Jamie Lawrence wrote:

Perhaps we'll have to agree to disagree, if you think those where good laws.

I don't necessarily think they are good laws. What it comes down to is this. A person will do whatever they think they can get away with if the punishment is only losing their service. I personally think that ISPs should write in penalty costs for breaking TOS and AUP and set them high enough to scare people into not breaking them. However, history has shown that we instead make it a criminal offense and use that as the way to scare people into doing what is right to begin with.

Extending this to criminalizing devices capable of doing NAT, or port forwarding, or (seemingly, in some cases) encryption, or anonymous remailers, is stupid and wrong.

I do think that the Act was poorly written and have stated such. There is too much room for abuse of the Act. They tried to incorporate too many things under one umbrella. And ISP should not be grouped with telco or even cable. It has it's own sets of problems, and those problems should be handled uniquely. Combining legislation has never been a good deal.

If you need to criminalize what you should be enforcing by contract, your business has a problem.

People, especially home users, don't fear breach of contract, especially if they feel they might get away with it. They do fear the law and going to jail; reguardless of if it's enforced heavily or not. -Jack