Courts are not run by robots, judges are generally smart people. I agree - I think most people overthink the whole IP == PII nonsense. I think it’s more likely that IP + other factors, and your USE (or misuse) is where things become more gray.
I think the whole point of the rule of law (versus rule of authority) is to remove some of the massive ambiguity about enforcement and make the courts a bit more “robotic” and regular. You don’t want a situation where it’s luck of the draw on a judge, or where the ambiguity allows selective enforcement against people one judge or prosecutor particularly dislikes.
I agree with you ideologically. I'm not defending this law, or bad laws, or laws applied unevenly. I've been a vocal opponent of all those.
But we also have to have a certain pragmatism when deciding how to behave in a society with an impossible legal system. How much effort should I, as a developer or as a consultant to business owners or as a systems administrator, spend on purging IP addresses versus all the other things that need attention?
For that we look to how the law is applied in practice.
I was active on Slashdot back when the DMCA was first proposed and then fought its way into becoming law. There is no topic about which HN is as rancorous as Slashdot was about the DMCA. What does the situation look like now, twenty years later? Yes, there are and have been and continue to be abuses of the DMCA, but not at the internet-destroying scale that Slashdot predicted.
So I'm not going to tell you to ignore IP addresses in your log files. That's up to your judgement. But I'm going to ignore them in mine, until I see a reason to do otherwise, and when it's a topic of discussion with others, I'll tell them that according to a strict reading of the law, logged IP addresses may be a liability, but that there have been exactly 0 cases to date which have been only about some business having IP addresses in its logs for abuse and diagnostic purposes.
Agreed. On the other hand, you can't make courts fully robotic. The absurdly large size of existing laws are the consequence of trying to make them more like computer code, and having to patch countless vulnerabilities and corner cases in the process. In general, writing good laws as computer code is an AI-complete problem. That's why all laws leave some space for human judgment.
