You are a Wikipedia paragraph away from knowing how irrelevant that objection is. Finding it (I'm staring at it now) is left as an exercise for the reader.
Another fun quirk of message board legal arguments, besides the propensity for participants to sincerely believe that only computer programmers possess the ability to reason about rule-based systems, is the belief that laws they don't like (or, more likely, that are inconvenient to their arguments) must be some terrible quirk of the fucked up US legal system. Sorry, no!
No one is saying nor implying that computer programmers possess a superior moral compass to make judgements on the rule-based systems as you have stated.
The laws are fucked up because of pervasive unethical political practices in the U.S. (and the entire world for that matter) where laws are made from the top down by those with the most money as opposed to the bottom up as our founding fathers intended via our representative democracy. (Side note, the internet is changing all of the above through the forums you denote as irrelevant as well as social media)
In regards to programmers calling the shots, I think you would be hard-pressed to find a group of people as intellectually capable percentage wise to make unbiased judgements on the nature of our laws.
They are certainly more capable that the majority of clowns in Washington.
You don't think maybe lawyers, who are actually versed in the frameworks on which the laws are built, are more capable than a group that by and large doesn't even seem to understand the difference between different kinds of intellectual property?
Of course they are more capable. But are you saying that these opinions aren't worth listening to as well? "Without understanding your opponent's argument, you can't fully understand your own." If nothing else this can be an educational experience thanks to you and tptacek.
Sometimes nerd opinions about the law are worth paying attention to. Sometimes they aren't.
Part of what put me on my recent CISPA jihad is that CISPA is a case where I think nerds actually had a chance of collecting the context required for informed debate; unfortunately, the CISPA debate got hijacked by militant activism.
But there are cases where nerds clearly have little to offer. Look at the old Reiser threads if you want to groan about very smart people looking dumb talking about the law. "There's no such thing as circumstantial evidence! If you can't find a body, you have to acquit!" Similarly, in most cases revolving around computer hacking and unauthorized access, nerd mentality does more harm than good; nerds tend to fall back to arguments like "if it's common knowledge how to bypass some control, then bypassing that control can't reasonably constitute unauthorized access".
It seems to me that the most appropriate role for domain experts (including computer science) is anticipating results in that domain. For example, my primary objection to SOPA was not the original justification for the law, but merely the likelihood of unintended consequences and broadening of the law beyond reasonableness. The ramifications of a law on a technical domain (like DNS, say) seem more appropriate for expert commentators.
To an extent. I think tech experts have a tendency to get carried away with consequences, and I think some tech/legal issues are deceptively legal-heavy and tech-light, such as unauthorized access.
I guess it depends on how much time you have to listen. Based on the evidence on display in HN comment threads, I think on average most programmers' opinions on the law are probably a little bit better-informed than those of a Starbucks barista, but not enough so that I'd give somebody's opinion deference just because he knew C++.
Most programmers' opinions on the law (like most people in general) fall into one of two categories: fundamentally mistaken (e.g. "sharing an encrypted file can't be copyright infringement because they didn't copyright the encrypted form") or merely indignant. That's not to say a programmer can't be well-informed, but just that it's hubris to think that programming knowledge alone can give you some keen insight into the law without actually studying the law.
On the other hand, I definitely stop and read when I see something by, say, grellas — because I know what he'll have to say is very likely to be the result of study and careful analysis.
(And for the record, I don't pretend to know a lot about most aspects of the law. I'm not trying to act high and mighty here. And that's why I feel so apprehensive about blindly trusting programmers about this sort of thing — I know how much I don't know.)
