Chilling Effects Cease & Desist Clearinghouse

Wendy Seltzer writes: "The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, EFF, and other major law school clinics have launched ChillingEffects.org to combat the chilling effect of Cease & Desist letters with ungrounded legal threats. (Slashdot readers got a site preview in the story on the Bnetd Cease & Desist, already in our database.) If you have received a Cease & Desist, we invite you to add it to the database, where law students will analyze the legalese and annotate the C&Ds with Frequently Asked Questions and answers. The site already offers several sets of general legal FAQs."

Comments

This is wonderful.

[Daunting*Alligheri]

Hey slashdot crowd, you all should be excited about this. We finally have a place to go check out what the laws really mean (and how they're really applied), as opposed to talking out our asses all the time. This is indeed a Good Thing (tm) and I only hope the best for the affiliated schools.

This is a *great* idea

[syzxys]

If the "Clearinghouse" manages to stay up, it will certainly become very useful. One of the worst things about cease-and-desist letters is that the lawyers throw all kinds of threats at you, which you then have to spend time checking into. If you're a small operation, this means a big company can basically bludgeon you to death with cease and desist letters. In fact, we've seen this happening a lot more in the past year.

I'm glad to see this site go up, IMHO it's a victory for the little guy. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the cease and desist climate after word of the site gets around; maybe people will stop throwing cease & desist at everything they don't like. (Heh, that's probably a pipe dream.) Anyway, just my $0.02.

---
Crash Windows XP just by viewing a simple text file!

Anyone have experience with brandimensions.com?

[tenzig_112]

I've seen them in my http logs a few times over the past few weeks. Their site says that they "empower our clients to retain control over their names and brands on the web." I may be wrong, but that sounds a lot like marketing-speak for "corporate bully."

Their tag line: "monitoring and protecting your brand equity."

Check the connotations of the individual words:

• Monitor is a fancy way of saying "invasion of privacy," but don't worry, we're invading someone else's privacy.
  
• Protect carries images of military campaigns and gunning down burglars in "self-defense."
  
• Brand is a corporate identity, an entity bigger than [and therefore above the laws of] governmental institutions.
  
• Equity = money.
  

Again, I may be [and probably am] wrong.

For Senders Too?!

[volsung]

If you go look at the site, you'll see that there are forms for entering your Cease & Desist letters if you are the receiver or if you are the sender. I expected to see the receiver form, but was surprised to see the sender form. How many businesses can you think of who would want to advertise that they are trying to indimidate people with C&D letters? I would imagine most businesses would be rather annoyed, actually, to have their letters end up in this thing and come back later to be a PR headache.

Along that line of thinking: How long do you think it will be before C&D letters contain language specifying that you cannot publish them? (And even if you say that is not possible/legal/whatever, how many will try anyway?)

Re:I agree completely

[renehollan]

I have obtained a DVD copier (at great expense) and I frequently rent movies and copy them so I can view them later, like so:

O.K., cool!

I use DeCSS-derived software to copy DVDs to my Hard Drive and later to DVD, only this time encoding free!

Also cool, sounds like traditional fair use to me. I too use CSS-defeating software so I can view DVDs I purchased under [GNU/]Linux.

I hand out free copies of DVD movies everywhere I can to as many people as I can, along with a 2600 flier about how bad the DMCA is.

Unless these are movies you made, this is uber-uncool. You should be fighting for fair-use, and reductions of copyight protection terms, not blatently fueling the flames of oppression. Such piracy just proves "them" right. Handing out the 2600 flyer is cool. I wear my anti-DVD/CCA t-shirt proudly, too, and explain what it means when people ask.

I realize that you posted in jest, but civil disobedience isn't about completely ignoring bad law, just orderly refusal to obey those parts of the law that are ill-concieved.

Re:Cease and Desist Unauthorized Law Practice?

[raresilk]

cperciva meant to be funny, I think, but this issue could actually be a concern. Posting legal advice on the internet is a very touchy thing, because no lawyer I've ever known is licensed to practice in every US jurisdiction in which the postings could be read. (Hence, e.g., my disclaimer.) I suspect that's the reason the site is set up to allow only comments from law students rather than lawyers. Couching it as a community-service-based educational project for law students (who by definition are not practicing law yet) might help the site avoid such attacks.

That being said, I wholeheartedly wish this site the best: a little knowledge about the law can go a long way in shielding oneself from abusive practices. I'm pleasantly surprised, also, to see that /.ers are not flaming the hell out of the idea, given the prevailing "why should I need a professional to explain my legal rights to me - life is supposed be simple, obvious and unfailingly fair" world view often expressed here.

Re:I agree completely

[Phanatic1a]

You should be fighting for fair-use, and reductions of copyight protection terms, not blatently fueling the flames of oppression.

I'm curious.

The issue of term limits and fair-use seems like a crucial one, but I'm not sure that it is. Wouldn't the DMCA be just as bad if copyright terms were only 75 years? 50? 14? Isn't the issue really the draconian laws that are being put into place to enforce copyright protection, and not the term of the protection itself?

Would any of us be satisfied with a world in which Skylarov and Johansen could be persecuted as they have been, in which the DMCA, WIPO regulations, and the SSSCA are enforced laws, but copyright terms were shortened to something reasonable?

I wouldn't be. I don't think fair use and copyright protection terms are the issue. I suspect the issue is that copyright laws simply can't effectively be applied to current and future technologies without draconian enforcement procedures being applied.