Reply #10: I think I know what they're gonna try, and it'll snare shitloads of

[Occulus]

DMCA violations. They'll demonize it all along the way, of course, and thereby create national outrage.

Here's what I think their plan is:

We have to make one very reasonable assumption here: most pornographic images on the internet- the ones you "stumble across" without paying- are in fact NOT "legal" under the DMCA. Just take a gander over to the .binaries sex forums on Usenet or look up "____ porn" on the various filesharing networks to see what I mean.

If you know to look for, and then actively look for it, there's lots and lots of "free porn" available online.

What I think Justice might be trying to do here (and I truly do hope I'm wrong) is nail a few million people under the provisions of the DMCA. It's a neat trick: pass a law making copyright violation a severe crime. Then, use that same law, in conjunction with a law passed to "protect the children" (which makes its passage in the first place more certain, as it happens) to go after something else online you happen to have a moral objection to.

This will end in a classic authoritarian bait-and-switch: they'll use rules not passed for their purposes in a way that suits them. While outrageous, I'm afraid they may be technically correct if they try this.

They're going to go after "free porn" because they don't like it. They'll use this child protection law as an excuse to get the neceessary IP addresses and use the UMCA as an excuse when they "happen" to find a "crime" was committed.

I hate our laws. Only lawyers can possibly hope to understand them, yet we're all supposed to abide by them. IANAL, so can someone please tell me this can't possibly happen?

Please?