From: greg@ideath.goldenbear.com (Greg Broiles)
Date: Fri, 14 Jan 94 15:55:46 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Public key encryption, in
Message-ID: <4eu6Fc2w165w@ideath.goldenbear.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain




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uunet!qualcomm.com!karn (Phil Karn) writes:

> This got me thinking about the impossibility of regulating and taxing
> the international transmission of information. At the time I was
> thinking more in terms of the impossibility of enforcing US import
> duties; who's to say what a particular magtape is worth? If this guy
> is still in business I suspect he has long since replaced physical
> magtape shipments with electronic transfers, which bypasses Customs
> completely.

Last summer I needed to send a magtape with custom-written software to 
Oman, and needed to declare a value for customs; neither the State 
Department nor Customs nor Federal Express nor DHL had any idea whether I 
was supposed to declare the value of the software or the value of the tape
carrying the software.

I settled on the value of the tape if it was blank, based on the notion 
that a copy of the software wasn't worth much; it was the legal right to 
use the software which was valuable, and that wasn't being shipped.

(Electronic transfer wasn't possible as the Omanis were very particular 
about which modems could be used with their telephone system, and it took 
longer to find an approved modem than it did to ship the magtape.)

As far as I could tell, the thing the Omanis were most concerned with was 
preventing the import of pornography or other forbidden data; I don't 
think many of the people involved in processing the shipment understood 
that the tape could easily have contained those forbidden images.


- --
Greg Broiles                   "Sometimes you're the windshield,
greg@goldenbear.com             sometimes you're the bug." -- Mark Knopfler


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