Tennessee bans sharing

The music industry continues to push for draconian solutions to simple problems. Their newest assault on their customers is a Tennessee law which bans the sharing of your Netflix or Pandora password, which can now be a felony, depending on the level of infraction that the company can prove.

At issue for me is not whether sharing a password is wrong - unless it is within a family, it clearly is wrong - but that somehow the recording industry thinks a law like this is a better solution than simply putting in a technical fix. Why treat a stupid college kid like a Master Criminal, when you can simply lock the door (by limiting a streaming account to one stream at a time)?

It is a mistake to fix simple technical problems, with complicated, life-altering laws.

CT Town Legalizes Ice Cream Trucks

When you think about the various threats to our way of life, what do you think of? Terrorism? Drugs? Silly Bandz? I am guessing nowhere in your list is the humble Ice Cream Truck. In fact, typically it is a staple of the childhood experience - the saccharine-sweet jingle sounding from its speakers, the stampedes of hungry kids clamoring for a rocket pop, the parents looking on sadly knowing their waistlines can't withstand another sugary assault until swimsuit season is over.

But for Stratford, CT - a neighboring town to two Mod-Bloggers - Ice Cream Trucks have been illegal for 27 years. Why? No one seems to know. Perhaps someone in 1983 feared Communists were attempting to undermine America with doctored fudgesicles. Either way, we're glad to see the law is being repealed and "pop goes the weasel" will soon be playing in Connecticut neighborhoods again.

Three felonies a day?!

In politics, there is much hay to be made by passing laws and very little to be made by repealing them. This is often seen in my home state of Connecticut where many so-called "blue laws" exist, which are regulations put into place back in the Puritan era for specific reasons which no longer are relevant today, but which the legislature can't find the votes to repeal.

A civil liberties lawyer has begun an analysis of the U.S. legal system which has found that between this propensity to pass laws and never update or repeal obsolete ones, added to a new trend in American law to remove the idea of "criminal intent", has lead to a situation where he estimates the average American commits 3 felonies a day.

Technology moves so quickly we can barely keep up, and our legal system moves so slowly it can't keep up with itself. By design, the law is built up over time by court decisions, statutes and regulations. Sometimes even criminal laws are left vague, to be defined case by case. Technology exacerbates the problem of laws so open and vague that they are hard to abide by, to the point that we have all become potential criminals...

Other misunderstandings of the Web criminalize the exercise of First Amendment rights. A Saudi student in Idaho was charged in 2003 with offering "material support" to terrorists. He had operated Web sites for a Muslim charity that focused on normal religious training, but was prosecuted on the theory that if a user followed enough links off his site, he would find violent, anti-American comments on other sites. The Internet is a series of links, so if there's liability for anything in an online chain, it would be hard to avoid prosecution.