The Year In Tech Law

Selanit writes "CNet has an article rounding up the year in IP law. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this article is that the SCO case gets only one paragraph out of a fairly lengthy article. It's good to get a reminder that there are other issues out there, including content filtering in libraries, the potential for a tax on Internet access, pop-up ads, domain name legislation, and of course file-sharing."

Comments

A good reminder...

[rockclimber]

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this article is that the SCO case gets only one paragraph out of a fairly lengthy article. It's good to get a reminder that there are other issues out there that would be a good reminder for the editors, too...

Why is it surprising?

[ObviousGuy]

The SCO case introduces no new law. The case relies almost solely on existing law.

SCO only getting 1 paragraph understandable...

[tekiegreg]

Think about it, how many Cnet readers even know what Linux is? Ok that's sarcasm but you get the idea, Windows users are not horridly affected by Darl McBride/SCO and company. However this regulation has many people in the Linux community wondering (well duh).

Spam on the other hand affects all of us, and the effectiveness of the new law will bring a shrug from most of us. If it's effective, great; if not the battle rages on...

Pop-ups? Same thing, affects everyone, legislation in any direction would be interesting to all.

Illegal music downloading also has popular appeal. The draconian efforts of the RIAA affect anyone who could be sued (including the grannies they were suing who barely knew what a computer was...)

Domain names? Got a fair amount of mention apparently, the reach on that issue is medium, lots of people own domain names these days.

Taxes, DEAR GOD NO!!! Good they're not going anywhere yet...broad reach so gets decent mention...

So in the end this is the reporting I'd expect from CNet...

At one time

[cluge]

At one time we didn't NEED internet law. It was understood that certain standards of behavior we're required so that we could all "get along". People that refused to follow the rules were "banned", essentially made non citizens of the global eletronic world. It was a brutally effective punishment.

Now we have no real accepted standard of behavior, and no penalty that is effective. Thus we have to create "Internet Laws" and find someway to enforce them. The early system was elegant and egalitarian. The current system is simply a miserable failure. I do not pine for the early days, I do not secretly sit in a dark corner complaining about the unwashed masses. I am vocal and write to my representatives when internet issues come before them, I try to enlighten my friends and family on the issues. Perhaps someday we will have some represntatives with a modicum of internet savvy. Then and only then can we start to write good internet law. Until then, 2003 was merely a stepping stone in a long arduous process.

AngryPeopleRule

Re:At one time

[jjjack]

I think the reason "internet law" wasn't necessary in the early days is that the internet wasn't actually used for all that much, and those who used it tended to be scientists and/or people very technically-inclined. You can't bemoan the fact that the internet is now used by the general public, that's just how it's happened. As a result, innovation on the internet boomed in the late '90s, and created a lot of issues which are now being considered. Along with this, general interest in the Internet of course created major commercial interests.

So the important thing to do now is to get educated individuals with a "modicum of internet savvy," as you put it, to represent the public interest to our officials (yes I know that's their job, but if they aren't doing it correctly, we need to help instruct them) in order to counter the often amoral and anti-innovative opinions of the invested commercial interests.

Re:At one time

[Tim C]

At one time we didn't need any law - what the village elder(s) said, everyone did. Failure to comply would generally see you left to fend for yourself, banished, or killed.

Then society got too big and too complex, and laws had to be made, and people employed and charged with upholding them.

I see the net as being similar. Back when it was small, as you say everyone agreed to get along, or was kicked out. Now, it's too big for that - you get me kicked off my current ISP today, I'll be back with on new one tomorrow.

On the other hand, with its distributed, no single owner nature, I'm not sure how we can make laws for the net as it is. There's simply no-one to enforce them.

Re:At one time

[adjuster]

At one time we didn't NEED internet law. It was understood that certain standards of behavior we're required so that we could all "get along". People that refused to follow the rules were "banned", essentially made non citizens of the global eletronic world. It was a brutally effective punishment.

It's still a brutally effective "punishment" today. No one is stopping users (corporations, individuals, etc) from installing pop-up blockers, subscribing to blacklists, using alternative DNS roots, and generally mangling the hell out of the traffic they receive from the Internet.

The thing is, on the whole, we're not exercising our freedoms to shun others and "police" the Internet ourselves. The public support needed to really make these "punishments" work isn't here, and the waves of unsecured "zombie" computers give ammunition to those who would seek to thwart these "punishments" with denial-of-service attacks. We need better software solutions to help people "police" their view of the Internet, more secure client computer operationg systems (and no, I don't mean "trusted computing"), and more social education about acceptable behaviour (i.e. never buy anything you see advertised in a spam, stop patronizing companies that you see advertised in spam, etc).

United States legislators are more concerned about passing new laws to outlaw very abstract types of "crimes" ("illegal spamming", as defined by the direct marketing lobby, for example) than they are about working to see that our law enforcement has the necessary appropriations and tools to enforce those existing laws that are being broken now (spammers breaking into PC's and using them for spam factories, for example).

I think we'd all agree that modifying bits bound for somebody else without their express consent is a bad idea, but modifying bits that I've requested is a-okay. Firewalls, proxy servers, intrusion detection and response systems-- all of these "technologies" function on that principle.

It's going to be really, really disturbing, though, when we all wake up and find out that we can't run our "popup blockers", use our blacklists, and filter responses through proxies anymore. It'll be "made illegal" to alter the contents of packets that we receive from the Internet because of "intellectual property" bogosity.

It's going to be even more disturbing when we all wake up and find that none of us have "root" access on our computers anymore. All our packets on the Internet are going to be authenticated and cryptographically "secured" (i.e. "secured" from US), and the content publishers and distributors will hold all the keys.

I may be overly pessimistic now, I guess, but I feel like we can't stop it. The Internet, as we know it now, is going to be gone sooner rather than later. There will be "other internets" that will be similar to this one, but the age of a single, unified, global Internet is going to pass quickly, and idiotic legislation, content publishers and distributions, and "intellectual property" are going to be the forces that break it apart.

Re:At one time

[Saeger]

I'm not sure how we can make laws for the net as it is.

You can only make laws for the "corporate net" with links to the real world that everbody uses for things like paying their taxes online; it will be the one to get infested with soul-sucking DRM. The OTHER "sideband freenet" will always be a self-governed anarchy (like slashdot) just the way I like it.

--

Hard to believe some of this

[Anonymous Coward]

I had to read this twice before understanding the full extent of the possible repercussions. IANAL, but I think now the 9th circuit court could invalidate the ruling, which would be a disaster for many of us:

In its first ruling on COPA, a divided Court said that definition does not by itself render the statute substantially overbroad for purposes of the First Amendment, refused to lift an injunction against enforcement of the act and sent the case back to the lower appellate court, which in March 2003 found COPA unconstitutional.

It *was* a scary year

[jsav40]

I feel as if I've lost a whole slew of civil rights as far as anything connected to computers goes. Starting with libraries, continuing on to my "illegal" linux DVD software and culminating with DCMA. The fact that congress is taking every opportunity to connect *everything* to the "war on terror" does not bode well either.

More free publicity for SCO

[Anonymous Coward]

The article claims that the outcome of this SCO case could affect the future of Linux. Wooo, scary! Just the kind of statement they want!

How about a more accurate statement like: "Unless SCO comes up with some evidence behind their so-far meritless case, SCO is likely to accelerate their self-destructive business trajectory."

There is simply no conceivable way SCO can win this case. The future of Linux has a better chance of being affected by the second coming of Cthulhu.

the diffrent meanings of the term "IP"

[Anonymous Coward]

If someone said "IP" last year, people in the tech-world would probably assume they were talking about the internet protocol.

This year however, its all about "Intellectual Property"
Sad..

Re:It *was* a scary year

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there's a presidential election next year,... go fix it

Merry-X-massexcucution

libraries and secret site lists

[bodrell]

I find the ruling on libraries, requiring them to install site-blocking software, especially frightening. I know it's been said many times before, but plenty of legitimate sites get blocked--like those discussing reproductive health, or censorship itself. And although outright pornography isn't found in libraries, some books are considered pornography to conservatives. The best example I can think of is "Naked Lunch" by William S. Burroughs, which has some repulsive content, but the Supreme Court ruled it could not be banned as an obscene material. I'm sure an online text of the book would be filtered out.

Of course then there's the software patenting nonsense. At least the patent office has enough sense to realize it needs to reform itself.

Re:grassroots campaign to end spam

[Artifakt]

The problem is, spam only requires half a percent of the most cluelss or so to bite, and it's working. Fixing that CAN be that hard to do.
A task like getting 80% of your local high school graduates to go on to college or trade school, or like getting a 50% reduction in the highway fatality rate by getting the worst 10% of drivers off the road, is a lot easier than getting the word to that last, clueless 1/2%, just because you can miss a half % or so completely, and still succeed, but here it's that last 1/2% that you have to find and convince instead, and nothinge else counts.

Re:Internet legislation futility

[Jerf]

Who says I have to use "the" root DNS servers?

Shhhhh. Don't freak out the Senators.

Am I committing a crime in the United States if I put up a private network running TCP/IP, put up some DNS servers that are authoritative for "CartoonNetwork.com" and put up some web servers to host pornography for that domain name?

To the extent that an external, unconnected visitor might see this resolution of "CartoonNetwork.com", it probably would be a crime, but not really one of those new-fangled "internet crimes", it'd just be fraud and/or trademark violations.

If it's purely internal then I can't imagine what the crime would be.

Cooperation on the Internet works on the basis of social pressure, not on legislation. Legislation will only cause the Internet to fragment and "route around" the stupidity.

Only to the extent that the legislation permits. I can imagine laws that can not be "routed around" in any significant way; an extreme, but perfectly viable, option is to ban the Internet altogether, or just whitelist it at the transport level. This is damned hard to just "route around". Unfortunately, this logic promotes just sitting back and do nothing ("they will inevitably lose"), which is a Very Bad Idea, not least of which is that there is still a difference between "not losing" and "winning".

One year is not enough. Look back at the last ten

[Qrlx]

It's going to be even more disturbing when we all wake up and find that none of us have "root" access on our computers anymore. All our packets on the Internet are going to be authenticated and cryptographically "secured" (i.e. "secured" from US), and the content publishers and distributors will hold all the keys.

I don't know diddly about crypto... but what you've described is exactly why Hollywood wanted CSS.

If Xing had protected their key better, we might still be trying to crack DVDs. (I'm not really sure how strong CSS is.) But take note of the approach -- a combination of leveraged industrial power, tech, and legislation. I think we'll be seeing this hybrid approach more and more. Try to lock 'em out, and if(when) the hackers find a way in, make sure the path they took was an illegal one, and a federal case to boot.

To wit: "Content providers" believe that when you skip commercials in TiVo, you're "stealing" from the networks. New TiVo's don't have this feature. (Or maybe it's ReplayTV, I'm a bit ignorant since I barely watch TV.) When you decipher Adobe's eBook, you go to jail for a few months -- the Sklyarov case being the equivalent of the Feds dipping their toes in the hot tub. Linking is looking less and less like protected speech. Jon Johansen gets retried for DeCSS. Microsoft rams Product Activation down our throat, and Windows XP loves to phone home.

While everyone's caught up looking at the trees, here's what's happening in the forest: We're inching ever towards limiting the common man's access to "intellectual property" (whatever that is). In doing so we're walking away from the past five hundred years of intellectual freedom brought about by Johannes Gutenberg and Martin Luther.

This is a huge, gigantic assault on the philosophy of the Enlightenment, on which (to some extent) our country was founded and our Constitution based. Yet my impression is that most comptuer geeks only see the tip of the iceberg --e.g. "I can't legally play my DVDs on Linux" or "ROT13! WTF J00 AD0B3 LAM3RZ!" The strongest fight is coming from librarians. I think librarians are the only ones to realize that, were libraries to be invented today, they would promptly be sued out of existence by the RIAA for illegal filesharing.

Though I think the librarians missed the obvious solutions when faced with CIPA and COPA: Deny Internet access to minors, and let adults surf unfettered. Let's see how Mommy and Daddy respond to that.

Grateful

[Lord_Dweomer]

You know, while everybody here has been discouraged over the downfall of our online freedoms (and i'm right with ya on it), I feel grateful. The internet spreads information at such speed that it speeds everything up. Including the evolution of societies. The internet is a society. It is a culture.

We have been fortunate enough to be able to live through the "Pilgrim" days of the net, as well as the "Wild West" which we are just starting to come out of. We've experienced many exciting things, and it doesn't look to be slowing down any time soon.

In 5 or 10 years from now, we may all be under the draconian rule of M$, the RIAA, the MPAA, or whatever organizations might strip our net freedoms, but they can never take away our memories of what it was like in the golden days.

I hope it doesn't come to that, but if it does, I will be sure to tell my future children and grand children of the glorious days of yore when you had to be a real computer geek to even access a BBS, or when almost any song or movie or software program could be found online for free if you knew where to look.

Take a step back and absorb all you can about the great things we take for granted on the net right now, for you may log on one day to find out they've disappeared over night, like a broken link.

At THIS time!

[ShaunC]

>At one time we didn't NEED internet law.

We still don't NEED internet law.

Everything that's illegal "on the internet" was already illegal to begin with, offline. Copyright infringement ("piracy")? It was illegal long before the internet came around. Fraud? That was illegal before computers were even invented. Breaking and entering ("cracking")? Already prohibited by law. Child porn? That wasn't OK before the Intarweb either.

No, we don't NEED internet law, the current laws already apply to just about any internet crime imaginable. The new [insert existing crime] "on the internet" laws are just yet another powergrab with longer sentences. But try convincing your congresscritter of that, without making a campaign contribution.