Re: Draft finding - "Transitioning the Web to HTTPS"

On 2015-01 -28, at 17:48, Eric J. Bowman <eric@bisonsystems.net> wrote:

>> 
>> I pointed out that outright ad-replacement was considered by some as
>> theft-of-revenue. I hope we can agree on that.
>> 
> 
> I can agree if we're sharing an opinion. As a fact, I must disagree as
> it hasn't been adjudicated, and I am not in posession of any crystal
> ball showing me what the courts must certainly find if it were to be
> adjudicated. As more years pass without adjudication of this issue, it
> becomes harder to rule against, if the defense is established custom and
> practice.
> 



This community should move from crystal-ball gazing as to how courts
might interpret laws and regulations which are out there toward defining a protocol, where
necessary including policy pieces as well as the technical bits. 
So for example, along with the TCP protocol that a byte stream is broken up
into packets, routed, retransmitted, and reorganized into the original stream byte for byte,
we now need a legal corollary that anyone who breaks the protocol as part of any nefarious
commercial scheme is breaking the law.  "Code is law" in that it determines the way people
interact much like law, but also Law is Code, in that it is part of the system design and also needs to be got right and
worked out in mailing lists and github.   We need to work more closely with people who make laws.

Just as Larry Lessig points out (I hope I attribute this right) that there is no justice in
obeying unjust laws, so maybe the corollary to that is that there is injustice in breaking
 things which ought to be laws even though they are not (yet). So if you are working for
 a project which injects javascript into hotel user's web pages, think about pushing back
on the project or finding a better job.

Jus sayin.

Tim

Director hat off but not far away