The Internet Under Siege

Gorgonzola writes: "Lawrence Lessig has written an accessible article in Foreign Policy on the threats to freedom on the internet, including the threat the DMCA poses to open and free software. Nothing new to Slashdot regulars, but good to see something appear in an influential magazine like Foreign Policy. An article mentioning the Sklyarov case like this one does, is going to draw a lot more attention from policymakers to the problems the DMCA and other legal troubles are posing to online freedom than your average rant on a board like this, how well reasoned it may be."

Comments

The DMCA sucks...

[Jin Wicked]

I recently had someone on Angelfire linking directly to one of my drawings on my site, effectively costing me bandwidth which I really can't afford since my host lets me squeak by every month to begin with. The drawing was very obviously being linked to on my server, and you could even see where I signed the artwork, and when I e-mailed Angelfire (Lycos) asking them to remove the image (because it was costing me bandwidth), first they told me I had to file a copyright infringement request or some B.S. according to DMCA procedure. Then when I complained about that being stupid, they sent a nasty letter to the site owner saying to remove it or they'd delete her site. I couldn't find a link to e-mail the site owner or I would have myself. I can change the filenames, but usually people are understanding about either putting the image on their own space and giving me a mention, or removing it entirely. The Lycos guy said "for future reference, a written name at the bottom of an image is not enough evidence to claim copyright." WTF? And people wonder why a large portion of my drawings are pictures of me. Apparently my signature on it isn't enough to prove I created the image. I understand that Photoshop can be used to edit things very well, but come on, it matched every other drawing on my site and it's a picture of ME!

I can't see how this nonsense is beneficial to anyone without a team of people at their disposal to make these "formal requests." All I wanted was to save myself a little bandwidth, and now I have to research the DMCA and fill out some non-existent form to do it? Nothanks!

AT&T breakup => innovation

[Camelot]

But when the United States broke up AT&T in 1984, the resulting companies no longer had the freedom to discriminate against other uses of their lines. And when ISPs sought access to the local Bell lines to enable customers to connect to the Internet, the local Bells were required to grant access equally. This enabled a vigorous competition in Internet access, and this competition meant that the network could not behave strategically against this new technology. In effect, through a competitive market, an end-to-end design was created at the physical layer of the telephone network, which meant that an end-to-end design could be layered on top of that.

Wonder what the effect of a Microsoft breakup would've been ? Thanks to the Bush administration, we'll never know.