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Retailers Swing DMCA To Stop "Black Friday" Sale Info
zoid.com writes "It looks like a few of the big retailers have sent out DMCA notices to a few of the consumer deal sites. So now they are claiming that sale prices are covered under the DMCA. I would like to know what part of the DMCA states that you can not share the price of merchandise. Also, why would they want to stop this free advertising?"
But then again, you have to realize that the first newspapers in this country were nothing more than prices of goods and services each day - they were called "price currents".
With that in mind, it's clearly not copyrightable.
I'm a 2000 man.
Are they doing this to prevent massive sales of loss-leaders? Is that what FatWallet does...find all the loss-leaders?
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Three cheers for the retailers involved in this legal action. This is exactly the kind of absurd example we need to get that crappy old DMCA repealed once and for all.
Seriously, anyone else as jazzed about this as I am?
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
We have been given DMCA notices regarding the posting of "Black Friday" sale prices from the following companies:
:)
Wal*Mart
Target
Best Buy
Staples
SCRRAATCH!! off the shopping list. Looks like everyone is getting a thinkgeek tshirt for Xmas this year.
Grandma would look pretty cool look with </geek> on the back
How do these sites GET their news? I figured that the companies themselves 'leaked' a lot of this information..
Individual things here and there are typically reported by the individual.. but where do they get the BIG news from companies like Dell, or Best Buy?
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
I want to see the damn takedown letters!
I want to read the greasy, obscene ooze penned by those lawyers under command of these retail Nazis!
I want that legalese filth to stain my nostrils with a stench so powerful that it will be constant reminder to me during my xmas shopping.
Do you read me, Wal-Mart, Target, Staples and (Not)Best-Buy?
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Okay. Mod me down to old and stupid, but while this article may be true, so far I haven't seen anything (other than the URL referenced in the summary ) confirming this. Sure, there's a link in this ( the Slashdot ) thread to a DVD discussion group, but has anyone researched this? It seems to be a mighty thin basis on which to be posting an article?
Xibalba: My hell. Your hell. Our hell!
The DMCA can apply. Why does everyone think the DMCA is only about encryption? It applies anywhere there are copyrights. The question is "can unreleased pricing information be copyrighted?".
While the answer _should_ be no, the way things are going a court might just say yes. Companies have been able to copyright collections of facts like phone numbers so why not?
I have recently left the retail business, so this story just causes me to sit here in front of my machine and chuckle about how absurd the DMCA has become, and how this law has been abused.
I can tell you that the store where I used to work has a competitive price policy-- we would match the price for the same item if another store had the item currently at a lower price. Of course, to verify this, we would have to call the other store. I can now envision how such a conversation might take place now:
"Hello, I'm calling to find out the price of a Ralph Lauren polo, blue in color?"
"I'm sorry sir, I can't reveal that information without you having a Price Licence-- it's copyrighted, ya know."
Note that this might well be a regular customer, not an employee from a competitor. I assume that this site was posting prices of items from the different stores, and the stores put the whammy on them to discourage shoppers from being able to compare for themselves who had the lowest price. I consider this to be an anticompetitve action which could be prosecuted by the FTC or the Justice Dept.-- but they probably won't be.
Always look on the briight side of life! (whistle, whistle)
People /want/ to fight it, they just can't. Try going up against Wal Mart, Best Buy, Target...you can't. You don't have the money. They can tie you up in court until your financing runs out, then your lawyer says "buh-bye" and you effectively lose.
:) You'd be suprised at how effective small groups of people can be once they get noticed by the higher managment of these places. If your stunt has entertainment value, local papers and tv stations will probably cover it if you tell them ahead of time... there's not much news on a holiday weekend anyway.
There's a fun and easy way to fight it...
Here are the stores that sent the DMCA threats: Wal*Mart, Target, Best Buy, Staples
Some of you may be screaming boycott... but that won't work. There aren't enough people who even know what the DMCA is to make a dent in the sales of these companies... besides, they would just chalk it up to the bad economy and ask for a government bail-out.
I think guerrilla protests are the best way... especially since most of us have the friday after thanksgiving off... Just get a few friends together and have fun...
a few ideas:
1. Go to a store and cover up their prices with red tape. This would be especially effective at stores where the prices are on the shelves and not on the items.
2. Go to a store and have customers sign a non-disclosure agreement before they look at the prices. Explain that the prices are copyrighted and they can't tell anyone else what they paid for what they buy. After the store kicks you out go outside in the parking lot. After the cops ask you to leave go to another store.
3. Guerrilla theater. Perform mini DMCA plays in the offending stores... this one can be a lot of fun.
Be sure to have fliers explaining the DMCA and what these stores did and hand them out to the curious. Be creative.
Don't worry about getting arrested... just leave when they ask you to leave and go on to another store. It doesn't matter if your mini-protest lasts only five minutes before they kick you out... the store manager will still tell his district manager about your stunt, and maybe the store might change its policy.
Too bad there isn't a geeky activist group to organize such a thing. If this were organized to be across several cities, small groups of five or six people in each city would be very effective.
I did a few protests back in college
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
For all practical purposes the "Safe Harbor" provision forces the presumption guilt upon act of the filing the complaint. That means that prior to any court cases, etc., the remedy the company filing the complaint desires already has taken place. The material is squelched.
Couple that with the deep-pockets vs small-operators problem of fighting a court case and the DMCA stiffles just about anything a company wants to stiffle, regardless of the merit of their complaint.
At the very least the "Safe Harbor" mechanism should be reworked. The company/person filing the complaint should have to go to court to get an injuction to get the offending material removed. If they couldn't even get an injunction, it is unlikely they would pursue the matter much farther. I think that would stop a lot of these thugish tactics.
Obligatory - IANAL.
deserve's got nothing to do with it...
My wife used to work at Sams's Club, and once explained the system to me (quite a while ago, so this may not be entirely accurate).
Products ending in 9 are as they were originally priced when Walmart began offerring the product.
Products ending in 6 have been marked down.
Products ending in something else (I forget the digit) have been reduced as far as they are going to go, and are essentially clearance items.
How this is useful is best left an excercise to the reader, but I guess someone could put it to use. (Probably not though.)
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
A valuable addendum to the DMCA would be a provision to punish for false accusations. Essentially the way it would work is that if you sent somebody a DMCA nastygram, and then decided to take them to court, if you lost, you would owe their legal fees and other associated costs.
This would allow for small players to take on the big corporations with some comfort that if they win, they'll get their money back.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
news story about public comment period for dmca
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
The DMCA relevance is as follows.
When a user of an internet service provider posts copyright-infringing data, the ISP is obligated to take down the postings once it is notified of a claim by the copyright holder. This is part of the DMCA. Then there is a mechanism for the user to challenge the removal, saying that the removed material was not copyrighted. This is discussed under section 512(c) of the DMCA link above.
It's a different part of the DMCA than what we often discuss, like breaking copyright protection measures, which is section 1201.
Now, I agree that price information, especially if reformatted, cannot be copyrighted. Copyright covers a particular expression of the data, and not the raw data itself. So IMO the sites could safely ignore these warnings. But as someone who was recently sued for several billion dollars, I can certainly understand the reluctance to enter the legal system.
In places (like most of Europe) that have a "loser-pays" system, it does not work like this -- you don't end up with a "loser" paying the entirety of the other side's bills. The amount that either side has to pay of the other's bills is based on who brought the suit, how valid each side's claims were, how much each side was held responsible for the issue at hand, etc. I don't know how well it works, in practice, but I don't think it does any good to spread false information about how loser-pays systems work. Check out this article for information on how loser-pays systems really work.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
How this is useful is best left an excercise to the reader, but I guess someone could put it to use
If it ends with '9' don't buy it unless it's the current craze.
If it ends with '6' and there is quite a few left, wait a bit before buying.
If it ends with anything else, and you still want it, buy it. It's not getting any cheaper.
A lawyer is the only kind of hired gun with the ability to legalise murder.
Bad laws cause a lot of legal friction. Legal friction is good for lawyers' business. Who spends the most on elections? Even better- who spent the most on the 2000 election? Lawyers are paying for the best government money can buy. For themselves.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
You have a fine point, however I would like to point out two things that negate almost all of your comment:
1: This is not Mom & Pop shop or any sort of a small company, it's the Wall Street Journal and as such they make and spend more money in one day than you will in your entire life (most likely, that is assuming you're not extrememly successful) So the cost of a few hundred 1-800 calls are virtually nothing to them. In addition to this, I'm sure if they were billing him for the calls it would put a fair dent in his pocket, however I would assume (due to the tangle of routing that I had to go through to get to him on the 800 number) that they are most likely not able to trace the call as being from their 800 number and bill him... At least I hope so, because he is a really nice fellow and I would hate to cost him any sum of money...
2: The 1-800 number I posted is listed on the Wall Street Journal homepage, so I would care to differ with you on the point of it not being heavily advertised already... It is highly accessible and heavily advertised.
Although I know you didn't have a clue about where I found that 800 number.....
On another point, your observation of slashdotting someone into bankruptcy, that actually made me laugh out loud... However I would like make sure that everyone knows bandwidth is not free either, and everytime the slashdot effect occurs it does cost someone, somewhere, something...