Slashdot Mirror
Interview with DMCA-challenger
BrianWCarver writes "The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interview with Ben Edelman, the Harvard law student and internet researcher who is bringing suit against the DMCA with the ACLU. Slashdot covered the announcement of this legal challenge. To refresh your memory, Edelman wants to be able to research the lists of sites blocked by internet filtering software, and to be able to publish his research. He's no lawyer yet, but he responds quite well to several objections to the case."
Mr. Edelman: We've seen a pattern emerging of cases where legal action is threatened under the DMCA, but when push comes to shove, the entity making the threats backs off, and thus the law remains.
What set of criteria do you feel must be present in a challenge to the DMCA that will give us our best hope of it being overturned, and do you feel your challenge meets these criteria?
would be very glad to see this work out. Apparantly, the filter they use at my local public library uses filters a lot of stuff that isn't pornographic at all. My sister had a report to do about communism and was trying to do stuff there, but they blocked communist-related websites. my school for the longest time blocked http://www.gnu.org (the BSD websites were unaffected though). I also could not find stuff about UK politcal parties from school. They cut out a lot of stuff that is blatantly unconstitutional to cut.
I'm no lawyer, but I plan on going to law school after I finish my poly sci degree. Laws like the DMCA really irritate me, so I was wondering if there are any slashdot nerds who are also lawyers, people who could consolidate and help inform people of the troubles such laws cause for people trying to remain within his or her fair use rights. We don't need more laws, we need more enforcement.
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
While not a lawyer myself (nor would I like to be), I do have significant experience in successfully managing legal affairs, lawsuits, etc without the benefit of law school, or even college for that matter. The resources are available for anyone to school themselves in procedure and nomenclature relating to legal matters.
Much of what makes a lawyer effective is *NOT* their knowledge of the legal system. Laws, technicalities, etc... that can all be dug up by a minimum-wage intern with access to a decent law library and the Internet. What makes a good lawyer effective is their communication skills and being able to articulate their position.
-- "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?"
Did the Church of Scientology not use the DMCA to clobber Google a while back? If the clams (q.v.) think that using the DMCA as a club is a lot easier than suing posters of their sacred texts the hard way, then they might just choose to step up and protect it. This would be a Bad Thing (TM).
Am I the only one who heard Roxette to sing "I'm gonna get blitzed for some sex"?
censure the aclu website, under "advocacy group" label...
Ahh, yes. To be a truly good parent, you must never give your child a moment of privacy. You must be looking over his/her shoulder always. Sit and watch them play video games, read over their shoulder, sit behind them and watch as they surf the net and chat with their friends, follow them around as they are having fun outside.
Guess how long it will be before your child goes into full rebellion mode? Kids need some freedom. Maybe these filters aren't the answer, but that doesn't mean that you're an irresponsible parent for installing one. Personally, I would do something more along the lines of recording the sites they visit just to check for anything overly objectionable. Keeping in mind, just because they visited a site, you don't know why they visited it. So you can't just jump to some conclusion without talking to them first. Anyway, it just annoys me when people immediately conclude that any parent who uses a filter is automatically a poor excuse for a parent.
Is there some way people can contribute to a fund to help with his legal costs?
I'm not a rich man but i'd definately fork over us$40 towards such a fantastic and important cause.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
Umm...
It seems to me that the Librarian of Congress reported a couple years back (as required by the DMCA) on specific exemptions to the DMCA that should be allowed. I believe two exemptions were recomended...
One of them was specifcally to allow decryption of the list of blocked sites in censorware packages. Has this researcher or the ACLU considered this before mounting their "challenge" to the DMCA?
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
We were using N2H2's filtering software in school. One day I had to do a report on the Cold War, but most sites that delt with "the other side" where blocked from being "Tasteless". Same with democraticunderground.com and other anti-goverment poltical sites.
And with that, they extracted from the CyberPatrol program a full and complete list of all the Web pages blocked by CyberPatrol. And they published it on the Internet ... The fact is, this has happened before, and I'm sure it's unpleasant for the filtering company. They'd rather not have this happen. But to say we're going to go out of business -- well, I don't know.
Well, it seems to me that although the companies can survive a "blip" such as the cited incident where a snapshot of their blocking list is published, I doubt they would survive if their lists were all forced permanently into the open.
It seems to me that these companies are selling the effort that's gone into compiling their lists, and compiling these lists is no doubt the bulk of their ongoing development costs. Any competent system administrator can block a list of sites at their proxy without purchasing this additional software, provided they have a list of URLs. Obviously then, it's this list of URLs and the organization/accuracy of said list that's really of value, not the blocking software itself.
Why should I spend money on them if I already have a list of sites I want blocked? I'll concede that I have never used third party blocking software, so I may be missing something here-- perhaps they also have real time filtration by context-filters rather than just "evil" URL lists.
So, yes, the companies have a lot to worry about--they could easily get pushed out of the market if their lists are forced public, but to me, this doesn't seem to me to be such a bad price to pay in the grand scheme. So what if a handful of people lose their jobs or get pushed into other areas. That's a small price to pay when you think about all the problems that open-source lists can solve. Errata or questionable blockages could be challenged and removed or re-categorized. A broader selection of blockage categories could be maintained (and selected from by parents/schoolboards/sys-admins who want to use a subset of the list). A vast army of concerned parents could be enlisted to help keep the list current by contributing new block candidates if there was a universal list.
Let the existing companies change their focus to develop more accurate context-filtration for when naughty bits get past the list, and leave the list to the global community, because the blockage list itself is an ideal case for open-source.