Hacker News Reader

Comment by Claudus | Hacker News Reader

I'm an even tempered person, but seeing a law like this passed really makes me angry.

Dear government, how about passing a law that benefits me for a change? It's been a while.

Even worse is that the "Librarian of Congress [...] decided that unlocking mobile phones would no longer be allowed" seemingly without an input from the people.

The regulatory agencies, dubbed the "fourth branch of government," are able to pass regulations with criminal penalties without passing a law through Congress.

This increase in arbitrary government authority threatens the very nature of a Republic.

Yes, regulatory agencies making laws is a hard call. The agencies are at least more specialist than Congress and don't have nearly the quid pro quo problems that election funding entails.

However, I'm sure a lot of them come from industry, which biases them to the establishment.

The nice thing is that they can easily be changed through public outcry unlike stupid laws passed through Congress.

This isn't exactly accurate; "... are able to pass regulations with criminal penalties without passing a law through Congress."

The DMCA was passed by congress and provides the criminal penalties. It's up to the agencies to work out the exact details of what falls under those penalties, within congress' wording. The larger problem is congress passing extremely broad laws.

Congress can't possibly legislate out every detail of every law (imagine holding hearings to decide on what species of tree in some national forest can be logged or on the details of the airport airspace restrictions around Des Moines Iowa), so they leave it to agencies. This isn't anything new.

That's not to say that there are no oversight issues though...

The regulatory agencies are largely controlled by the executive branch, and the increase in their power in part of a larger, seemingly irreversible towards the president being a sort of elected king.

There are many reasons for this, but the growing staleness and corruption of congress is a major one. That, in turn, is caused by a historical low in congressional turnover (with a multitude of causes, including Gerrymandering, Power determined by seniority, etc)

Term limits, preferably on consecutive terms rather than absolute ones, would help. And it's considerably more likely to happen than, say, switching our voting system to proportional representation.

Congress is supposed to be the people's chamber, in fact, the most important and powerful branch of government. Without a strong one, the Republic, in the form it was intended, will fail.

It's a basic principle of administrative law that administrative regulations can only be adopted with legislative authority, which in this case was granted by a statute Congress passed. It should be possible to look up the second step taken on this issue as an administrative regulation, which was a public notice and comment period. I have read the official notices and public comments for other administrative regulations on other topics, and generally regulators get plenty of commentary from the public (with "public" of course including interest groups, but also private citizens) whenever a new regulation is in the notice and commment period. "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience... The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. The Common Law (1881), p. 1.

The quote refers to experience gained in the process of the development of common law.

"Common law, also known as case law or precedent, is law developed by judges through decisions of courts and similar tribunals, as opposed to statutes adopted through the legislative process or regulations issued by the executive branch."

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law

The Librarian of Congress was responsible for the exemption that exempted jailbreaking in the first place, and then decided not to renew it. The public is actually petitioned for what they think should be exempted and their argument for or against. As to whether it's truly illegal or not is now up to the courts.

Note: this is about "unlocking" (as the term is used for purposes of using a device on a different carrier, as opposed to the usage you often see on Android devices of "unlocking the bootloader"), not "jailbreaking" (which is about removing the defenses on the phone against the installation of third-party unauthorized software; not just "apps" but replacements of core operating system functionality).

In fact, the Library of Congress renewed the exemption on jailbreaking; they did not, however, see fit to expand it to cover any of the proposed expansions ("tablets", "video game consoles", or "personal computing devices"). This standing exemption, which was put into place in the 2009 exemption window due to an EFF application, covers the jailbreaking of "mobile telecommunication handsets".

Yes, I mixed the words up because I was trying to post quickly. But my point is more that LoC is in a position to provide or to no longer extend previously provided exemptions to 17 USC 1201 for 3 year durations. That is, they do not really issue prohibitions. Something that they don't provide an exemption for could possibly turn out to actually be legal through court doctrine and caselaw.

Don't worry, I'm sure the tens of thousands of new federal laws passed since 1990 have you covered.

The states are passing upwards of 40,000 new laws per year at this point (per MSNBC).

It's a nation that has gone completely insane politically.

It's only insane if you think that every new law makes something illegal. A law can do just about anything: clarify or update the language of existing laws, create or amend a budget, add or revoke a subsidy for a product or economic activity, be a statement of purpose, or allocate funds for infrastructure projects. In other words, just claiming that "40,000" laws is insane doesn't really mean much. Governments work by way of laws, so this metric simply tells me that these governments are active. To determine whether or not their activity is insane, one must investigate the types of laws being passed.

I don't see the word 'illegal' or any permutation thereof in the post you're responding to.

Personally, 40,000 additions to the surface area of the legal system qualifies as pretty crazy under just about every circumstance. Not all government activity requires a new law.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com