Technology

I think the problem is that so many of our laws (especially intellectual property laws) seem to be ill equipped to deal with the reality of our increasingly digital world.

For example, recently there was an example of "worst person you know makes a good point" when 4chan and Kiwifarms opposed the imposition of the UK's recent Online Safety Act (OSA). They argued that they don't operate in the UK, none of their employees are based in the UK, none of their services are hosted in the UK, so under what jurisdiction can they be fined for not complying with the OSA? The UK's stance was that the OSA does apply to them because some of the users of those sites are from the UK, but the counterpoint to that is that it shouldn't be 4chan's legal obligation to police their users in this respect. UK users would be beholden to UK law, Nepalese users to Nepal's laws, US users to US law etc. — it isn't reasonable to expect a website to have a comprehensive understanding and compliance of the laws of every country that their users belong to. They argued that if the UK has beef with UK users going to a non-UK website that doesn't comply with the OSA, then they should take that up with entities based in the UK (such as ISPs).

The lawsuit was doomed from the getgo, because sovereign immunity means that they could sue a country, but it raised some super interesting points about jurisdiction and legal compliance. Buying and selling stolen goods is illegal, but what about if the person buying couldn't have reasonably known they were stolen? There's plenty of case law around that question, but does the same burden of evidence and "reasonableness" apply in an online context? Is embedding stolen content that's hosted on a different site seen the same as directly hosting that? Let's say that linking to stolen content is agreed to be the same as hosting that content directly — what about linking to a place that links to stolen content?

Even if we agree that buying and selling stolen goods is illegal, actually applying that to an online context gets messy real quick. Case law can be sparse, or contradictory in some cases. I share your view that intellectual property and copyright are bullshit, and I think part of what makes them so bullshit is how ill-suited they are to our current reality. There's always been a tension between the intention of copyright and the effects in practice, but I feel like that's gotten worse over the years. I don't know what a good solution would be, but I know for certain that the current system isn't working