En Garde!
By Michael Swaine
How the law applies to technology and the Internet depends on which law and who's talking. Business and government have separate views, and any connection with your rights and interests is purely coincidental.
Business Says:
We'll give you free Internet access, a free vanity Web page, free email, even a free computer, in exchange for permission to bombard you with advertising. We'll put free computers in your schools and all we ask in exchange is unlimited access to your children's minds without fear of contradiction or competition. We'll sell you a virtual desktop, and then we'll sell ad space on it to other companies.
We'll sell you software and tell you that you can't resell it without our permission, can't make backup copies of it unless we say it's OK, and can use it only in ways that we approve. We'll hide code in our software that detects when you do things of which we disapprove. Depending on the level of our disapproval, we'll punish you by flashing annoying messages, shutting down the program, sending email to our legal department, and/or erasing your hard disk. The software we sell may capture your keystrokes and send them to us without your knowledge or approval, and that's OK.
You agreed to all of this when you broke the seal on the package. The fact that you're using the software is evidence that you broke the seal—or clicked on the button.
Programmers sometimes invent ways to break our software by revealing how to win our games or turn off encryption. So we got the government to make it illegal for them to think up this stuff or to communicate such thoughts to others, whether verbally, electronically, in print, or on T-shirts or coffee mugs.<>
