Ernie Miller argues often against the INDUCE Act. I happen to agree that the act is too broad, but I do think there is a place for law that prohibits true inducement of infringement, as long as it is properly tailored.

However, Ernie presents the argument that p2p networks are hard to regulate or control, seemingly as some sort of reason that legislation should not go forward, or some justification for p2p networks in and of themselves. Actually, I'm not quite sure what this argument is supposed to achieve other than some sort of glee in the apparent impotency of Congress to stop p2p networks, which Ernie obviously is for.

Well, I am for p2p networks too, but not when they are specifically tailored to induce copyright infringement, as some have been in the past.

At any rate, the argument that p2p is unregulable is out of place. There are quite a few things that are hard to regulate with law, but we figure out ways to do it anyway if it's necessary and desirable to our society. For instance, how can we regulate drugs? Presumably, growing pot is just about as easy as downloading a p2p app from an overseas server. How is it that we can still have laws that have a significant effect on marijuana consumption? We do...

My point is that if p2p is hard to regulate, and there are any serious social or economic problems caused by its widespread unregulated use, no one should be gleefully declaring its unregulability, or that our laws are impotent or ineffective. In such situations, we need to find ways to regulate that preserve the benefits of a technology, while simultaneously suppressing the detriments.

Certainly, if I were in the market for a nuke, I'd be happy to pronounce that the laws of the U.S. could do nothing to stop me in my endeavors. But this doesn't at all address whether the technology may have problems or harmful effects. If the technology does, we need to find ways to regulate it.

Where do I begin?

For some reason, blogging became less than seductive to me over the last few months. I think finishing my first year of law school had something to do with it. Rather than feeling I wanted to blog about it, I felt like I just wanted to get off the treadmill for a while.

I also felt like I should stop trying to pontificate about things, now that I've been so humbled by what I didn't know upon entering law school. It has widened my horizons more than I can describe. It has reconnected me with the idea that logic and technology must interface with humanity at some point. The point of intersection is often the law, and it's usually based on some very deep philosophical principles that only the best law professors force you to think about, and only the best students actually figure out. Everyone else just muddles through.

So I finished exams in May. I lost a year of my life, basically. I barely remember anything but studying, for 9 months. Amazing. But I also gained all the things I've been describing. I even became more responsible. And I will have to be even more responsible yet. More on that later...

I can say with reasonable satisfaction that I finished in the top 25% of my class. I could have done much much better, but many things held me back, including my cluelessness about simply how to study. I never really had to study properly before. I could always get by just by pulling all-nighters the last couple of nights before a big due date. Now it's different. There's just too much information.

In computer science, understanding is 85% of your work. If you understand everything, you're pretty much golden. In law, it is not that way. You have to cram a ridiculous amount of information into your head before you can even begin to 'understand.' Then you have to synthesize all that information, distill it, and try to understand it. It's not like looking at an equation or proof or algorithm and just thinking through it. It's more like taking a whole bunch of algorithms that researchers may have come up with, and trying to distill the most salient principles from them, developing a new algorithm that incorporates the principles of all its predecessors.

I've also realized that if there's something out there someone is doing that I think is hard, I know I can do it too. There is almost nothing too tough for me to take on anymore.

The law is an amazing thing. I wish more people knew what I now know about how it works, why it works, and how it should continue working. Particularly our beautiful system of the common law. Yes, judges make law, and it rocks. It is an amazing institution, one we should continue to take advantage of, and attempt not to derogate for merely political ends.

I am now President of the IP law society at George Mason, which will be great fun over the next year.

Yes, even most of a summer later, I'm still in shock.

I'll be back... ;)

I have a new theory.

In this world, we should try to find the right balance in everything. That is, in society, in law, in technology, our overriding goal should be just to prevent our systems from breaking unrecoverably (e.g. everyone dying).

Evolution guides all these processes, and everything else too, it seems. So as the ideologues battle, I'm going to try to keep a bit of perspective. I'll try to remember that theories and ideologies are merely forces nudging the evolution of our systems, and can never be entirely self-coherent. They are only coherent inasmuch as they recognize they would fail if implemented in toto, and that they are only one part of a much bigger, much slower process.

Well, maybe it's not really new. Maybe it's just the Dao.