Where did things go wrong? In programming, a lot of the time, things went sour roughly around the place where you made the last change. If a program you're developing suddenly, for no apparent reason, breaks down, you can always look towards the last place where you changed something and trace your problems from there.

What does this tell us about society? According to both activists, lobbyists and politicians, something is not right with the state of the world today. Piracy, as they call it, has caused I don't know how much pain and agony in the past few years (if you are to believe the lobbyists). Copyright law in and by itself causes no end to the problems, and even inspires piracy (if you are to look at what the activists are saying). Current legislation is not up to date with the modern world and the modern world needs a reality check (according to some politicians). Modern world is all fine, and legislation needs to be adapted to not preserve the status quo (says the activists). Regardless of who you talk to, it's quite obvious that something must be done! But what?

Taking the idea that the last place where we made a change is where things went wrong, we can just look at what legislation we've introduced over the last years:

• Directive 2004/48/EC of the European Parliament (IPRED)
• Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
• Proposition 2006/07:63 (FRA Law)
• Loi favorisant la diffusion et la protection de la création sur Internet (HADOPI)
• Digital Economy Act 2010
• Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act
• Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic works
• Council Directive 93/98/EEC on harmonising the term of protection of copyright

Well, the list goes on and on. So if there is a problem in society, and these are the fixes we've attempted last, then it makes sense that the problem lies in them. In programming, one of the offenses is when you try to fix a broken program with a kludge, a patch which masks the symptoms without fixing the underlying problem. The above are examples of legislative kludges. Rather than continuously patching a broken system, we need to fix the system as a whole. In programming terms: we need to re-implement the system. Retracing our steps, even as far back as the Statute of Anne if necessary, would be a good first step.