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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."
-- "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?"
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?
Who wants to bet that chronicle.com is going to be added very very soon ..?
Only lawyers can truely understand the law. You lesser life forms only have a superficial understanding and marginal charisma to argue your position.
While you're being stupid, why don't you lecture us on how not all black people like rap, or you don't have to be an auto mechanic to have in-depth knowledge on auto repair! Stop! You're blinding me with insight! Ahh!!!
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
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.
A. There are a few different problems with that argument. First is that the people who are buying the filtering are not, by and large, the people who are subject to the filtering. The person in a particular library who is buying the filter, for example, is likely the network administrator of the filter, probably a pretty savvy computer user who can figure out a way around the filter. If anyone can do it, it's the person who's in charge of putting it in. He's the expert in computers, after all. ... So the person who's making the decision is, oddly, not all that affected by the filter, as I think about it.
I thought the biggest users of filters were clueless parents who heard some horror story of the internet, bought a filter and installed it just so they could be 'hands-off' parents. Parents don't want the responsibilly of monitoring the net usage of their kid.
I think putting the computers where everyone can see them, and actually discussing! what's out there is a far better answer than filtering, which is trivial to get around for even the dumbest of kids/adults. Go to a friends house or other computer (unfiltered), download the QNX internet browser floppy disk for instance.
Actually, unless OSS is filtered (Goddless heathens! Communists! Child Molesters!) you could do that right there.
I'm glad this case is going forward but it's another one of those fringe cases that is defending against the rough edges of the DMCA instead of striking it at its unconstitutional heart.
We need something that throws a spotlight on the huge potential of this law to do harm to fundamental freedoms that most people take for granted.
Suppose we could enlist the cooperation of one of the major book publishing houses to bring an offensive and egregious suit against a library (for example) that accuses the library of theft of so-called "intellectual property" by allowing people to consume their product without compensation to them as the copyright holder.
When the headlines start blaring about how the DMCA is being used to make libraries illegal then non-technical people might understand what's really wrong with this law.
IANAL (but lawyers are good, despite the corporate "tort reform" rhetoric intended to smear lawyers and limit our access to the only branch of government left that hasn't been closed to the citizens.)
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
Your biting edginess amuses me! Here goes my karma...I agree with you. But you forget, the parent poster here is a slashdot reader. To him, everything is perfectly understandable. He understands the subtleties of law and how to effectively debate them. He understands physics, cryptography, biology, auto mechanics, needlepoint, basket weaving, and calculus. Everyone here is an expert on all things. On the flip side of this, non-geeks know nothing. How could a politician ever understand technology? Laws are so horrible because politicians "just don't get it". Nobody really understands anything, except the slashdot reader. So, yeah, I agree with you entirely, but you're just gonna get modded to oblivion...like me.
do not read this line twice.
It kinda reminds me of the situation when the NSA tried to stop academic cryptographers from continuing or publishing their results, slapping them with secrecy orders and citing national security concerns--however, they were beaten pretty soundly in court. Somehow, though, intellectual property seems more important to this government than national security. Say what you will, but the NSA had a much more legitimate interest in maintaining the breakability of codes than in protecting the rights of companies to obtain security through the combination of weak codes and obscurity.
In the end, the NSA's arguments were found to be less than compelling when it came to restricting academic freedom. It's shocking that Hollywood's interests are not patently irrelevent in the same arena.
It took a while for the courts and congress to stop being scared away from 'crypto anarchy' by NSA spooks, and to side with researchers. My hope for the current crisis is that these same bodies will stop being frightened off by the cries of doom and gloom from spookier spooks like Jack Valenti before academic (and even personal) research is further crippled in this country.
telekon
Hollywood's three leading products: Fear Uncertainty, and Doubt.
To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
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.
Indeed, the filter is designed that way. If it allowed you to see the content and judge for yourself whether it should have been available, it wouldn't be working, would it?
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
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