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Comment by sailormoon | Hacker News Reader

"Being arrested and accused of what is probably one of the worst crimes known to man, losing my job, having my reputation run through the mud, it's a living nightmare."

I love how downloading a stream of bytes - simply copying a file from A to B - is now "one of the worst crimes known to man". I wonder how long this kind of crap goes on before the average person considers it a good use of their time to learn about encryption.

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Well, you could argue in this case that the crime he was accused of was purchasing child porn which encourages and supports the producers though I have a feeling that the author just mean 'child porn' (in general) when he wrote that.

Funny how that argument only works with kiddie porn. I mean, you could argue that by buying Nikes you're encouraging and supporting child labor. You could argue that by buying a diamond you're encouraging and supporting slavery. You could argue that by buying pictures of Abu Ghraib the media "encourages and supports" the behaviour at Abu Ghraib.

But this supposed causal chain of responsibility between purchaser and producer is only enforced, indeed only even mentioned, when it comes to the bogeyman of child porn, which means it's nothing but an excuse.

This is a rather common logical fallacy. It should have a name, but the "zeroes and ones fallacy" doesn't sound too good. A stream of bytes has a meaning which has to do with not only the bytes themselves but their context, and I can think of several ways in which copying a file from A to B could be among the worst crimes known to man. This fallacy ignores the context of the bytes.

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