Slashdot Mirror
EFF Chairman Interviewed
mpawlo writes "I have just published an interview with Mr Brad Templeton, chairman of the board of the EFF, over at Greplaw. Mr Templeton presents, among other things, his view on spam and freedom of speech among. If that's not enough, there is also a rather unique tongue-in-cheek interview with Professor Lessig."
# You were involved in the early days of Usenet. Today, Usenet news seems to me to be only slightly more useful than the average Nigerian scam letter. Are you disappointed?
Not at all. What's amazing is that even though USENET has stagnated and not added much new since the 80s, it's still the best way to read an online conversation.
I couldn't disagree more. While there are definitely groups that have unfortunately descended into the chaos of uncontrollable spam and retarded flame-wars, many are thriving with great information. Even the ones infested with crap can be useful by using Google Groups search to glean the content out.
It still amazes me how little they understood about the incentives for innovation, and how little their incorrect predictions mattered to their careers/credibility. Not too surprisingly, many of these same economists have argued that a private licensing of spectrum through auctions will increase efficiency, even as it kills innovation.
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
I wonder. On the one hand, there are 60 million Americans out there ending the old media cartels one download at a time, and that's a very good thing and it's revolutionary. But on the other hand, the online community seems utterly paralyzed in terms of taking real political action against those powers-that-be who are trying to take our rights away. Whether it be privacy or the DMCA or monopoly behavior, everytime they announce some new scheme to disenfranchize us, the answer from the online community is a deafening silence.
The EFF is a very good organization, and they're doing a lot of good work on our behalf. But they're more like the ACLU of cyberspace than, say, the Sierra Club or NRA. What we need is a membership organization that can carefully target politicians like Tauzin or Berman who do not vote our way. When millions of voters and campaign contributors speak, then, and only then, does the government listen.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
What I mean is that USENET has stagnated, innovation wise. It's very difficult to do something new (both technologically, and socially) in USENET, and that's not because it's already perfect.
/. (Even though in total posting volume, /. is a tiny fraction of the size of USENET.)
:-)
The web is not this way. Anybody can build anything they can think of into a web site over a fairly broad range of possibles. It's their web site, there is nobody there to approve or disapprove. If people like it, they read the site, if not, they don't.
Proposing something new on USENET results in mostly flamewars. Imagine having to have a vote before you can put up a new website!
At the same time USENET retains some core functions not found on the web. In its true form -- reading news from a local or very nearby server at LAN speed -- it provides a response time that is unmatched. Instant response has a profound affect on UI. You can do things you would not tolerate doing with even a 500ms delay on your clicks as is typical even of fast web sites.
And it's aimed at conversation, with good thread support, fancy killfile facilities in many readers, and most importantly a basic understanding of what you have read and what you haven't. You can handle a much larger discussion group in USENET than you can with mailing lists, or web boards for example.
But, counter to this, web boards have had the ability to innovate. Slash was able to add the moderation point system because they wanted it to, and it's vital to a system as big as
USENET is not stagnant in terms of discussions, or the creation of alt groups, but go ahead and try to name the recent innovations there. DejaNews/Google is about the last thing to make a big difference, and that didn't even come from USENET.
I must say I wish I had seen this thread right away and then I could have done a "first post" and had the only such post to get modded up.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
How about we respect the opinions of the US Supreme Court for a change, and not allow software patents at all?
The things that are threatening electronic freedom are the perversions of copyright: access controls, enforced access controls (DMCA), ever-increasing retroactive term extensions, etc. Copyright all on its own, is a fair deal.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
'The EFF is against copyright infringement on principle. Copyright infringement is, as of this time, illegal. Those who contribute to the EFF because they are 'for file sharing' and then share copyrighted music do a double disservice to the organization - first, they have a mistaken impression of what the EFF supports (which is the free distribution of information not bound by copyright or other restrictions), and two, they no doubt share this mistaken belief with others, giving the impression that the EFF by proxy supports copyright infringement over P2P networks to further a cause of limited copyright and limited copyright rights.'
This really is simple. 'Copyright infringement is wrong.' Period, end of press release. From all the posts I see on slashdot and the number of people I know who file trade (and their rationale), I have to wonder if that one sentence press release would completely blow them away.
I've come to the conclusion recently that the RIAA intends to use a squeeze and destroy tactic to accomplish their ends. Copyright infringement on P2P networks won't be tolerated. Period. If they can't use existing law to stop that, they'll get legislators to pass new ones. The only reason that some laws proposed haven't yet passed is because I believe many legislators are still doing a 'wait and see' to see if the problem goes away without further decreasing the rights of people to do it.
But if that doesn't happen, I have very little doubt that CBDTPA and the 'hack computers that are file trading' laws will pass with fanfare, because they will finally 'stop the stealing', assuming it goes on that long. At that point, all we have left to trust are the courts to overturn the law. We've seen how successful that's been with the DMCA.
I believe the EFF needs to make a firm stand about this issue, because if people are let to believe that if only they fileshare enough, if only enough people do it, that somehow, legislators will just conveniently forget that copyright infringement is still infringement and drop the whole thing. In fact, I believe that should it come to that, the U.S. government will pass a bill making copyright infringement in certain circumstances (like P2P sharing) a CRIMINAL offence, rather than a civil one. And there isn't a single infringement of anybody's basic rights if that happens - a lot of people will just find themselves in jail, and Congress has every right to do it.
I believe the EFF is obligated to, while supporting the principle of P2P file sharing technologies, also make crystal clear that every infringement that occurs on those networks hurts the very cause that the EFF is trying to underscore.
I won't give the EFF a single penny until something like this happens. As is, I believe the EFF is giving a bad message to file sharers: 'We're behind you.' That's not a good long term message. It should be, 'We're behind your using these services legally, and we will spit on you if you knowingly infringe people's copyrights - because that is not what we're about.' I'm sorry for the rant/flame, and it reads this way, but I am quite concerned about this trend. Taking care of egregious copyright length and bredth is NOT part of the same argument behind P2P sharing. Mixing them is creating an extremely dangerous mixed message.
I don't want to see laws passed to punish those that don't get the message fast enough - because that message isn't spelled out to them.
The whole point is that he doesn't want things like Slashdot comments to have automatic, near-infinite copyrights.
He wants most things (emails, notes, blogs) to be free of copyright. Copyright would only apply to things that actually had some cost in their production, and would not get produced without copyright.
That means that instead of having a giant WWW full of copyrighted material, you'd have a giant WWW full of the public domain.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
" # Speaking of copyright - what would a Lessig balance of copyright look like? Would you regulate books and computer programs different? 14 year term, renewable to 28 for all but computer programs. Deposit requirement. Registration requirement. Vastly limited "derivative rights". 10 years for software max, if and only if, the source code is deposited. No copyright protection at all for any software whose source code is not deposited. "
The idea that you need to deposit a work to copyright it is ridiculous. It's a scam where "the public" tries to benefit unfairly from an individual by forcing him to turn over a work to the public in order to get protection from the public. In the US, if I write something, whether I release it to no one or sell to anyone, I still retain the exclusive copyright. This is particularly important in the case of software, since there is not necessarily a motive to sell the source to the public. Lessig wants to force every company into a BSD style coding license after 10 years, however, or receive no protection for written software (if you refuse to deposit). This is a direct attack on proprietary software, as well as GPLed software, since both lose copyright in a very short time, after which anyone is free to copy out of a public archive and do as they wish with it.
Vote for Pedro
So migration in your views is ironic?
It's the folks who hold exactly the same views as they did 10 years ago that I wouldn't trust.
The questions about the role of intellectual property on the net have been among the most new in cyberlaw. I've made a number of thoughts and predictions about how they will pan out or how they should. Some right, some wrong.
And I still defend copyright and disagree with those (inside the EFF or out) who want to simply dismantle it. But everybody at the EFF is bothered by the collateral damage caused by copyright holders attacking not infringement, but the underlying technologies which are being used for it.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
The EFF's major 'problem' is that they attempt to work on major issues long before most people would recognize that the issue exists. Back in 1989, how many people would know what a BBS is, let along why it isn't constitutional to seize an entire email server to check out one person's email? The EFF is fighting the equivalent of Physical and Link layer issues, while most people can only really get worked up about Application layer issues. The EFF's fights are the "why we need to protect plankton and krill" issues of the online world- critically important but doesn't have big-eyed sympathetic megafauna that photographs well symbols.
Nor does the EFF get to choose sympathetic posterboy cases. Much as the EFF would love to take on a "RIAA threatens to eat babies at the widows and orphans facility" case, the XXAA is never going to give them one. They get 2600, not the NYTimes. They get Hamadi, not the girl scouts.
But by fighting the one case early on, however obscure or unsympathetic, the EFF is preventing a whole timeline of worse court cases later on. So donate! with this quote from the interview in mind:
You would be able to copyright them. Larry Lessig doesn't want to stop you. However, if you wish to do so, you'd need to make a point to request a copyright.
The reason for this is that there are many things that no one ever desired a copyright for, but they are still prevented from being used/archived/etc due to automatic copyrights. So we lose helpful but forgotten material. This has only been going on since the mid 60s, and it only happened because content industries didn't want to have to compete with free content.
IMHO, a requirement for an explicit copyright notice would be sufficient in this regard. If you want to copyright, just say "Copyright "Magic Thread Heavy Industries, LLC", July 31 2003" and don't worry about it. If you forget to provide notice, then you're the asshole.
His source code requirement is so that computer programs don't get special protection not provided to books, which is what copyright was designed for.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Yeah, but the intent isn't _just_ to get people to make stuff. The intent is to benefit the public. The public _may_ be benefited if you make stuff, but the public is also benefited by having a healthy public domain.
I sincerely doubt that you would cease your personal correspondence with people if it weren't copyrighted. I don't think that anyone writes letters to their friends because they think they'll be able to profit off of them later should they be published.
If something is to be copyrighted, it should be _worth_ being copyrighted. That is, the author should be willing to jump through some hoops, so secure is he that his work will later profit him. If he's not, it seems rather wasted to give him protection for something he doesn't value economically. I say economically because copyright only benefits an author in that fashion; if an author wants to create art for art's sake, or wants the fame, he'll be encouraged without the copyright.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I can't think of a more critical time to support civil liberties and cyberliberties groups like the EFF in the face of the federal government's incursion into our privacy, corporations' surveillance of employees, and the entertainment industries' clampdown on our digital rights.
The EFF may not win every battle, but it's engaged and taking a leadership role in a number of legal struggles. I get two to three emails a week regarding bulletins, updates and legal developments. Not earthshaking, but at least they're in the trenches and on our side.