Re: FSF condemns partnership between Mozilla and Adobe to support Digital Restrictions Management
On Tue, 20 May 2014 09:15:39 -0400
The Wanderer <wanderer@fastmail.fm> wrote:
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> On 05/20/2014 09:07 AM, Celejar wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 20 May 2014 21:47:57 +1000 Zenaan Harkness <zen@freedbms.net>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> On 5/20/14, Celejar <celejar@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >>> But this is precisely the problem with some of the dogmatic
> >>> idealists here - by this logic, we should abolish criminal
> >>> justice entirely, as it's virtually impossible to guarantee that
> >>> "no one blameless" will ever be "persecuted":
> >>> http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/guilty.htm
> >>
> >> I don't remember reading the words Slavko posted before, but the
> >> way I read it is as: "we must make our best efforts to not
> >> persecute blameless people" and "if blameless people are being
> >> persecuted, we must make more efforts [eg with our criminal justice
> >> system - to fix this problem]".
> >>
> >> So not abolish criminal justice, but make more efforts in this
> >> system to reduce/minimize persecution/punishment of people who
> >> should not be punished.
> >>
> >> Of course perfection cannot be achieved in reality, I agree.
> >
> > Of course. But while it's certainly not a zero-sum game, there's
> > generally going to be a trade-off: increasing protections for
> > defendants will save some innocents, at the expense of letting some
> > guilty go free. The same goes for IP regulation: many of us at least
> > believe that the law should balance the rights of the IP holders with
> > the rights of the consumer, and insisting on absolute freedom for
> > the consumer at the expense of the rights of the rights-holders is
> > wrong.
>
> So is the other way around.
>
> There's a saying:
>
> "It is better for X guilty persons to go free than for Y innocent
> persons to be punished."
>
> Traditionally, Y is 1 (with the accompanying change of "innocent
> persons" to the singular), and I think X is something like 100 or 1000.
> I present it in this form because I think it enables a valuable
> question, particularly in context of the third level of quotation above:
>
> What numbers would you pick for X and Y, for you to accept this
> statement as being true?
If you take the trouble to follow the link I posted above, you'll see
an entire paper - one of the most brilliantly erudite and funniest
things I have ever read - devoted to that question.
> I'd like to ask that question of every politician, and every police
> officer, and so forth. I think it could be quite illuminating.
Celejar
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