Reddit mentions of Software & Internet Law 4e (Aspen Casebook Series)

Said in mocking tone: "Aw, boo."

> It's more likely the downvotes were from people in the computer security field who understand that the internet is the 2012 version of the wild fucking west

Sad for you, I actually have worked in computer security, now I'm a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property and internet law, I'm in-house for a company that makes, among other things, enterprise grade security software, and that is just total fucking bullshit. Everything you are saying is infuriatingly wrong.

In the last 30 years, there have been fifteen sets of laws passed by the US congress directly regulating online behavior.

Not only that, this:
> Most of the outcry over CISPA has been from the people who want to keep the internet some sort of lawless land where they can anonymously download their fill of horse porn while some other guy steals 4 million identities and sells them to fraud mills in taiwan and china.

Is just utter fucking bullshit. I don't even know where to start: the internet is not just for horse porn, and your argument saying that open = evil is a classic 'moral panic' argument, the opennness of the internet is precisely what has allowed google, airbnb, amazon, twitter and foursquare to work, and if you cannot understand that horse-porn is an unfortunate but necessary externality of this open-ness, it is because you are a dumbass; the people who write this legislation don't know how to check their own fucking email, and are utterly unqualified to be doing this; identity theft is already illegal and passing new laws about using computers in identity theft won't make it less common; local law is not going to regulate behavior in china; the list goes on.

The only 'wild west'-ness of the internet is that computers are general computation machines, and code can be run on them to do pretty much anything, but, other than that, the internet is regulated by all the same laws that your behavior IRL is regulated by. It has multiple governing bodies, ranging from the US courts to the UN and Icann. Many thick textbooks and treatises exist on internet law. Not just that, but, if you have read Code 2.0 by Larry Lessig, and it is abundantly clear you have not, you would know that law simply doesn't change the way the internet works, it just changes what you can throw people in jail for. So, basically, CISPA and SOPA do not make the internet a better place or reduce cybercrime, and, even, if they were perfect, it is still theoretically impossible for these bills to accomplish those goals, and, often the proposed legislation makes the problem worse. It is literally outside the possible realm of law to stop people from being gullible idiots and falling for nigerian scammers.

So, basically, everything you have said is wrong, and, sadly for you, I not only have a JD, but my first career was in IT, and just... nothing you are saying is right, and not only is it wrong, it is just retweeting the hysterical nonsense of copyright maximalist groups and people who are paroxysmically and unjustifiably afraid of terrorism and willing to throw their rights away because one time a few brown people did a thing with some planes. I sincerely hate that this was your answer, because this is precisely the sort of bullshit that makes me so fucking depressed: not only are your arguments wrong, they are based on luddite misconceptions, actively hinder progress, are not shared by experts, and, most importantly they employed rhetorical devices designed to make your opponents look like criminals and pornographers, so, sincerely, go fuck yourself. I am not 'implying' that you are a pornographer or a criminal, I'm actively calling you a douche, and I fully stand by my decision to openly call you a douche and claim your contribution to the debate as a detriment to society, because at least I'm being goddamn upfront about it.