InfoAnarchy is carrying an edited transcript of the awesome P2P and legal issues panel from Day 2 of CodeCon:
Just about the first thing Phil says is that he wrote PGP to be exported. Now that the statue of limitations is up, he can admit it :-) As you probably know, PGP was printed in book form, which was legal because the law did not consider printed materials to be a computer readable format. Then it was exported, scanned in, and converted back into C code. They went to special lengths to make sure the printed code could be easily scanned, but had to take care to make to not make it too obvious.
Fred: There are instincts that you have as a software engineer, that don't match what your instincts have to be for the legal system. You may need to implement certain inefficiencies, workarounds, or generalizations. He gives the example of Napster, which was very efficient from a technical perspective, but legally vulnerable because of its central index of songs.
