Intent is where lawyers and engineers take a whole different paths. It&#x27;s that &quot;what color are your bits&quot; question.<p>To a lawyer, the details don&#x27;t matter much at all as long as there&#x27;s enough evidence to prove the intent.<p>To an engineer, only the details do matter because otherwise the world as organised by engineering will become completely chaotic, i.e. why is this number illegal and another number not, and if X holds for this thing then X should hold for all similar things.<p>One thing that underlines this is that hackers don&#x27;t see laws as an authority, they actually tend to question laws by default.<p>As far as I can see, the majority of hacker-type people see no legal&#x2F;moral issue in copying music and films. Copying is just bits, bits are a convenient format to distribute and store content, and they&#x27;ll surely buy a certain album or film not because they couldn&#x27;t somehow get it for free but because it&#x27;s so good that they <i>want to own it</i> themselves. This is completely in opposition how MAFIAA thinks people behave, and lawyers work for MAFIAA.<p>So, hackers and engineers are placed in the whole legal game by putting them in the position of the defendant. Instead of MAFIAA having to think why would they be allowed to sue someone for <i>copying their own bits</i>, the hackers are forced to come up with reasons why something of an ordinary activity (in their world) such as copying wouldn&#x27;t be illegal. That&#x27;s where the common outcry originates from: the kind of story how I was just driving taxi, took a guy to the bank, he asked to wait outside, and he came back in a hurry to the docklands, so I did as requested and he paid with a hundred dollar bill.<p>The events are unusual, mechanistic, machines connect and exchange bits, taxis take rides from the bank to the outskirts of the city, because it&#x27;s mechanisms that engineers work with. Mechanisms can always be used for good or bad similar to science, and it&#x27;s not the engineers&#x27; job to consider one method illegal and another legal, nor the scientists job to consider one field illegal and another legal. For an engineer, rights and wrongs are universal while legal <i>opinions</i> aren&#x27;t.<p>Moreover, throw a libertarian mindset in the mix and you&#x27;ve got a hacker both working with these mechanisms and also living by the idea that his activities are innately private, bits can&#x27;t be owned, and everybody should play by the rules spelled out by the objective truths and laws of physics rather than the arbitrary laws made up by the society made of non-experts.<p>Then bring in a lawyer telling them that not all file checksums come equal and they&#x27;ll tell him he&#x27;s full of bullshit. At the point where the two paths――the engineering path and the lawyer path――meet there is absolutely no conversation left because the paths come from completely different worlds.