What do laws have to do with this? Almost none of the examples have anything to do with laws (cell phones in restaurants, please) and the ones that do are irrelevant because this is being partially described as a tool for enforcing the law.
Laws can never be universally and compulsorily enforced because laws are merely guidelines. "Don't do X because if we catch you will be punished with Y." I imagine many of us, myself included, commit multiple crimes per day, including various felonies. If these laws were enforced with omnipotence, everyone would be in jail. Or life would just be a lot more boring.
Many of the "pleasantness" policies and laws this technology wants to enforce are merely products of society; you can't fix society with more gadgets. In fact, I don't think you can fix it, period.
Sure, all laws are products of society and eforcement is more or less leaky in a very imbalanced way, but that's another story. I'm saying laws because my assumption is that it will become illegal (maybe it is already in some countries) to create or modify devices so that they do not enforce copyright and other laws.
I am convinced that the one thing _all_ consumer devices including PCs will be obliged to do is to authenticate users. Enforcement isn't trivial, but once it is a felony the risk becomes so high that only organised crime will actually do it, not hackers
It can still swing the other way, I and people like me think life of author + 10 or 30 years is plenty of time for copyrights to last. Others want it to last forever, who wins is more a question politics than the laws of physics.
Getting the "kill switch" to work is all about the law. And having someone "kill switch" 10,000 cars in some city would vary quickly change that law should it ever show up.
"Laws can never be universally and compulsorily enforced because laws are merely guidelines."
But this kind of thing is encoding those "choose to follow or suffer the consequences" laws into "we will take control and force your devices to comply".
e.g. no photography within 100m of the police, even if you are an investigative journalist willing to break the letter of a restrictive law to cover a story.
Right, which is completely preposterous and will never happen. The biggest problem, as outlined in the article, is that one way or another the security measures for such a protocol would eventually (probably quickly) be cracked which means such devices couldn't be trusted anymore, etc.
e.g., The journalist will take the picture, one way or another. You can't clobber free will with gadgets.
