Gary Scarborough

While I can see that some good has been done with this bill, it still is not enough. We still have a hand held mobile market that is slowly destroying itself with patents. The barrier to entry into that market is enormous. In the end, the user foots the bill. The more I learn about copyright and patent, the more I think it should just be abolished. It started out as a contract between the creator and society. Slowly over time though, society has lost most of its benefits. The corporations have absolutely no respect for the patents or copyrights of others. Look at Microsoft, who according to their own emails, knew i4i had a patent on technology they used. So why should society honor the agreement? There is a common definition of insane: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting the results to change.

Its not exactly clear that he used a protected computer system. Some accounts of the incident indicate he was using a guest account. He was downloading the info to a laptop. The system may be set to allow all local accesses as its authentication. When you create a guest account for people to use, you are giving permission. If he actually hacked his way into the system, then he should be found guilty of that. But its not clear that is what happened. From my own experience:

Many computer systems used to have banners welcoming the user to the system. Our ISO banned such banners and strictly requires a certain banner now. Why? Because if someone sits down at a terminal, and the screen says welcome, you can't really make a case that they accessed the system without permission. Saying "Welcome" is actually giving permission. Our banner now reads basically: "If you are not a university student or employee, disconnect immediately!"