Doctorow: The coming war on general-purpose computation

Furthermore, selective application moves power from those who in principle should decide law (elected politicians) to others (lobby-groups, private investigators, police-officials).

And that is a major danger of "everyone is guilty but few are prosecuted" type laws. They give those with the power to decide who to investigate enormous power. Afterall, if everyone is guilty, this means the power to decide who is investigated is, essentially, the power to select who is punished.

Copyright law is probably the most grave example currently. I would guess that 80%+ of people in the 15-35 age-bracket are guilty of violating it during the last year, especially in those jurisdictions where there's not even an exemption for copying for private use. Yet a miniscule fraction of these people are ever prosecuted.

The ones who decide who is investigated, can thus more or less choose to point at any random young person, and have excellent odds of ruining that persons life, if they so choose. And that's not a good situation.

It would actually be an advantage if *all* (or atleast a substantial fraction) of copyright-infringement where prosecuted: this would make the craziness visible, and I suspect the end-result would be an adjustment to make the law itself substantially more sane.