This one of those legal logic puzzles that geeks love to do, but that lawyers roll their eyes at.
He uses a series of statutes to show that if you have public wifi you exist in a legal gray are between subscriber and service provider, and therefore you can't be monitored by your ISP or held accountable for copyright infringement. Good luck with that.
I didn't read this as an exercise as avoiding accountability for copyright infringement, I read it as a thought exercise that picks apart the Digital Economy Bill for the joke that it is.
I would like to fill the House of Commons with all those who voted for the bill and have someone read out said thought exercise to see how many of them remotely understand it.
Do you read the Hansard? Read the comments by Lord Whitty as per the digital economy bill. Ministers/Lords are making the points we want discussed, however in a lot of cases they are ignored due to the power of the whip.
I found myself thinking that too, but unlike some typical logic puzzle situations the underlying events seem sound as well. If you really do provide free public wifi access (from your house or a cafe), how does the law handle random peoples' illegal downloads? I know that in some cases, since they can't be identified the buck stops with you. But you'd be treated much less severely given that you might not be the person causing the harm...
I don't think the buck would stop with you (I think it's a legally grey area still) BUT your opening up yourself to inconvenience if it's used for something outright illegal - because your computers will end up being seized to establish if it was you or not.
And then there's the potential personal guilt of having facilitated someone committing a crime (I guess that is an individual thing but some would feel it)
Lawyers roll their eyes at things like this not necessarily because they think so-and-so is being a smart-ass but because they've learned to understand why a particular law is put in place and who paid for it to be put there. In this case the political and legal establishment have decided they are going to do the bidding of copyright kingpins and this law is just a tool to help them do that. Any judge (or magistrate as the case may be) will throw this kind of crap out because loopholes and the like are for rich shitpokes and corporations, not average citizens with enough time on their hands to pick apart poorly written legislation.
At least in the US, Law is really defined by court precedents, not by some stupid wording.
This is a good thing. Imagine a "Don't murder anyone" law. Without a court to decide what that actually means, I could argue that if I put a timer on a bomb, I didn't murder anyone - the bomb did the killing, and I didn't even trigger it directly. How is a bullet any different except that the delay is shorter? Dumbass didn't get out of the way, I say. No different than someone standing in the middle of a highway. The english language isn't like a programming language - its remarkably open to interpretation as to meaning, hence the need for courts to define what the law means through actual examples.
But the statutes very specifically cover the cases above with wording like "took action to deliberately cause the death of another".
The courts have made the definition even stricter, by allowing things like the death penalty and abortion. Although the individuals involved in those acts deliberately caused the death of someone, it doesn't count as murder.
How can anyone be expected to obey the law if it is not absolutely clear about what your obligations are? Overly general laws that the courts can deal with "later" are a grave danger to society.
He uses a series of statutes to show that if you have public wifi you exist in a legal gray are between subscriber and service provider, and therefore you can't be monitored by your ISP or held accountable for copyright infringement. Good luck with that.