It looks like Spain has set a pretty strong legal precedent on filesharing. A Spanish man who downloaded, for starters, 3322 copyrighted movies, and then shared them, is not guilty of any crime because “there was no evidence that he profitted from downloading the movies and music, or sharing them with others.” While this precedent is pretty liberal definition of filesharing, it does right what so many laws here in the US do wrong: it keeps the law a shield, not a sword.

Too often in in the States, it seems that our legal system is set up to punish rather than to protect. The point of copyright, for example, is so that if I write up some code, Microsoft can’t just sell my code as their own. But copyright law is being abused to sue the pants of kids like Joel Tenenbaum instead of being used properly. In New York, there are street vendors who sell burned CDs all over the place, but you never hear about the RIAA trying to shut down those guys.

But the problem isn’t just confined to copyright law, though that’s where we see it most. It may be outside the realm of technology, but child …

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