RE: [dvd-discuss] 2600 Loses in 2nd Circuit

[Richard Hartman <hartman(at)onetouch.com>]

The parallel between clicking the button on a mouse
and pulling the trigger on a gun should be pressed
hard if this gets appealed higher.  Even better,
a mouse click could certainly be used as the signal
to set off explosives.  It is not the action that 
triggers an event that is significant or insignificant,
it is the thought that initiates that action.

-- 
-Richard M. Hartman
hartman@onetouch.com

186,000 mi./sec ... not just a good idea, it's the LAW!


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bryan Taylor [mailto:bryan_w_taylor@yahoo.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2001 9:08 PM
> To: dvd-discuss@eon.law.harvard.edu
> Subject: [dvd-discuss] 2600 Loses in 2nd Circuit
> 
> 
> 2600 Lost. The text of the decision is here:
> 
> http://www.2600.com/news/112801-files/UniversalBrief_3.pdf
> 
> The court wrote the best explaination yet of why code, 
> including object code is
> speech. Then they applied the test for intermediate scrutiny. 
> Here is a key
> point of their argument:
> 
> "Unlike a blueprint or a recipe, which cannot yield any 
> functional result
> without human comprehension of its content, human 
> decision-making, and human
> action,
> can instantly cause a computer to accomplish tasks and 
> instantly render the
> results of those tasks available throughout he world via the 
> Internet. The only
> human action required to a hieve these results can be as limited and
> instantaneous as a single click of a mouse."
> 
> This is a very clear error. Their second sentence admits that 
> it in fact does
> take human action, to execute the program, while the standard 
> of the first
> sentence depends on absense of "human decision-making". 
> 
> The decision to click that mouse may involve very subtle and 
> minute physical
> motion, but so does pulling the trigger of a gun. That is 
> what technology does
> -- it allows human decisions to be implemented with minimal 
> physical action,
> but the smallness of the trigger is not the measure of who must bear
> responsibility for the enormous conscious choice of if, when, 
> and under what
> circumstances to tap it. 
> 
> 
> 
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