If you've spent any significant time following the Open Internet campaign, you'll see that Rudd's censorship proposal isn't the only internet issue that gives the community cause to take umbrage.

In the last couple of months we've also seen strong reactions to the AFACT vs iiNet copyright trial and the electoral comment laws in South Australia and Tasmania.

That latter subject in particular has lead some commentators to accuse the online civil liberties movement of a form of internet exceptionalism, as if they're claiming normal laws somehow aren't supposed to apply to the internet.

So is the criticism valid, or is there some ideological common thread which draws the three subjects together?

Let's start with copyright:

Wind the clock back far enough, and you'll find a society without copyright. Early creative works funded either by commission or patronage, and the investment of effort involved in making large-scale copies was impractical to the point that a "copy right" was considered unnecessary.

The 15th century invention of the printing press spawned the democratisation of knowledge and the creation of the commercial book publishing industry, and by 1710 the English parliament was ready to pass what is now considered the world's first copyright law, the Statute of Anne.

Copyright originally covered books then grew to address other creative works: piano rolls, sound recordings, photographs, architecture, and movies. Through the centuries one aspect of copyright remained the same: Copyright only regulated people with the outlandish financial resources needed to own the printing presses and recording apparatus needed to duplicate copyrighted works.

As Jessica Litman discusses in her seminal work, Digital Copyright, that all changed in the early 1990's, when the US 9th Circuit observed that running a computer program required loading it from disk into RAM, which, in the absence of a license from the computer program's publisher, qualified as an actionable RAM-based copy of the disk-based program.

No longer was copyright a rich-man's game. Our parents lived their lives without clashing with copyright, but since 1993 everyone with enough resources to own a computer invokes copyright each and every time we use it.

In other words: A change in technology has caused a law to extend into territory it was never designed to cover.

It's easy to see parallels with the censorship issue citizens are increasingly strident about: Our classification system has a very similar lineage.

Once again we have a legislative regime designed to affect corporations. In the 1970's and 1980's, the only people who needed to care about running afoul of censorship laws were film studios and publishers. Normal people lacked the resources to produce a classifiable mass-market film, or even to publish a book that'd be read by more than a handful of people.

The edifice started to crack in 1997, when the Victorian Director of Public Prosecutions initiated proceedings for criminal prosecution against the editors of La Trobe University's student newspaper, Rabelais. Egged on by the Victorian Retail Traders Association, the DPP pressed charges relating to a Refused Classification satirical political article headed, "The Art of Shoplifting".

The case thus became the first high-profile instance of Australia's national classification code being used for political censorship. The Full Bench of the Federal Court seemed to agree: Justice Heerey seemingly believed that the law was an ass, and indicated his displeasure by reproducing the entire text of the offending article in his written concurrence, thus making it available to all whether the Victorian DPP liked it or not.

Australia's corporate-focussed classification regime has slowly crumbled ever since. These days playing certain computer games has become a widespread, mainstream statement of civil disobedience against the Classification (Films, Publications and Computer Games) Act 1995, and we can't inform ourselves about controversial political issues without wondering if we're consuming content that "promotes, incites or instructs in matters of crime." And, of course, our Broadband Prevention Minister desires to extend this creaky edifice over the internet, where it'll sink its tendrils ever deeper into our daily activities.

As the internet democratises media participation and turns more people into content creators, you can expect classification law to pass dehumanising judgements on more and more people, who will be surprised to find that their acts of personal creative expression are Refused Classification and banned.

And what of electoral comment? Same story.

In February 2010, News Corporation's Adelaide Now outlet hyperventilated about 2009 South Australian Electoral Act amendments requiring anyone commenting on an "electoral issue" during a campaign to identify themselves with their real name and postcode, and, in certain cases, their actual physical address.

The resulting furore eventually forced state Attorney-General Michael Atkinson to issue an embarrassing backdown, and to commit to overturning the amendments in the event that his party retained Government after the election.

Some commentators appeared to believe that the reaction by the online community was a tad inconsistent. Stilgherrian accurately pointed out that netizens spend a good deal of their time ridiculing claims that the internet is different from any other aspect of human life, so protesting against online identification requirements which apply to radio, television and newspapers reeks of exceptionalism.

However, the fact that electoral law has always required comment outlets such as newspapers, TV and radio to identify electors during campaigns only highlights the issue: People aren't TV stations, and ought not be regulated as such.

Once again, we have a legal framework designed to regulate corporate and institutional participants in our society. And once again, the rules are being stretched and distorted to cover the normal conversational activities of normal people carrying out normal online lives.

It isn't just South Australia, either. Tasmania has an almost identical requirement, debated in parliament at an almost identical time, as if the respective governments of South Australia and Tasmania were in a monkey-see monkey-do race to out-stupid each other.

In the 2008 US Presidential Elections, the Obama campaign actively encouraged American voters to get involved in the campaign by publishing hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos. A Pew Research study found that "15 [per cent] of internet users have gone online to add to the political discussion by posting comments on a website or blog about a political or social issue, posting pictures or video content [or other commentary] online."

Ordinary citizens talk about politics, and do some of their talking online. So what would possess our 2009 politicians to make much of that activity impossible without exposing your personal life to stalkers and lawsuit cannons? Can a Tasmanian battered wife agitate online for changes to the Family Law Act during an election campaign without revealing her location to her violent husband? And if her political speech is restricted due to the TEC's intimidation and his isn't, is Tasmania's electoral system actually fair?

Australia has an increasingly apparent body of law which was written before the internet arrived on our shores, and which, without major revision, will consistently and predictably lead to terrible outcomes for Australian citizens.

When we're revolted by unjust outcomes caused by misapplication of these laws, our politicians have a choice between viewing our unrest as a problem and regulating ever more onerously to quash dissent, or seeing the law as the problem and amending it to accommodate the needs of Australians.

The South Australian Government has creditably backed down over the electoral comment issue, but the Tasmanian Electoral Commission has outright refused to entertain any discussion about how they'll choose to exercise their prosecutorial discretion over this matter, allowing confusion over the legality of conversations to persist throughout an entire election campaign. In contrast, the Federal Government wins applause for considered responses to my emailed enquiries, including published material to help voters distinguish between lawful anonymous discussion and unlawful unattributed paid political advertising.

Thus far the Government may be hedging its bets over the copyright issue, and has refrained from announcing any legislative response to the iiNet lawsuit despite some early off-the-reservation commentary. Until they take the time to educate themselves about all sides of the issue, that's perhaps a well-considered position.

That consideration isn't extending to the classification issue. The 55,000 responses they've had to the R18+ computer games inquiry should be telling them that the public is watching, with scornful disapproval of the reprehensible bipartisan hash-job that successive Governments have inflicted on our classification system. So far their filtering policy has only been informed by pro-censorship lobbyists, and they've either ignored or attacked everybody else. Will they stretch classification past breaking point across the internet, or will they fix it?

More broadly, we the people have a problem: We've all adapted to technology, integrated it into our lives, and changed our lifestyles accordingly.

But many of our politicians are still living in the 1990's, pretending the internet is another country and refusing to acquire the faintest clue about it. You'll see the signs whenever they confuse megabits with megabytes, invent jargon (such as Rudd's deplorably hilarious "bandspeed"), or blame "hackers" for taking down a website which has crashed because they've neglected to provision it adequately. They really have no idea.

Even worse, they appear to believe that we're just like them, helpless, hapless and ignorant, in need of "protection" from online threats which they've either misunderstood or just plain made-up. In reality, their ignorance is far more dangerous to us than anything we'll ever find on the internet -- And who is to protect us from them?

Technology issues affect the environment, the NBN, our financial systems, our education systems, energy, heath care, media, and virtually every other aspect of our lives, and while we don't expect our MPs to be geeky experts we should at least expect them to comprehend the issues as well as we do.

In the 21st century it should be utterly unacceptable to elect representatives who wilfully fail to understand how our country has changed in the presence of technology. The modern world will not retard its progress to suit the needs of our 19th century institutions, we need the institutions to change to suit us -- and if our current crop of politicians aren't prepared to help, we need to replace them with some who are.