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Comment by pestaa | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who finds these regulations increasingly funny?

I want to see how they would react to URL shortening services, base64-encoded outgoing redirects, links injections only on click events; you know, the gray tactics the whole internet already uses!

Please explain this one thing to me: why don't politicians work with field experts? Not just IT, but any domain, really.

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The government sets an agenda and uses all kinds of tricks to get it through the parliament as fast as possible. A real democratic process is not desired. MPs usually don't have enough time to even read bills, doing proper research is completely out of the question, and therefore they trust the party position. Disagreeing with the party is sanctioned, e.g. you won't get listed in the next election (-> you lose the income you need for your mortgage), less speaking time, etc.

Source: Members of the Bundestag and "Von Rettern und Rebellen" by Klaus-Peter Willsch

> MPs usually don't have enough time to even read bills, doing proper research is completely out of the question, and therefore they trust the party position.

I don't get this. They should automatically reject anything they didn't have time to read.

I wrote about this 13 years ago during the Les Kelly vs. Arriba Soft Corp. court case(s):

http://www.kozubik.com/published/decisions.txt

I went the other way, though - my thought experiment was, what if you came up with a standard way to "say" a URL in plain english. As in, just a wordy, colloquial way to describe the content that is in a URL.

Obviously this would fall under free speech and nobody would consider barring such speech ...

So I think now, as I did then, that if you really want to demonstrate the ridiculous nature of these proposals, you need a browser plug-in that allows you to describe URLs in plain english and then demonstrate that to the court (or whomever).

But most copyrighted works are already in plain English and aren't excluded from copyright because of "free speach", so that argument doesn't add up. You're trying to argue that anything that can be written in plain English can't be subjected to copyright.

I don't think that is what rsync is talking about at all. I read it to mean that instead of using a specific hyperlink, that you could use a collection of English words that would allow some hypothetical computer system to locate the same resource. Reading rsync's linked article,

  >> Consider also that it would be trivial for a programmer of a web 
  browser to alter the behavior of the browser such that a normal text
  link that points to a file determined to be a picture would result
  in the actual picture being displayed - exactly as it would have been
  if an inline link were being used.  
  Further, it would also be trivial to rewrite the browser to display the
  picture in question given an english sentence on the web page that
  described the address of the picture, thus prompting this (as yet)
  imaginary web browser to, once again, display the picture.

  >> The important point is that the behavior of any given web browser
  as relates to the use of links (inline or otherwise) is in fact
  completely arbitrary.  Therefore the prohibition of one kind of
  linking over another not only demonstrates a failure to grasp how
  the underlying technology works (and could be made to work) but also
  represents a legal precedent that would require constant maintenance
  and revision to remain relevant.

Right, so a different form of describing hyperlinks? Just changing the form doesn't matter. I've said this many times on HN: 'law is not a closed rule-based system like computers are'.

Besides, I'm not sure what 'free speech' has to do with anything. For starters we have such a thing only in the abstract in the EU; secondly, there are many, many exceptions to 'free speech' that neuter all 'absolutist interpretation of free speech' based ideas like this one.

The law and the courts don't care about the technical implementation; if it works like a link, it's a link. The Pirate Bay defense was much stronger than that, and look at what happened.

I don't know about the EU but in the US politicians to work with field experts, they are called lobbyists. This is why you have the automotive industry writing automotive law, etc.

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