(I know this isn’t possible, but bear with me. It’s a “thought experiment”.) Theorizing too much about the impossible is a risky activity, like deliberately pr

(I know this isn’t possible, but bear with me. It’s a “thought experiment”.) Theorizing too much about the impossible is a risky activity, like deliberately practicing bad rhythm. You can train your mind to fall into patterns of misguided thought. You can wind up being deathly afraid of shadows that do not exist. Abstraction can be good for a while, like training wheels on a bicycle, but try to respect the limits of your abstractions and spend a healthy amount of your time in the real world. I don't remember which lawyer -- might have been Lessig, might have been Moglen -- made the obvious point that copyright law can't be adjudicated by computer. Here are fifteen words taken from a copyrighted work: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. A computer can detect that these words are from a copyrighted work and censor them. But it can't figure out that in this context -- a brief educational example as part of an essay -- my use of these words is obviously a case of fair use. That's for a judge to decide. Judges are not run by algorithms that we know how to duplicate. If quotations that matched previously copyrighted work were literally "completely impossible" human thought would grind to a halt. Just read the Spider Robinson short story, which will tell you everything you need to know about this counterfactual, and then worry about something more subtle but actually real, like the problem of corrupt judges, or selective enforcement of unrealistic laws, or the fact that fair use could end up being so expensive to defend that only rich people can exercise it without fear.