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Comment by random_upvoter | Hacker News Reader

From the headline it's easy to conclude that the judge is ignorant but if you read the article what actually happened is that he took a narrow reading of the text of law so as to protect the rights of the accused. I think that is totally recommendable. People don't use the word "computer" when they talk about their smart phone. Therefore it's fair to conclude that when a law talks about "computers", that does not include smart phones, even if they have more CPU power than a 1990s PC. It's up to the lawmakers to write a better law, i.e. one that simple states "... and also smart phones".

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While I think the distinction is wrong and stupid, with the state of computer security legislation in Australia I think it's possible that what the judge did is right and in defense of personal security. Logically it makes sense in line with what Woz said about if you change the size or power of something significantly enough it's a different thing. But I can't help but think that this distinction is going to be turned around into a weapon against people and I can promise if that same thing happened in the US, everything would get weird for everyone pretty quick.

This question has already been addressed in the US. Luckily there US allows phones to be multiple things at once, so constitutional protections like the 4th and 5th amendments still apply.

Setting a precedent that a smart phone is not a computer seems like a bad idea. Surely there are other laws that smart phone owners (and makers) would want to apply to both smart phones and more traditional computers.

This sort of thing (distorting the meaning of words in law to achieve a "fair" outcome) is that not uncommon.

Long ago one of the triggers for an expansion of copyright law was someone doing a clever job skirting it, who came up against a judge who wanted to put a stop to whatever he was doing. The only problem was according to earlier precedents the person wasn't actually copying anything. (Sorry - I forget the exact facts - it was a long time ago.) Anyway, the judge then had an epiphany - when the content was being played / transmitted or whatever it was, the bits were beginning copied on the bus lines.

That got leapt on by the copyright owners to mean they could control any copy, no matter how transient - and so the distinction between making a copy and transmission disappeared. If you copied something you not only had to have the legal right to have copies on on the source and destination (which this guy did) - you have to have the legal right own the "copy" on the transmission method.

The judge got his conviction of course, but all computer programmers watching on recoiled in horror. Later came the DCMA, which was actually an improvement on that situation that decision created.

Isn't that too specific? That wouldn't cover tablets, phablets or future computer-like devices.

That's probably OK I think. Legislators probably have a particular device in mind, with particular functions and usage patterns, when they write a law.

Requiring a specific update to the law in order to encompass new devices - which probably have different features and usage patterns - is worth the inconvenience to lawmakers. Sometimes an "automatic extension" of a law to new-but-related devices is appropriate, but many times it will not be and I'd rather err on the side of less law.

Is it less law to require a specific law for every single illogical differentiation, or to have a general principle that can be applied in a logical and consistent fashion?

"Less law" in the sense of fewer areas of life covered, not the number of words written.

OT (wrt law): The phone hardware is a call computer, but even I would call them consumer devices rather than a computer. The closest convenient computation I can do on one might be Google sheets.

It bears mentioning that this same judicial philosophy is extolled by hotly-controversial and recent appointments to the US Supreme Court.

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