On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 11:35:19AM -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>
> FYI, a US business can rather successfully sue a Canadian one.
Yes, but in Canada, only for actual violations of Canadian law. Most
of the time, the practical effect of this is nothing, because the
Canadian businesses have US assets that the USian business can go
after in USian courts. (This tactic is the one that's been
attempted, for instance, to perform the enforcement of the
extraterritorial claims of the US Cuba embargo.) But since the
project isn't a legal entity and has no assets, we don't have that
problem. Individual contributors might, of course, but we can't do
anything about that anyway.
> I am not saying I agree or disagree with the above 3. Frankly it is none
> of anybody's business what I think about it. However I am no fool in
> thinking that another country provides any veil if the US actually wants
> something you have.
Well, sure. But the code isn't really something they can "have" any
more than they can "have" the idea of public key cryptography. The
more relevant question is a cost-benefit one: the US government spent
(IMHO) too much time harassing US security researchers over PGP, for
instance, but didn't do very much attempting to make life difficult
for non-US researchers. I submit that was mostly because the
diplomatic pain that it was likely to cost wasn't worth the pointless
benefit of trying to put the cat back in the bag. I think that there
is a potential nonzero advantage in having the project hosted outside
of the strict legal reach of the US Congress. The Parliament of
Canada isn't a whole lot better, but its tendency to feature debates
about who will be best at bribing some part of the country to keep
quiet about the divorce means that it is less likely to spend as much
time attempting to tell people what to think. It's a very modest
benefit, to be sure, but not one to give up without thinking. (In
the Canada case, of course, it comes at the potential cost that in
any year, the project could find itself in a new, and previously
non-existent, country.)
A
--
Andrew Sullivan | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
A certain description of men are for getting out of debt, yet are
against all taxes for raising money to pay it off. --Alexander Hamilton