[sociotech]

This "TOS" stuff is another red herring. Even the EFF said the new proposed change in that law wouldn't have stopped the charges in this case.

This case was about more than doing something that JSTOR told users not to do. Yes, it involved that too, but it also involved taking materials that others had copyright to and threatening to make them publicly available, which could have disrupted many organizations' functioning.

Would you be surprised if someone pulled four million videos off of YouTube (or books off of Google Books) and torrented them, and then was prosecuted and asked to serve six months?

[AnthonyMouse]

>Would you be surprised if someone pulled four million videos off of YouTube (or books off of Google Books) and torrented them, and then was prosecuted and asked to serve six months?

You're using the six months as though it wasn't the "coercive" part of a coercive plea bargain. When six months in prison and a felony record is supposed to be the carrot in a case of noncommercial copyright infringement, something malevolent is going on with the stick.

[sociotech]

Maybe. It's the administrative system we've got, though, and we should be talking about how to reform the whole thing.

Note how much Orin Kerr recently agreed with the points I made days ago here on this subject.

[AnthonyMouse]

>It's the administrative system we've got, though, and we should be talking about how to reform the whole thing.

I completely agree. The whole thing with the prosecutors is kind of a "they represent the part of what's broken that we can currently see" thing. Fixing the laws and the system is more important than fixing a few individuals.

>Note how much Orin Kerr recently agreed with the points I made days ago here on this subject.

I think most reasonable people end up coming to largely the same conclusions about all of this at the end of the day... which is actually kind of eerie. People who are normally at loggerheads continuously, now getting along and working together.

It makes my brain hurt that it took for someone to die for this to happen and now I don't want to be happy about it even though it's seeming more likely that we may actually get something good to come out of this. I guess I don't know what to feel. So I just keep trying to figure out how to fix it and hope actually accomplishing something will make it feel different somehow.