"So what you're saying is, your computers cannot possibly not continue damaging the plaintiff's interests." "That's correct." "You're being honest with me." "Yes, your Honor." "Will the computers continue harming the plaintiff's interests if shut off?" "... That would be dreadfully inconvenient, your Honor." "Do you have a more convenient solution?" "No, your Honor." "You are hereby ordered to turn off your computers in 48 hours." "... You can't do that." "I can do a lot of things, including jailing you if you disobey my lawful authority. 48 hours."
Engineers often think that they are the first people in history to have thought "Hey, wouldn't it be easy to pull one over on the legal system?" This is, in fact, quite routine. The legal system interprets attempts to route around it as damage and responds to damage with overwhelming force.
What Patrick says is technically true. But before granting the "extraordinary remedy" of an injunction, U.S. courts would apply the traditional four-factor test, which includes assessing:
+ the balance of hardships between allowing the conduct in question to continue vs. issuing the injunction;
+ whether the damage being caused by the conduct in question could be satisfactorily remedied by a payment of money as opposed to a mandate or a prohibition; and
It's not about whether the removal is logistically possible, it's about whether a court can punish someone for failing to carry out the removal.
Even when the former is actually impossible, a court could still punish for the latter. "Ha ha ha I use technology to cleverly show how futile your orders are" is not the kind of thing you want to say to a court with broad contempt powers.
The court can't punish you for not being able to do the impossible. That's ludicrous. "We have shut down all of our servers, yes. We can't stop people from downloading this, no"
It only doesn't work like that in the context of safe harbor laws.
If the safe harbor law protection doesn't apply, and the defendant is responsible for the illegal behavior, the defendant can absolutely be held legally liable and pay the legally-appropriate punishment.
IFPS is cool, however pretty far away from being usable as a package management system... Some package management system could use it as a backend, though.
That's why I'm looking into IPFS(https://ipfs.io) as part of my infrastructure. How that would look then, with IPFS...
> "So what you're saying is, your computers cannot possibly not continue damaging the plaintiff's interests." "That's correct."
> "You're being honest with me." "Yes, your Honor."
> "Will the computers continue harming the plaintiff's interests if shut off?" "No it wouldn't, your Honor.".....
And suddenly things like NPM can transfer the data to other machines, and those machines themselves can also provide to others. Deletions are impossible if people still want the content.
And IPFS guarantees that if a single node has the data, then any node can download it and also be part of the cloud that provides the data. Once it's out, it's impossible to retract.
