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.

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.