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f everything from people to industrial machinery. Our customs system is famously porous. Very few shipping containers are ever opened and inspected. New, tighter regulations designed to keep terrorists from shipping dangerous substances into the country won't detect things like anti-AIDS or high blood pressure medicine, nor will dogs trained to sniff out heroin, cocaine, or marijuana. Closer searches of returning tourists won't work, either. Imagine the headlines when a 72-year-old grandmother is arrested for smuggling anti-cancer drugs into the U.S. from Mexico because she can't afford to buy them here. Then imagine the millions of emails, calls and faxes U.S. elected officials will get from enraged AARP members.

The AARP is already on record as favouring drug re-importation. Now imagine thousands of senior citizens being denied the right to buy low-cost software through Thailand (or wherever) so they can receive those all-important grandkid pictures by email. Another cause! And one thing American politicians learn early on is that older people vote more heavily than younger ones, and that retired people have lots of time to engage in lobbying and electioneering, so making old people mad is not a wise career move.

Once Microsoft and other commercial software producers try to sell their products at different prices in different countries, they are going to face the same problems drug companies are now having with regional price enforcement. In the end, they are going to be forced to cut prices in high-cost countries in order to prevent smuggling.

How do you prevent software smuggling?

Answer: You don't, by any practical means. Who is going to boot up each CD every traveller carries on an international flight? Who is going to monitor every cross-border download? Even countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the People's Republic of China that have tried to control their citizens' Internet use haven't had much luck doing it, and countries with a more relaxed attitude toward information exchange are going to have even less success at keeping out 'bad' software. The DMCA and DRM are weapons Ashcroft, Microsoft, and other anti-freedom activists will certainly try to wield in an attempt to keep Americans from downloading, but their 'unapproved' files, but their attempts are doomed from the start. There are simply too many ways to move information from one computer to another to control even a small fraction of the flow, and too many people willing to grab a discount on digital items they feel are overpriced to keep the public from finding ways to bypass regulations they will almost certainly decide are unfair if the government tries to enforce them heavily.

Besides, Microsoft and other software vendors are (hopefully) smart enough to avoid the sales-killing backlash now being experienced by RIAA member companies, which seem to see a new drop in revenue every time they make another attempt to stop file trading by taking their customers to court (even though they never admit this is one of the reasons they are losing business).

It's easy to forget that the Internet and the World Wide Web are truly world-wide, and that it is no longer feasible to isolate digital information geographically in any meaningful sense. The communications adv本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。