Slashdot Mirror

Chilling Effects Clearinghouse A joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and University of Maine law school clinics. Do you know your online rights? Have you received a letter asking you to remove information from a Web site or to stop engaging in an activity? Are you concerned about liability for information that someone else posted to your online forum? If so, this site is for you. Chilling Effects aims to help you understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws give to your online activities. We are excited about the new opportunities the Internet offers individuals to express their views, parody politicians, celebrate their favorite movie stars, or criticize businesses. But we've noticed that not everyone feels the same way. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some individuals and corporations are using intellectual property and other laws to silence other online users. Chilling Effects encourages respect for intellectual property law, while frowning on its misuse to "chill" legitimate activity.

Nothing like educating the public about the dangers of the DMCA/etal by linking them to EFF and the like :).

Kazaa had Google remove several links to Kazaa Lite pages, and not long ago Scientology tried the same against a Scientology-critical site.

While some here cheer that Google put a reference to the the Kazaa Lite pages removed (or rather to the DMCA notice which includes the URLs of those pages), effecly nullyfing the effect, it is worrying me instead.
Fact is that Companies and Organisations can force the removal of Links from Search Engines, and if those Engines don't act as smartly as Google here (be it due to fear of lawsuits from those Organistions or due to simple lazyness) we might not even notice it....

I had posted this in my journal a while back.

Basically, when you search for Tetris, you get some friendly information on how they had removed the link because of DMCA. They give you more information here.

And here is a screenshot of the said search.

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

For C&D letters Chilling Effects is our group defense, as is the EFF in general.

For Everybody else there's The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse. Don't leave a threat to your homepage without it. As the ever busy EFF is part of ChillingEffects, if Brad Templeton hadn't hadn't already known about the right to parody vs. scare tactic legal letters he could just call them up and ask.

But if you yourself have received one of these letters, you also can report it to Chilling Effects and ask for help from the EFF. But the EFF can only be there to help you later if you support the EFF through joining now.

For Everybody else there's The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse. Don't leave a threat to your homepage without it. As the ever busy EFF is part of ChillingEffects, if Brad Templeton hadn't hadn't already known about the right to parody vs. scare tactic legal letters he could just call them up and ask.

But if you yourself have received one of these letters, you also can report it to Chilling Effects and ask for help from the EFF. But the EFF can only be there to help you later if you support the EFF through joining now.

For Everybody else there's The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse. Don't leave a threat to your homepage without it. As the ever busy EFF is part of ChillingEffects, if Brad Templeton hadn't hadn't already known about the right to parody vs. scare tactic legal letters he could just call them up and ask.

But if you yourself have received one of these letters, you also can report it to Chilling Effects and ask for help from the EFF. But the EFF can only be there to help you later if you support the EFF through joining now.

IANALE but here's a great site put together by lawyers: chillingeffects.org

Looks like the answer is yes but the court determines how much SCOMayo gets, not SCOMayo.

A holder of a copyright on some portion of the subject material.

False. Try reading the DMCA:

A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed

I state under penalty of perjury that I am a copyright holder of my own post. I alledge that your post infringes my rights.

Making such a fraudulent claim can result in you being prosecuted for perjury.

The allegation of infringment is NOT made under penalty of perjury.

Nonsense.

Wrong. There have been numerous such cases.
Here is one such example. Universal Studios Stated under penalty of perjury that they were authorized on behalf of the movie U-571. They then made of infringment for files 19571.mpg, 19571.mpg, 20571b.mpg, 20571b.mpg, 20571b.mpg, 20571b.mpg, 20571b.mpg, 20571b.mpg, and 20571b.mpg. Those files were in fact public domain films promoting home economics and driving safety and fuel economy. The only "connection" to the movie U-571 was that these files all happened have file names ending in 571.

According to the DMCA it was a valid take-down notice and Universal Studios was NOT liable for purjury.

I seem to recall another case where a movie or song made a similar allegation against a Linux text file based on a very remote similarity in filename. They are running software scanning the web for any filename that matches certain patterns and mailing off takedown notices, and NO ONE EVER BOTHERS TO LOOK AT THE FILES. In another case they issued a takedown notice against some school-kid's BOOK REPORT.

DMCA takedown allegations of infringment are not subject to perjury. The DMCA was literally written by lawyers employed by the publishing industry.

-

They're not doing anything illegal? Can you explain how what trackers (that have infringing material) are legal when they are participating in contributory infringement as defined by the DMCA? The only way that they can be legal is to if they fall under the safe harbor provisions, but I couldn't find their DMCA agent listed on their site.

They're not doing anything illegal? Can you explain how what trackers (that have infringing material) are legal when they are participating in contributory infringement as defined by the DMCA? The only way that they can be legal is to if they fall under the safe harbor provisions, but I couldn't find their DMCA agent listed on their site.

Mp3 might not have developed independantly, but I'm sure a similar one would have. The web/internet was crying out for a audio format with better compression. The only reason MP3 became as popular as it did was because Fraunhofer didn't start enforcing their patent until it was already fairly entrenched. In other words, it only spread because people thought it was free.

I do think that the MP3 patent is less harmful then the one in the article. At least it isn't trying to patent "A method by which digital audio files are compressed to around 90% of their original size." It's still the Intellectual Property equivilant of patenting a .doc format or .zip format.

Anyone bothered to read the MUTE site should be really worried about now. Apart from technical problems and generally suspicious statements, the entire workings of MUTE place every user at the risk of contributory infringement of copyright.

Why doesn't MUTE protect you? Because the "RIAA node" only needs to download a single copyright file and use netstat to take the address of its peer (neighbour) node. It then has the ability to track you (i.e. the neighbour, via your ISP) and has proof of your contribution to the infringement (you actively provided infrastructure for the transfer of the copyright material).

But they need to show you have knowledge of the activity, right? Wrong. First because they'll just subpoena you anyway and it will cost lest to pay the requested amount than to fight them. Second because they only have to prove on a balance of probabilities that you were aware that your "service" was being used for illicit purposes. More on that later.

You also can't claim that you were just providing a service "like an ISP", because you're not. ISPs protect themselves by being telecommunications carriers (which are largely exempt from monitoring content), or having appropriate AUPs with the customers they provide the service for, or responding in an appropriate manner to compliants. For example if you can't or are not prepared to remove known illegal material from your service when you are notified about it, you become a contributory infringer!

Alright, so why can ISPs get away with it and you can't? Because they have AUPs, because they respond to complaints, and most importantly because there is a significant non-infringing use for their network. MUTE, on the other hand, is described specifically as a network dedicated to preserving your anonymity for the purpose of trading in illegal MP3s without getting caught by the RIAA.

Here's an anecdote for you: a landlord was arrested for pimping and money laundering. When he pleaded ignorance the police demonstrated to the court that they could ask virtually any member of the community where there were prostitutes and drug sellers at the building in question, and the answer would be "Yes". So a "reasonable man" was aware of the problem, yet the landlord tried to protect himself by never looking into it. Running a brothel is an offense that attaches to the property owner -- it is his responsibility to take reasonable measures to ensure that the property is not being used for illegal purposes.

The other problems? Phrases like "military-grade encryption" don't inspire confidence, especially in a system that uses asymmetric cryptography without a PKI (and a PKI in this system would pretty much kill the idea of being anonymous). The "RIAA node" could happily perform a man-in-the-middle attack on all secure connections that are established through it.

In general the documentation on MUTE appears to give little consideration to side-channel attacks, concentrating on how secure and anonymous the system is algorithmically.

some guy claims that he has access to the neccessary docus, but the rockbox-developer don't even consider looking at it, unless they get official permission to use it.

Why not use the old, tried-and-tested method of clean-room reverse-enginering? Recruit several people with no Rockbox programming exposure to look at the documents and write their own version of the specs, noting entry points, API calls, and so on. Get them to publish the documentation using some version of the GPL. Then fire them, put them out to pasture. Ensure they never communicate directly with any of the Rockbox programmers regarding what they read.

Then get people who have never read the original documents to create code implementing the published doduments.

Because of increasing restrictions on reverse engineering in the US, the document analysis team should be based in the EU or Asia. Or preferably Russia or China.

• We didn't "leave because we don't like CMSs" (Phil Hughes's claim)

• It wasn't "some of the volunteers" (Phil Hughes's claim) but rather 100% of the staff by unanimous decision

• We didn't spring the decision to move on SSC by surprise at the last minute (Phil Hughes's claim), but rather had warned them for months about what would happen if they went ahead with their plan.

• The editors moved LG to new quarters in part because SSC had said the monthly magazine would cease to exist entirely. (We had no idea SSC would change its mind later and direct uncredited SSC employees to resume producing issues at our old site.) I.e., we actually don't think it's OK to "open up a new site under exactly the same name, even using the same logo", nor were we starting "a spinoff under the same name"; it was a question of move the magazine or let SSC kill the magazine by corporate decree, according to everything they'd told us.

• Founder John M. Fisk, in 1996, transferred custody LG to SSC explicitly as a free magazine to be run in harmony with SSC's commercial magazine, Linux Journal. It was explicitly not to be a commercial property.

• You cannot "own a name": You can own a commercial brand identity, but Linux Gazette has never been a commercial offering. SSC's assertion to the contrary in its USPTO filing is materially false.

• Ownership of everything in LG is retained by each individual contributor, and issued to the public under an open-source licence -- just like with the Linux kernel

• Even successful assertion of a trademark that you prove you own lets you enjoin only competing commercial goods or services using your mark in ways likely to confuse your customers into thinking those are your offerings. SSC's attempt to misuse trademark law -- in which they showed no interest for seven years until the very day we told them we were moving the magazine -- against our volunteer magazine seems to assume we're clueless techies and ignorant of trademark law fundamentals.

Discussion of the matter has been occurring at LWN. Here are my two recent posts:

"Chilling Effects" letter received from SSC, Inc.
(Posted Dec 5, 2003 9:05 UTC (Fri) by rickmoen) (Post reply)

Alan Cox wrote:

John Fisk founded Linux Gazette in 1995. He's not visibly part of either side of the argument which begs the question who did he give it to.

It's a fair question, and the top-level answer is that copyright over all content belongs to the individual authors, being published by each of them under an open-source licence (in LG's case, OPL v. 1.0, and two predecessor open-source licences for very early issues). Alan's no doubt very familiar with this concept. {grin}

Alan is of course thinking of some concept of ownership over the magazine as a whole, and that too is a fair question: The answer is that there's really nothing of that sort to own. The compilation copyright (if any) would likewise be OPL-licensed, and LG was from its inception explicitly a community, non-profit effort.

And that leaves an equally fair third question: What was it that John M. Fisk entrusted to SSC, Inc. -- subject to the promise to keep it non-commercial -- when medical school was keeping him too busy to keep things going? Please read again what John wrote: Phil Hughes and SSC, Inc. willingly assumed (and carried out admirably for many years) an obligation, a volunteer job, a custodianship.

And explicitly not over a corporate balance sheet asset, a lesson that Mr. Hughes seems to have f

Zeropaid was crawling yesterday when I submitted this story to Slashdot. It probably didn't take much to push it over the edge.

As an interesting corollary, you'll notice that if you search for Kazaa or Kazaa Lite on Google, you get "In response to a complaint we received under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 2 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint for these removed results."

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

Feel welcome to bitchslap them.

The other shoe has just dropped: SSC evidently feels its easier and cheaper to try to seize our domain than to file a trademark-infringement lawsuit, and they've just delivered a cease & desist letter to our domain registrar, citing their bogus trademark claim. We are of course not sitting down for that, and are drafting a response just in case SSC causes the ICANN UDRP to be applied (as may be their intent). You can see a recent version of that draft at http://www.linuxgazette.com/node/view/134/228#228 (unless SSC deletes the post).

And, yes, we have indeed posted the demand letter to the EFF's http://www.chillingeffects.org/ Web site. It'll be case #983, when available for display, there.

Rick Moen
Contributing Editor, Linux Gazette

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

chillingeffects.org

Of particular interest is the following paragraph:

(from ChillingEffects.org)
In addition, we want your help. We are gathering a searchable database of Cease and Desist notices sent to Internet users like you. We invite you to input Cease and Desist letters that you've received into our database, to document the chill. We will respond by linking the legalese in the letters to FAQs that explain the allegations in plain English.

Of particular interest is the following paragraph:

(from ChillingEffects.org)
In addition, we want your help. We are gathering a searchable database of Cease and Desist notices sent to Internet users like you. We invite you to input Cease and Desist letters that you've received into our database, to document the chill. We will respond by linking the legalese in the letters to FAQs that explain the allegations in plain English.

Hey! You know, oddly enough, there is such a site. And here it is. www.chillingeffects.org

www.chillingeffects.org

Yes, as a matter of fact, try www.chillingeffects.org

Hey, as a matter of fact there is, go to www.chillingeffects.org

Hey, why not try www.chillingeffects.org

Is there a site out there like a "Wall of Shame" where we can go to see a list of fuckheads who have C&D'd people using the DMCA as a threat?

The EFF has a site: Chilling Effects Clearinghouse

--Rob

Is there a site out there like a "Wall of Shame" where we can go to see a list of fuckheads who have C&D'd people using the DMCA as a threat?

Yes - chillingeffects.org

ChillingEffects.org

I believe they collect DCMA supoenas:

http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca-sub/

This isn't exactly what you want, but I think you'll find it of interest:
Chilling Effects

Don't forget to report the letter to CHilling Effects

I was amused by the way they handled the DCMA complaint about Kazaa-lite. If you search Google for "Kazaa lite" at the bottom of the page you'll see this at the bottom of the page.

A link to the DCMA complaint itself with the URLs of the sites they were forced to remove from the index. Priceless! A nice big "Fuck you" and it's totally legal.

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

From chilling effects, the letter there is nothing in the memo claiming that the documents have been altered, claims of liebel, etc. They simply claim that the site links to documents to which Diebold holds the copyright that are being published without Diebold's consent. You'd think they'd take that approach instead of claiming that they own the documents being published if they thought they could. For that matter, though, have they even registered a copyright on these documents? Can they sue for copyright infringement if they haven't explicity registered a copyright? I don't know what the law is - in the USA or here in Australia for that matter - but I'd be interested to find out.

From chilling effects, the letter there is nothing in the memo claiming that the documents have been altered, claims of liebel, etc. They simply claim that the site links to documents to which Diebold holds the copyright that are being published without Diebold's consent. You'd think they'd take that approach instead of claiming that they own the documents being published if they thought they could. For that matter, though, have they even registered a copyright on these documents? Can they sue for copyright infringement if they haven't explicity registered a copyright? I don't know what the law is - in the USA or here in Australia for that matter - but I'd be interested to find out.

In response to a complaint we received under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 7 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint for these removed results.

Well check again. You might want to start with the article:

The third problem with the FBI's letter is that it requests that I not "disclose this request or its contents to anyone."

That sounds like a restriction to me. If Mr. McCullagh had obeyed the letter, this very report of government abuse would have been censored. One must wonder how many times the Justice Department has already pulled this shenanigan.

In this case, the government is exploring their legal rights to determine the source of the material that is being distributed.

The government has no such right. Freedom of the press protects a reporter's right to keep their source confidentional. Again from the article:

Who would confide in a reporter who was nothing but a lackey for Attorney General John Ashcroft?

Freedom of the press is meaningless if reporters can be compelled to act as government informants. Imagine if the publisher of the Federalist Papers were compelled to reveal his source. The very constitution Ashcroft swore to uphold may have never been ratified.

From your own source:

The First Amendment gives the press the right to publish news, information and opinions without government interference.

Which is why I *really* want some stupid corporation to plough ahead with one of these bullshit legal threats. The DMCA is a disaster, a blunt instrument whose real purpose is to intimidate into silence the great majority of people who do not have access to unlimited legal help. What kind of justice is that?

Question: Does it matter if infringement is accidental or innocent?

Answer: It does not matter for liability purposes that a patented infringer was unaware of the patented technology when infringement occurred. However, willful or intentional infringement may carry a higher monetary penalty than innocent infringement.

The fact that the patent database is a mountain of useless gibberish is not enough to get you off the hook.

Check it out if you want a good summary of all the DMCA cases over the past five years.

Umm... EFF has skipped over all the $cientology cases, /. cases, Scientology v. Internet Wayback machine, Scientology v. Google, Scientology v. /., Scientolog v. Ebay, and so many more...

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

They should look into the law about this and take appropriate measures.

Firstly, for a DMCA notice to be valid, certain terms are required. IANAL, so I can't tell you whether this is compliant, but really that's just a formality. Even if it is not valid, they'll simply send another one.

However, in response to a correct DMCA takedown notice, the accused can send a counter notice. From chilling effects

"In order to ensure that copyright owners do not wrongly insist on the removal of materials that actually do not infringe their copyrights, the safe harbor provisions require service providers to notify the subscribers if their materials have been removed and to provide them with an opportunity to send a written notice to the service provider stating that the material has been wrongly removed. [512(g)] If a subscriber provides a proper "counter-notice" claiming that the material does not infringe copyrights, the service provider must then promptly notify the claiming party of the individual's objection. [512(g)(2)] If the copyright owner does not bring a lawsuit in district court within 14 days, the service provider is then required to restore the material to its location on its network. [512(g)(2)(C)]"

To keep it down, Diebold would have to sue the people behind BlackBoxvoting.org. This will be embarrassing since they will have to claim that the incrtiminating evidence was created by them.