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?
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
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.
This implies that one must be a lawyer to understand legality, and to be able to convincingly argue one's position.
I think it may imply the former, but not the latter. People are paid high salaries for the benefit of their expertise.
To put it into a perspective which may carry more weight on Slashdot, many people can understand the principles behind routers and firewalls, but rather fewer are able to competently configure same when complex scenarios are involved. Consider, for example, how many people fail their first run of the CCIE lab portion.
One may argue the semantics behind the formalization and/or certification of the knowledge required for a specialized task, but why be so demeaning? How many Slashdotters would leap to the defense were the above statement to be modified to read:
This implies that one must be a { systems engineer / network engineer / pick your label } to understand { WAN configurations / how to configure a firewall / pick your prized specialized skill }.
There's a difference between understanding something and knowing how to apply knowledge in an expert fashion. Don't demean skills that you don't understand or appreciate.