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ACM vs. RIAA
stinkbomb writes "The venerable Association for Computing Machinery has posted a legal brief on it's site regarding Felten vs. RIAA. The ACM position is: 'ACM believes that the application of any law to limit the freedom to publish research on computer technology will impose a cost not only on ACM's members, but also on the academic community, the process of scientific discourse, and society in general.'"
WARNING:
The RIAA's surgeon general has determined that process of scientific disclosure can be detrimental to the health of your bottom line, and your chances of re-election.
In the United States, Congress has the right "To Promote the Progress of Science and the Useful Arts, by Securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the Exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Sec 1, Art 8, Cl 8.
Someone explain to me how outlawing science and research in order to protect overextended copyrights (life+70 only helps Disney...) "promotes the progress of science" or the useful arts.
It's in the plain language, kids. Someone else want to try to explain that to Congress and the Supreme Court?
Note: a good history of Copyright is available at http://netizen.uoregon.edu/documents/ethics.html (I have nothing to do with that page, but found it and it's pretty good)
WRITE YOUR CONGRESSMEN. All the EFF has is money. The ACM has people who can reasonably explain whey they, as a voter, think the congresscritter needs to do something. Believe it or not, as idealistic as it sounds, enough people writing letters can still overcome large amounts of money in deals like this.
Seeing as there wouldn't be much to sell if science and research didn't exist, the RIAA would be prudent to listen. Studio technology is one of the most important aspects of (at least many genres') selling a hit record (unfortunately), and probably wouldn't be where it is today without that good old unbridled R&D. Just to expand on that, for those who don't understand what I'm getting at, studio production values are to music what happy endings are to hollywood.
Of course, we all know that no business can see past the end of it's wallet, so it's unlikely they'll suddenly grow the foresight to recognize that laws they have sponsored or are pursuing will hurt them in the long run. Ah, ya gotta love cycles.
It's much like the oil and gas industry; what exactly do you expect to be selling when you're inadvertantly being detramental to the very thing that makes you money?
History doesn't teach us anything, it seems. It teaches us about 2 or 3 heros and villains, and usually with a better ending. And you can quote me on that.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Last time I checked, the RIAA was in the business of copyright enforcement.
Perhaps
Sincerely,
Vergil
Insects and Grafitti Photos
I know this is somewhat offtopic, but oh well...
Whether you agree with the politics of these websites or not, it is pretty repugnant that the law is now being used to squelch criticism. The story is HERE.
Also here is a rough draft of something I am writing to address the DMCA and to explain the problems with this law to Joe and Jane sixpack. Please suggest changes, criticize and flame etc.. and also feel free to use it. Thanks.
RIAA may have the money, but the ACM has a much greater degree of prestige and trust in the eyes of the public. Every computer science and computer engineering professor, and all of their students as well, will line up behind the the ACM against the RIAA as this conflict gains media exposure. The public will trust the scientists and college professors over the corrupt music industry moneyboys. Most politicians will be forced to fall in line. The key to this happening is that this conflict is brought to the forefront, in full view of the public, by every means possible - public protests, bumperstickers, letters to the editor, internet forums and mailing lists, word-of-mouth...
The public is going to trust the smart people??
Where the hell have you been for the last decade??
No one EVER pays attention to the smart people. If they did the public would be smart themselves, but they aren't and so the RIAA grows and grows.
Ain't life grand.
(That code of conduct is, generally, in my opinion, excellent, and well worth reading and abiding by, to the extent it's possible.)
Unlike most any other industry, the computer industry is one in which research on the technology is often presented as the technology itself. In that sense, even well-established, free, "production" software like GNU Emacs, GCC, and the Linux kernel can be reasonably considered "research" as well -- they're distributed as source code, and everyone is encouraged to study it, learn from it, modify it, and distribute what they learn and/or their modifications.
Since the existence of software patents directly infringes peoples' individual rights to distribute research in that form (free source code), I found the ACM's requirements, as much as I agree with the basic ethical, moral, and practical basis for them (that is, it's generally ethical, moral, and practical to obey existing laws), to be too much for me in the case of software patents.
So, while I'm happy to see the ACM recognize the specific new threat, I wonder how they view software patents today, since software patents can easily render much practical research either infeasible (can't be distributed as free software without authors losing their houses and other property in court due to patent-infringement lawsuits) or illegal?
For example, without things like the DMCA, software patents can be used to prevent (or punish for) distributing things like DeCSS and other "IP-security" softwarez. (I used that term on purpose; "warez" denotes illegal software, it should perhaps also denote immoral, self-delusional, or tyrannical software as well. ;-)
True, ideally, software patents make an invention's nature plain enough for all (adequately schooled in the arts) to understand, and what the ACM's complaining about here is the "security-through-obscurity" approach presently used by certain companies enjoying an artificial, and ultimately too-fragile, legal fence built around it, known as the DMCA.
But, in practice, software patents are not used by typical programmers or computer-science researchers as a source of information on how stuff works; and, further, the lawyers who help write them up apparently try to make sure they are as inscrutable as possible (while still passing muster with the Patent and Trademark Office, or whatever it's called), so as to provide the least useful information, while carving out the most intellectual "property" possible.
So, even absent the DMCA, it seems to me that a much broader problem, including much of what the ACM is presently worried about, is posed by software patents, which too-often amount to inscrutable, unhelpful "explanations" of just what a person (or even a computer program) might, on its own, be doing, that is illegal, because the owner of the software patent a) says so and b) can afford expensive lawyers.
I guess what I'm asking is, given that the DMCA and software patents do exist:
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- not publishing software that even might infringe
- not publishing research papers that describe patented properties, if it's fairly straightforward to convert any pseudocode or descriptions in the papers into software (in languages ranging from assembly code to Haskell, ML, Prolog, and so on)
- spending so much time researching the constant stream of software patents which they might otherwise infringe that they have little or no time to actually research and publish computer technologies?
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Of course, these are really general questions of ethics, but since the ACM is making a statement, one which I support, I'd like to see them continue to think through issues like these, so their members have appropriate guidance from them regarding ethical issues, and so they serve as an ethically-consistent "voice", for computing professionals, to be heard by those who take on the responsibility of authoring and enforcing human laws.Does the ACM expect its members to abide by the legal restrictions of the DMCA, even if the result (not publishing weaknesses in a timely fashion) might be loss of property or even life of innocents?
Similarly, does the ACM expect its members to strive to avoid infringing software patents, by:
And does it expect its members to do these things even if doing so prevents them finding and/or publishing security flaws, again, even if the result of withholding such information might include the loss of property or life?
Beyond specifics such as the DMCA and software patents, does the ACM generally expect its members to abide by legal restrictions when the result of doing so could have severe moral repercussions, such as loss of life or property due to inadequate, or even hostile, computing technology being deployed by companies using "intellectual-property" law to protect such deployments against ACM members dutifully informing the public?
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
However compelling you may find the argument, you are hunting a straw man. Congress expressly based its power to pass DMCA not on the Copyright Act, but upon the Commerce Clause. While indeed DMCA is codified in Title 17, it is most certainly not a copyright law.
Indeed, this was one of the points made by DMCA's advocates during the hearings in opposition to the fair use amendments.
>But, in practice, software patents are not used by typical programmers or computer-science researchers as a source of information on
>how stuff works;
Agreed ! and most of the times, even if they were published, they won't be of any use; as basic software techniques are often the same ! knowing your classics (The Art of Computer programming) are more than enough to recreate any patented software. So the main reason patents have been done (i.e. disclosure of original information while granting monopoly to it's owner) is caduceus in this case.
I think one of the workaround to this, is to make the publication of the source code necessary prior to granting any software patent; after source code is the equivalent of blue prints, and these are (I believe !?) necessary in areas which need them. This will no doubt limit the scope of abusively wide patents, and will ensure that reimplementation of the idea (which is not patentable) don't violate the patent.
Are you sure you've read the code properly? Just because you don't agree with the executives of the society doesn't mean you can't argue against them. That what scientific debate is for, and from what I can tell having just checked, those executives haven't influenced the idea behind the code of ethics at all.
As it should be with any good society, the ACM does not dictate to its members. On the contrary, the members define the ACM and what it stands for. This isn't rhetoric, it's realtime definition generation and the ACM's code of ethics demonstrates it perfectly.
In the past couple of weeks I've been looking around for papers crossing ethics and databases for some postgraduate work I'm doing. The presence of papers in the ACM digital library was strangely vacuuous, but I did find one paper by Donn B. Parker titled Rules of Ethics in Information Processing. It was published in 1968 in the Communications of the ACM. You can see the abstract here, but you might need an ACM login for the abstract and probably a member to download the pdf.
When he wrote it, Donn Parker was the Secretary of the ACM as well as the Chairman of the ACM Professional Standards and Practices Committee. He was arguing in favour of the first ever edition of the ethical rules of conduct for ACM members that was adopted in 1966.
One of the major points of his argument was that it was important to have guidelines to effectively say that "members must be ethical". On the other hand, the guidelines were very cleverly written so as not to say what ethical was. Everything that mattered was left to the judgement of the member.
The idea was not to impose any specific rules on members, but to simply require them to use good judgement and common sense in what they consider ethical, and abide by it. If, on the other hand, a member did something that they clearly should have known was wrong and couldn't offer a reasonable argument against it, there would be grounds to have them thrown out of the society.
Even looking at it now though, I think it would be possible to argue that it's written in the same form. Consider section 1.5 where it says "Copies of software should be made only with proper authorization. Unauthorized duplication of materials must not be condoned."
Nowhere does it define what "proper authorization" actually is. This is left up to the member to decide, and it's feasible that under some circumstances someone might argue that proper authorization doesn't require consent of the copyright holder.
Section 2.3 specifically says "ACM members must obey existing local, state,province, national, and international laws unless there is a compelling ethical basis not to do so. Policies and procedures of the organizations in which one participates must also be obeyed. But compliance must be balanced with the recognition that sometimes existing laws and rules may be immoral or inappropriate and, therefore, must be challenged. Violation of a law or regulation may be ethical when that law or rule has inadequate moral basis or when it conflicts with another law judged to be more important. If one decides to violate a law or rule because it is viewed as unethical, or for any other reason, one must fully accept responsibility for one's actions and for the consequences."
This is a complete let-off by the ACM if you want to protest against the DMCA with civil disobedience. It's saying that you shouldn't drag other people (eg. employer) down with you unless they consent. But if you seriously disagree with the ethics of the law then go ahead and protest.
Whether it was in 1966 or 2001 and regardless of how many words there are, the ACM code of ethics has been very cleverly written. In so many words, it basically tells people to trust their common sense and don't do anything stupid. That's exactly what ethics are, and the ACM isn't telling you otherwise. I think you should consider rejoining.