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I was keeping away from expressing my opinions on the cases. The point I was trying to make was how much trouble we can get ourselves into with just a few keystrokes.

When I think crime I think things like assault, armed robbery, murder. Very physical things. They clearly deprive people of something - your money or your life, in the case of robbery and murder.

In our business however, it seems that it is possible to be fined literally thousands of dollars for an act that does no damage, causes no downtime, hurts noone. I'm referring to things like copying a password file here.

The idea that a court can come up with some ludicrously high figure for possesion of a copied document( or a password ) file scares me. I'm secretly praying for the day a judge turns around and says "a million for a lousy 10kb file? You're kidding. Divide that by a million".

It's not going to happen, I suspect. But I honestly feel that the punishment no longer fits the crime. Banning a computer enthusiast from ever using a computer is cruel. I can't even think of the right words for some of the other judgements that have gone by in the last decade. Not to mention the fact that it now seems to be impossible to do anything without breaking a law somewhere.

On a completely unrelated note: most schools thesedays offer basic computer training. Why don't they offer basic law training as well?

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

In reply to Re: Re: Oregon Supreme Court declines to hear my case by jepri
in thread Oregon Supreme Court declines to hear my case by merlyn

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