Chris writes:
The industry we are in and technology we work with is comparatively new and most legal systems are doing an very poor job and keeping up with the state of things and hence their abilities to make `reasonable' decisions and pass reasonable legislation in woefully inadequate (this isn't a slight against the people involved, these things take time).
<sigh> 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. And the place to sort those issues out, where a binding ruling is needed bacause voluntary negotiation has failed, is the court. It's one of things that helps make our society work. It's not going to go away. 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". 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. 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. -- don --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog