Using the DMCA Against License Violations?

bcrowell asks: "Here's a moral conundrum for you. The much-hated DMCA can be a tool to enforce copyleft licenses, and in my case, it may be the only effective tool. I'm the author of some free physics textbooks (all free as in beer, some free as in speech) that are available under the GFDL and OPL copyleft licenses. I've learned that there's a guy on eBay who is selling my books on CD and violating the license. (Selling is allowed, since they're free-as-in-speech, but he's violating the license in various ways, such as not informing his buyers about the license, and selling them under a different title and using the tables of contents in his ads without showing the license or listing me as the author.) It's not just me. He's doing the same thing with other copylefted books, such as this one." The submitter is worried about the ethics behind using the recent misuses we've seen so far. Those interested in this question might also be interested in Prof. Felten's answers from his recent Slashdot interview.

"eBay has several different mechanisms for complaining about this, and I used one of them. Other people have complained too, but so far the result just seems to be that eBay deletes the listings of the items (which have already been sold). Meanwhile the guy is still violating copyleft licenses (as well as selling other copyright-violating stuff, such as screensavers containing commercial porn images).

Apparently the most effective way to deal with this on eBay is to participate in their vero program, which basically means sending the DMCA Police after the guy. For instance, if I wanted to sue the guy (which I don't), I'd need to know his name and address. The DMCA says that eBay has to provide that info to someone who complains about a copyright violation.

It seems like it would be a similar deal in the software world. The conventional wisdom about how to prevent infringement is to GPL your code, and transfer the copyright to the FSF, which will contact license violators and (theoretically) sue them if it comes to that. So how long will it be until the FSF is asked by an open-source developer to invoke the DMCA in order to deal with a license violation? In my own case, should I go ahead and join eBay's vero program? It would make me feel like I was in bed with the enemy, but it does seem like it would give me some very effective options for dealing with the situation. For instance, members of the program can have eBay run automated boolean searches for copyright-violating items, and get the results e-mailed to them periodically.

One possible reply to my question is 'Why do you care?" The problem here is that this guy is doing exactly what RMS originally designed copyleft to prevent: he's taking free information and making it not-free. His customers don't know that the books are copylefted, and have effectively had their own freedom taken away: they don't know they can modify the books, copy them, or sell them."

Comments

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[Anonymous Coward]

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[Anonymous Coward]

1 Linus Torvalds Apr 23, 2003 |-2 Greg KH Apr 23, 2003 | \-3 Linus Torvalds Apr 23, 2003 | \-4 Clemens Schwaighofer Apr 23, 2003 | |-5 viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk Apr 23, 2003 | | |-6 Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu Apr 23, 2003 | | | \-7 Dax Kelson Apr 24, 2003 | | \-8 Clemens Schwaighofer Apr 24, 2003 | \-9 Felipe Alfaro Solana Apr 24, 2003 | \-10 Clemens Schwaighofer Apr 24, 2003 |-11 Joel Jaeggli Apr 23, 2003 |-12 Andre Hedrick Apr 23, 2003 | \-13 Linus Torvalds Apr 23, 2003 | |-14 Shawn Apr 24, 2003 | | \-15 Kenneth Johansson Apr 24, 2003 | \-16 Andreas Boman Apr 24, 2003 | \-17 William Lee Irwin III Apr 24, 2003 | \-18 Balram Adlakha Apr 24, 2003 |-19 Mark J Roberts Apr 23, 2003 | \-20 Clemens Schwaighofer Apr 23, 2003

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[Anonymous Coward]

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[Anonymous Coward]

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We're captive on the carousel of time
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From where we came
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In the circle game