On Thu, Nov 19, 1998 at 11:48:26AM +1300, Don Stokes wrote:
Civil law has nothing whatsoever to do with technology. It's entirely to do with what is agreed (or not agreed) between parties and what the contractual obligations and liabilities are.
Provided the courts decisions and implications thereof are entirely bound to this, I completely agree.
It doesn't take a technically oriented judge to say "you don't have a contract that says you can do this so you can't do this".
No it doesn't -- but what about the situation where a contract (or court decision) requires unrealistic technical changes or constraints?
Technical issues may be factors to take into account in evidence, but they're not points of law, and as such generally don't need to be enshrined in law. I think the opposition to the Rogers bill demonstrated that.
The Roger's bill fell apart because Rogers is an incompetent moron and there was a couple of people slightly more cluefull that him on the select committee -- not to mention the fact he went of to form the Christine Fundy party or something and lost most of his support. We still have laws the make it illegal to _possess_ child pornography. Web proxy anyone?
I don't really want to get into a debate about philosophy of law and technology on a technical list, but I do think it needs to be pointed out that there are contractual issues on all sides of the problem at hand that need to be taken into account.
I have no doubts on the courts abilities to make decisions regarding contractual issues -- I'm just fearful the decisions will have ramifications of a technical nature, something I don't believe the court is equipped to deal with. What if, for arguments sake, a court decides that all network numbers are portable or that ownership of networks numbers is inferred unless explicitly stated otherwise? -cw --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog