Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Incredibly Narrow Privacy Protection

In case you were worried about unauthorized disclosure of personal information by a video tape service provider, you will be happy to know that there is a law which is specifically designed to prevent video tape service providers (and those they communicate with) from knowingly disclosing their customers' personally identifiable information. An interesting discussion of how that law might actually be applied can be found here (via BoingBoing).

As a note, while ridiculous, the level of specificity of the law mentioned above isn't unusual. A good example of an even more specific law is 17 USC 110(5)(b)(i)(II), which sets forth specific diagonal screen lengths in inches for equipment that can be used to make an audiovisual display without infringing a copyright.

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