That sounds a lot like saying that it is, indeed, incoherent, but don't worry because we can get a judge to decide whether or not you're going to jail ex post facto, at a cost to you of more than you paid for your house (win or lose).

Computer people probably see the nondeterministic behavior in words like “primarily” as evidence of a bug. To the law school graduates who write the laws, it’s a feature and not a bug that these decisions are made by a judge in a courtroom.

It helps to realize that "human reality" is nondeterministic in the sense that we lack sufficient computing power and modelling capability to work with it. It's not random, it's AI-complete. We literally can't handle it formally, and that's why we need to defer to the only "general AI" we have - or as its ordinarily called, human judgement. And human judgement is not random - it's taking into account vast amounts of data, like ethics/morality and social context, which for now escape our attempts at formalizing them.

And the concept of case law / precedent is an attempt to synthesize a point of view from multiple different judges. “Training data,” if you will.

I don't see where you're getting that. GP rightly pointed out that 1201 prohibits tools "primarily" designed for prohibited circumvention. That's a perfectly coherent thing to prohibit, and that has the perfectly clear, logical implications that GP described.

Now, if what you really mean is that is is vague, then I agree. But I don't see any case for it being incoherent.

> GP rightly pointed out that 1201 prohibits tools "primarily" designed for prohibited circumvention. That's a perfectly coherent thing to prohibit, and that has the perfectly clear, logical implications that GP described.

Except that it isn't, as already discussed, because the code doesn't change based on the design intent. The technical operation of the tool is identical whether it's used for interoperability or fair use or to rip songs for The Pirate Bay. The technical operation of the tool is identical whether it's produced by a university researcher or the developer of a media player app or a literal sea-faring pirate with a parrot and a peg leg who is the founder of a political movement to abolish copyright and promote civil disobedience.

But prohibiting a specific person (who may have had a particular intent) from distributing it is incoherent (or at least futile) if it means you can just get some other person with some other intent to distribute the exact same thing. And it's also incoherent to say that the other person can't distribute it even if they genuinely do have a different intent, if the intent is supposed to be what matters.

None of which depends on what you judge a give person's intent to be after the fact, because it's a defect in the legislation, not the judgment in any particular case.

He probably consider any human judgement incoherent.

When "guess, it will work somehow" is all you can say, it sounds like you agree that it's incoherent.

Maybe. But nobody said that.

>Section 1201 requires that the piece of software is meant primarily for infringing purposes

It requires that the piece of software is meant primarily for circumventing technical measures in place to prevent infringement. Just infringing copyright isn't a violation of the section.