While you might be right in normal circumstances, once the legal system tries to make humanly-intuitive decisions about the mathematical processes inside real "

While you might be right in normal circumstances, once the legal system tries to make humanly-intuitive decisions about the mathematical processes inside real "dumb machines", that legal system really should trigger exceptions or result in undefined behaviour. Already, legal notions like jurisdiction are being pushed to their limits thanks to technology like the internet (look at the extradition case of Kim Dotcom), and things get even murkier with questions of copyright. What is the difference between a forum (such as Reddit) where people can discuss magnet links/hashes (to news articles, and public domain works, and copyrighted works) and a forum called The Pirate Bay? If it's just the word "Pirate" in the title (as opposed to "The irate Bay", for example), then it seems that the law is very sensitive to single byte changes on a website, and the job of humans to classify these things into buckets rapidly becomes intractable. We're back to "What Colour are your bits?" again: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23