"Bad" P2P and Spyware
As the negotiations on the Induce Act continue, it's likely that there are people sitting in a room on Capitol Hill debating how to define “bad” P2P applications and products in legislative language. The same exercise is certainly going forward with respect to spyware. It may be that we're taking the wrong approach to these questions.
How do you describe code you don't like without sweeping in untold numbers of existing (and yet-to-be-created) innovations? Answer: You try really really hard and create tortured definitions, then hope for the best. It's inevitable that some “good” P2P applications will provide the kinds of tools that KaZaa and Grokster did/do. It's inevitable that some “good” spyware will have the potential to be used “badly.” (Although we've gone pretty far with this question by calling an entire category of things “spyware” — like “broadcast flag,” which sounds so benign and positive, “spyware” sounds positively evil no matter what its uses.)
Maybe, instead of defining what code we don't like, we should define what relationships we don't approve of. People that intend to rob me of my control over my attention, without my wanting them to (or without my getting some benefit that I want in exchange) are creating a relationship with me that I don't want. Like a car alarm under my window (note: there are no car alarms under my window — I'm lucky), their work is keeping me from focusing. That's wrong, and that's something we may want to condemn globally. Similarly, someone who wants to make money from massive uploading of copyrighted works, but tries to avoid liability under standard copyright law, is creating a relationship with the marketplace that we may want to condemn.
Working on defining oppressive relationships — and getting at what really makes us mad, rather than trying to anticipate how technology will be used — has got to be a better approach than trying to define “bad” technology.
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