"Terrorism"

SCO, the company trying to cover its lack of innovation by enforcing vague intellectual property rights (that it purchased from someone else), had its web site hit with a denial-of-service attack over the weekend. SCO CEO Darl McBride commented:

"Terrorists do things designed to intimidate people, and we see a lot of that going on all the time -- people trying to attack us or people that we're associated with," he said at the time. "If you look at a DOS attack, that's a form of cyber-terrorism," he said. "when you're shutting people's Web sites down, you are impacting commerce. That's against the law."

But apparently it's not against the law to profit off of other people's work. In fact, doing that is protected by copyright law. As is violating the Fair Use principle that once was part of copyright law, back in the pre-DMCA days. Ask the entertainment industry . . .

Anyway, another recent incident, a protest against SUVs targeted especially at dealers of the vehicles (commentary), is now being termed "domestic terrorism" by the government. Those regular old crimes, vandalism and arson, aren't good enough anymore, it seems.

Since when did the world become so full of "terrorism"?

All acts of violence are horrific, no matter what label you give them. But why do we allow some, even some that are relatively trivial and do no physical harm to people, to be called "terrorism" while celebrating others, even others that kill and maim hundreds, as "justice"?

I better stop writing now before I'm accused of stirring up cyber-terrorism.