nagano wrote:Zombie wrote:His basic point is that you set the computer to accept data, which is akin to putting a book on display. Someone reads it, done is done, kind of. If you read it really to the letter and assume pure greed (without malicious intent as such), there's not much of an argument to be made if you want to be really anal about it.
The presence of a firewall or a password lock or whatever would obviously be a different matter entirely, that's a very clear statement of "you are not allowed to do this".
I understand, but I don't think this makes any difference. If you leave your front door unlocked, does this give someone the right to enter your house? I think not.
Agreed this far. Neither locking your door nor installing a password on your computer changes your rights on a strict libertarian understanding.
The implication seems to be that by allowing your computer to receive information and respond to it, that you have implicitly agreed to allow someone to gain access to your computer by use of these means. But this misses the mark. If you found a lost laptop in public, do you automatically have the right to snoop through the owner's files if he did not bother to set a password, or if you're good at cracking passwords? No. How is doing so remotely any different? While the owner may have set up the computer to communicate over a network, this is only agreeing to share very specific information, not the general contents of the computer.
Exactly what information are you agreeing to share? And how is that agreement established? In the actual world, they're established by case law and precedent. But neither of those explanations are available to you.
This is analogous to arguing that you have the right to enter a house by picking the lock simply because it has uncovered windows, and therefore, some of the information is set up to be "shared" with the outside. Again I will stress the point that goods, be they scarce or non-scarce, can be owned as individual copies (thus they cannot be trespassed against), but no one can hold a monopoly right over the idea of the good.
This is the disanalogy I see. My house is my own. By default, you cannot do anything to it. If you are a handyman, I might give you a narrowly circumscribed right to make a specific modification, which is demarcated from other things you might do by the physical characteristics of what you are doing ("open this door, not that door..."). When you connect your computer to a network, it communicates by a simple protocol (or couple of protocols) which all reduce to a model of sending information or messages from one computer to another. Arguing that computer hacking is a crime requires you to effectively say that some messages are ok, but not others. I doubt such a distinction can be rationalized in terms of property rights. It comes down to much mushier things, like privacy, trade secrets, and simple utility.
