A Bad Law Is Worse Than No Law

[Scarecrow Man]

A bad law is worse than no law. Bad laws have the potential to make things worse. Don't believe me? Well then, take a look at your email inbox. Is there more spam or less spam now than before CAN-SPAM became law in the United States? CAN-SPAM addressed the issue without fixing it and, in fact, made the problem worse by making spam legitimate if it follows a couple of rules.

A bad law also can be abused for things it was not intended to address. Let's consider the DMCA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA was intended to help copyright owners stop the theft of their intellectual property (IP). Has it worked? Download Winmx, do a search for Metallica and draw your own conclusion.

The DMCA more often is used to stifle fair competition than it is to stop theft of IP, an abuse not intended when it was passed by the US Congress. Here are some examples of this:

Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov was jailed for several weeks and detained for five months in the United States because of his work for Elcomsoft, a software company in Russia. Elcomsoft created software that allows the rightful owner of a protected Adobe e-book to convert the file to Adobe's PDF format.

Read it all, here.

[andsome]

Don't get ANY since I changed my e=mail address.

[-pops-]

This is yet another example of the Americans thinking they are in control of everything that happens on this planet.

The US judiciary has control over the US and that alone. They cannot control other countries (as amply demonstrated on a larger scale recently in Iraq, and in the not too distant past in Vietnam and several others).

Whatever controls they introduce they introduce in their own country will not directly affect anywhere else. They would like it to, of course, and numerous American puppet states will concur at every pull of the strings (no names, no - - - etc.) but, there is a big world out there that has different views and opinions, a lot of them in direct opposition to those held by the USA and who, indeed, would dearly like to see the collapse of that country.

Spam (defined here as unwanted Internet communications) in one form or another will continue as long as the Internet continues. The USA is completely impotent in its abolition.

(and no, Viagra will not work on that impotence however cheaply and easily that material can be obtained over the Internet)