Re: Bernstein ruling meets the virus law

[frantz@netcom.com (Bill Frantz)]

At  2:43 PM 4/22/96 -0700, Steve Reid wrote:
>Things are only black and white in lawmaker's dreams. :-/

Note also that there are programs which replicate and maintain themselves
on several machines in a network in order to provide reliable network
services (e.g. print spooling).  (The people at Xerox PARC, who did almost
everything first, experimented with this kind of program.)

If lawmakers are to come up with a rational law, a big if, they will have
to differentiate between a bug in a "tame" worm which lets it get loose as
a virus, and a virus which was meant to be destructive from the get go. 
And then they will have to decide what to do about the virus that was
designed to write, "Hi Mom!" on as many screens as possible with no
malicious damage, and bugs in it.


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