well, but does absolutely nothing to restore justice or equity to the damaged party. This is the point when the "better a guilty man go free" argument really breaks down, which is why I wish people wouldn't treat the fact that privacy allows this no-win situation as a good thing. Privacy is important for many constructive reasons. Permitting someone to damage someone else while effectively immune to any personal consequences is not one of them.
