Ben Hammersley reminds us that the internets don’t care about the Supreme Court.
The curse of the missing clause:
Declaring filesharing illegal across the net because it’s illegal in the US is like declaring the web broken because it’s censored in China. All it means is that people in the US wanting to write filesharing apps and make money from them will just have to move somewhere warm and cheap and do it from there.
While developers in the US are being hamstrung by their courts, and their counterparts in Europe are about to have software patents kick the chair out from under them, the developers in the warm and cheap places are getting busy. If you really care that your software was written in the US, then the Grokster case is quite a big deal. If not, you just shrug and move on. The rest of the world’s a big place. They make software there too.
Not the first he has suggested that rest of the world beckons clueful people. Does the New Colossus’s offer still stand but as guide to the exit?
“Give me
your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to
breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your
teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless,
tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden
door!”
[composed and posted with ecto]