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Ask Mike Godwin About Internet Law
Mike Godwin is probably best known to Slashdot readers for Godwin's Law, but that's one of the most minor reasons you should know him. In this blurb for his book, CYBER RIGHTS, he's (correctly) described as "one of the first lawyers to 'live and work in cyberspace.'" Naturally, Mike can't give specific legal advice, but he's certainly about as expert as they come about the development of law and legal hassles surrounding the Internet. We'll send him 10 of the highest-moderated questions, and publish his answers as soon as we get them back.
In your experience, have you found most lawsuits involving IP issues to be a waste of time/resources, or possessing merit?
Nothing but the finest in meaningless drivel
What do you think of the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act of 1997 and do you think it is fair to make not profit motive copyright infringement a criminal offense?
Don't you think that some of today's Internet laws are suspiciously reminiscent of the laws the Nazis used to have? What? What did I say? Why are you looking at me like that?
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
It has become clear to me that we probably need new IP laws for an age where copying is so easy. The current set were drafted when widespread copying was difficult, and accepted that certain infringements would happen. We can now copy so much so easily, and prevent copying so easily, that I think we should look again at the law, and see whether some small rights should accrue to the user. What's your view on this?
Exercise your right not to vote. thinkoutside.org
How long do you predict it will be before all rights to fair use are vanquished from the Internet?
Sedition is defined as speach which advocates the immedate and violent overthrow of the government in a fashion as to provide a clear and present danger, if my memory serves me correctly.
My question is, would an internet website fall into that catigory, as it does not have the same force as say, Hitler in the Haufbrauhause with like, 2,000 SA going to storm the Bavarian capital building. It does have a wider audience, but due to the decentralized nature I doubt that a website can provide a clear and present danger or immediate action at all. Am I wrong? Does the PATRIOT Act redefine it in such a way as to make it "terrorism?"
If so, how does this impact the manufacturers of copy protected audio and data CDs?
If a copy-protected audio or data CD goes faulty, is the manufacturer liable to provide a new copy free of charge? If so, in what time-frame?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Is deep linking legal?
What about mirroring? Does the answer change if the site would require you to register before accessing it? Does the answer change if no copyright notice is placed on the page?
Often, I find my network and servers I use for my small business come under attack by script kiddies. Sometimes it's a DDoS attack, but more often than not, it's just getting hammered by one machine. When I contact the ISP involved, generally one of the large US ISPs, I am told that they will look into it. Nothing ever happens, however, and ISPs are generally unwilling to provide assistance in tracking down attacks. This means my complaint ends up in the circular file. The ISPs are protecting criminals because they don't want to lose business, and I have no way of making sure my complaint doesn't end up lost in this black hole. As an individual representing a small business, what recourse do I have in dealing with ISPs to make sure my complaints are heard and taken seriously?
The DMCA contains an obscure clause about interoperability, what does this mean? That is could I break encryption to allow DVD player to work, so long as I maintained the spirit of the encryption (not allowing copies)? Can I break the encryption on various games to allow them to run under Wine?
please.
You're connecting "piracy", something inherantly illegal by definition, with peer-to-peer. p2p is a technology that can be used for so many different things, that lumping them together is naive.
so many geeks want what to be legal? piracy? sharing mp3's? p2p? they are 3 separate things, only one of which I care about, as a geek, and that is p2p. Which I don't even use. Once i tried bit torrent to d/l slackware, but it didn't work.
please, for the sake of reality, don't lump 3 vastly different things into one thing that the general public sees as illegal. p2p != sharing mp3s. p2p != piracy. sharing mp3's is not always even equal to piracy.
generalizations are like premature optimizations... the root of all evil.
By the time your daughter grows up, do you think there will be any of our cherished freedoms on the Internet left, or will everything be wrapped in legalese and DRM? With the passage of laws from the DMCA to the PATRIOT act, I've been increasingly pessimistic about the US's ability to pass any sane legislation that interfaces with the Internet...
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Mr. Godwin - Lots of /.ers follow the SCO case, followed the DeCSS, Napster, IP, CIPA, etc. What are some lesser known cases/laws that you forsee as having a large potential impact on 'cyberlaw' as we know it?
Most law requires context. Port scanning has plenty of legit purposes. If I port scan my home network, or the network of a system that I own, operate, or maintain - you'd think it would be legal. If not, enter the hazy grey area. Spoofing email addresses can go either way as well, depending on the content and the recipients.
Nothing but the finest in meaningless drivel
A freind of mine was preaching to the choir (me) about how inappropriate it is that the RIAA is calling mass copyright infringement "piracy", and how it is an inappropriately biased term given the evils of Blackbeard and the like. Since I agreed, but like my rants to be backed up by better facts, I did some research on piracy of the "Argh, me hearties" kind. To my surprise, it almost fits, if you grant that copyright is "property", Cyberspace is a "place outside the jurisdiction of any State", and that mass copyright infringement falls within "act of depredation". (See what the UN has to say about the Jolly Roger type stuff.)
Skimming the web for some history on this, it seems that the idea of the laws against piracy arose slowly to deal with the problem of crimes committed outside of any national jurisdiction. I was wondering if Mike has any thoughts on this parallel, and what it may imply about how cyberlaw may evolve.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
A print example is an author's refusal to allow translation of a book to a given language.
A more digital example is Lucas' refusal to release the original Star Wars movies on DVD.
It seems to me that the copyright system is designed to allow the copyright holder to receive compensation for his art, but that this system is being abused by not allowing publication in a given format.
This has obvious implications, also, in the world of digital music.
:wq
If I may, I would like to ask you the same basic question I asked of Lawrence Lessig three years ago: what form do you think that copyright law (and licencing) should take on the Internet?
Do you like Japanese imports?
How far do you think that the internet will be responsible for creating a de-facto international legal system? Property rights, shared criminal databases, shared economic systems,... it seems that the influence of TCP/IP packets has no limits on our society. Will we one day see a world government to enforce international law? And lastly, will this be the US?
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Several years ago the company I work for was the target of a denial of service attack. We contacted the FBI and, after an hour of deliberation, in not so many words they said there really wasn't much they could do. Our ISP was actually much more helpful, both legally and technically, than the FBI. Basically, as I understood the situation, they won't lift a finger unless you can prove $5,000 in damage was caused. The damages were easy to account for, but even then it seemed like they had very little power. I know most internet crimes involve violation of FCC regulations, making them federal issues, but does the FBI have any more power now than they did 3 years ago on this particular issue? If so, is the Patriot Act the source of additional power?
Copyright law in individual countries is usually relatively clear. However, the interactions of the copyright laws of different jurisdictions are often a legal minefield.
What is the best general rule for dealing with 'odd' copyright lengths such as Crown copyright, 50 years from date of publication in general, in countries like the US which have not adopted the Berne Convention rule of shorter term?
It seems to me that most (if not all) spaming and advertising done on the Internet is simply polluting the lines of communication. Like any pollution, it reduces the stuff you want, by increasing the ratio of stuff you don't want, thereby making the whole environment unusable.
Is it possible that this view can be used in any legal way to go after Internet polluters?
What's the legality of An Anti-DoS Tool That Returns Fire? It sounds pretty vigilante to me, but what sort of laws would be applicable to it?
On the contary, if a site passes itself as an "eNewspaper" site, an eMag or whatever, and it publishes mistruths, then I would expect it to be sued as any pulp publication would be.
Are there any legal precedents or specific laws on this?
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
I have a question about the recent litigation by the RIAA against a handful of university students for running supposedly illegal P2P services. I'm a student at Rensselaer, so I'm more familiar with the service that was being run there, but as far as I figure it was the same deal at all the other universities as well. At RPI, the Phynd server searched all the computers that were sharing files on the network and indexed them so you could do a keyword search for files, similar to the way google works. From what I read of the case, the major point in the case was that the RIAA said that the service provided illegal access to copyrighted material because you could use the service to directly download material, via a hyperlink in the search results window; even though the service and the files were restricted only to students at Rensselaer. My question is how would their case have changed if all the service returned was just the address of the computer hosting the files? Thus after a person ran a search and decided on his own to manually type the address of the hosting computer to access it, would the owners of the phynd server have been held accountable since it would have been the miscosoft transfer protocols transfering the files. This seemed to be the big point in going after the students that it was their program that was directly facilitating the illegal downloads, and it seems like if the service merely indexed the files without providing direct access the case would have been significantly weakened.
Q: Can You see any way the net can be regulated? I have read the other suggestions/queries here and quite frankly it seems that most people(american that is) just dont understand that the net is global. How can we make a set of rules that all users of the net is forced to follow? Do we really want to?
Do you see the DMCA as a law that can truly benefit the world as a whole, or just a tool of the big corporations (MPAA, I'm looking at you) or whatever?
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
As a computer science student graduating college and hoping to head to law school, I wonder if you have any particular advice about wha training, if any, will help to prepare me for "cyber-law". Many schools seem to have programs focusing on this aspect of the law, but I've often thought that the generalist approach to a field yielded better results.
Are there any experiences you'd advise a young prospective attorney interested in this field to seek out?
More to the point, does changing the medium in which content is delivered constitute a derivative work and therefore require a seperate copyright license? E.G., ripping a muic track from a CD to play on a computer, copying a track from a vinyl album to a CD or audio cassette to play in a car, etc.
While I find spam as annoying as the next person, I'm more interested in the legal status of spyware. What are the rights of the individual when he visits a site? What rights to the individual's machine does the site have? Is permanently altering a user's browser a legal operation? What constitutes permission with regard to this type of manipulation?
"If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit." - Mitch Hedberg
Is it legal to make and edit copies of commercial DVDs for personal use? What about loaning out the edited copies to friends?
Ha, ha! Nobody ever says Italy.
Why is it that there "have to be" laws specific to the internet? If a spammer sends an e-mail using forged headers, why doesn't the law go after him (or her) with good old-fashioned anti-fraud laws? Does the main failing of these kinds of old laws lie in ingorance that makes law enforcement unable or unwilling to enforce the laws without further clarification, or is something else going on here?
How do you feel about people sharing your book?
Do you feel that one should have to make their (human) name and street public information to receive a domain name? It is perfectly possible to keep such information private except to law enforcement under request. The debators on both sides seem to see it as an all or nothing situation: open to everybody or open to nobody.
For that matter, what are the legal barriers against having a single "recipient number" for all types of communication so that one can move and still keep the same number? Email, phone, paper mail, etc. can then be redirected to such a number, and internal lookup tables would supply physical locations or addresses for final delivery. But to senders or callers, it is just one stable number.
Table-ized A.I.
Do you think that the widespread use of the Internet and practical anonymity will force copyright back into its original, more reasonable form of limited restrictions on copying as business models adapt to the unenforcability of existing law? Or do you think it will force law the other way, to ever-more draconian measures that can't be enforced effectively without making examples of people?
Do you think a new form of Intellectual Property will arise that is based around creators' rights to control their work that goes beyond mere copying and into the realm of restrictions on use? Or have we already gotten to that point?
Are EULAs legal? If they aren't now, will they ever be?
What would you suggest people in countries do to avoid capitulating to the USA and adopting its twisted notion of copyright? It's not always practical to "just say no" to the USA.
i think this is pretty interesting. It's similar to saying, "I didn't break in to that persons house to aquire their property, the door was wide open." Pardon my law knowledge.. terminology may be incorrect, but this is sort of like Breaking and Entering (plus theft) versus Trespassing (plus theft).
Is there a difference between trespassing a "wide open" system which you aren't supposed to be in, and "cracking" ones way into a secured system which you aren't supposd to be in?
I have written some software and have decided to distribute it under the GNU General Public License. I then find out some established/incorporated company has modified the software without redistributing their modified version freely, that they are making a profit out of the modified undistributed version, or that they are redistributing the software without pointing out that what they are giving is not the original version of the software. What exactly are my rights? Is it worth taking the company to court, or is this too risky? To come to the point, is the GPL actually a licence which has some value in the courts of justice?
"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect" -- Linus Torval
What effects, positive or negative, do you think sites like the popular Groklaw have/will have on corporate technology litigation? Do lawyers pay any attention to the research and opinions of amateurs and the general public?
How do you plan on managing laws and constitutions that stretch beyond U.S territories.
If the Internet started with the U.S and expanded to some parts of Antarctica. U.S. rules are probably useless once it gets to the new continent.
Vice versa if someone in Antarctica created a P2P application and it became extremely popular in the U.S. U.S lawyers probably can never get a grip on it.
Isn't geography the greatest challenge out there for any lawyers. In fact it's so difficult to deal with it's rendering the law useless.
That police officer has repeatedly attempted to contact me (as a rule, I never volunteer any information to law enforcement), and has gone so far as to obtain some personal information about me. Turns-out that the ISP caved-in to his demands and provided some information about me, in clear violation of legal procedure and current privacy laws.
This is no different from a cracker obtaining passwords/access through social engineering.
Furthermore, the officer has repeatedly attempted to have me contact him tough threatening e-mail messages.
My question is: should there be stiff penalties towards law-enforcement officers who manage to illegally and without due process of law get information about ISP subscribers, especially if they are well outside their police department jurisdiction?
Based on downloads of MythTV I would guestimate there are somewhere around 25,000 people who are screen-scaping copyrighted tv-listings information off of various web sites around the world. These web sites offer public access, and do not require you to view any sort of legal agreement - though I have heard there is a legal agreement on their websites somewhere...
My question is: Would it be legal to screen-scrape and use this copyrighted information for personal use if there were "terms of service" documents on the website that explicitly forbid this behaviour?
My question is this: Has it been decided by any courts or legislation whether domain names are property, or merely a contractual service? Particularly as this pertains to bankruptcy law?
I'm interested in a domain name, but it seems to be in legal limbo and I'd be interested in understanding the principles involved.
Backround:
The company that holds the domain name filed for bankruptcy about 2 months after domain name was first requested. This was back in 1998. There is no evidence that the company ever used the domain name (e.g. internet archive, trademark registration, etc). The company was trying to restructure and then filed to liquidate back in 2000.
I looked up the court docket for the bankruptcy case but it looks like there have been no judicial or trustee actions for ~3 years.
However, the domain name, which appears to be in some sort of Registrar Lock and also a Legal Lock at Network Solutions, appears to be renewing at 1-year intervals somehow.
There are two other sub-questions that this scenario raises that I presume you don't have time to answer but I'll mention them in case someone else knows:
1) Does a bankruptcy trustee typically have the ability to renew contracts such as that for a domain name?
2) What sort of court papers would signal to a registrar that the entity registering the name has been bankrupt and the name should be removed from whatever legal lock and auto-renewal process is in place? (We've tried faxing stuff to their legal department but it seems to go into a black hole and we don't really know what should be sent.)
--LP
While wardriving one day I happened to stumble onto an open wireless network for a lawyer, a doctor, and a securities trading firm in the same parking lot. All networks were open and C drives for many computers were shared. I connected to the networks for the doctor and checked my email. I connected to the lawyer's office and plundered around in their shared drives and copied a folder called Client Files onto my computer. And I connected to the securities firm and started up a packet monitor for an hour to capture and analyze their network traffic. This information reveled several bank account numbers, email usernames and passwords, and sensitive customer information.
All 3 networks had no encryption in place and no passwords were cracked to access any of the data.
How many, and which laws, have I broken?
The Code Ninja is swift with his tool, precise in his delivery, and deadly accurate in his execution.
Both programmers and lawyers deal with logic as their bread and butter. But law relies on a vague language (English), an obscure syntax (18th century customs), and bases it's procedures and algorithms on an foundation that's very volatile, hard to track, and subject to forking with almost each ruling.
Computer professionals had to deal with trying to figure out reliable ways to deal with similar problems even when it wasn't in their power to change things. The waterfall development models of the sixites, and the trial-and-error bumbling of the hobbyists have developed some workable procedures (extreme programming, pragmatic programming, etc) that have made the computer world accessible and observable to all who want to participate.
I don't see the legal community even wanting to pursue such ideas. A senator introducing a bill into congress can offer all sorts of flowery comments to his "legal code", but it's the code that matters and affects people once codified into law. So much irrelevant crap gets worked into law each year on the state and federal level by being hidden in other work, it's depressing. When a court writes a verdict to set a legal precedent, all hell seems to break loose. It's like you have been told that the memory management routines in the standard C library are deprecated and you're left wondering whether that impacts your string library.
I know that English stinks as a language for expressing logic, but why can't lawyers depend on something English-like such as Lisp, Scheme, Prolog, or a special legal dialect that could be reduced to clear answers and effects. Lawmakers and judges could continue to write English comments with flowery and awe-inspiring prose, but their code would be clear what the result of this change would be. Imagine the Supreme Court running their rulings through regression tests before they are released so that they can fully understand the impact the changes will have. The results may still be ground-breaking but at least such tests would ensure that there are no unexpected results and loopholes created by a sloppy ruling.
Of course, this is an absurd idea. But it's even more absurd that the governed allow politicians, lawyers, and judges to play so fast and loose with the rules that govern their own lives. Is it a matter of power having corrupted those in charge? The legal community has all sorts of institutions to preserve their power ("passing the bar", etc).
Is it just that only recently have the techniques and ability to deal with such a huge system become available? I could be wrong, but wasn't it Blaise Pascal who dreamed of a time when courts could be run with the logic of algebra? Today we machines that can hold the volumous data from the legal world. Our understanding of logic and (more importantly) the consequences of making exceptions are much better understood. Artificial Intelligence tools do exactly this sort of logical "if this then this" sort of reasoning that humans are so bad at doing when we really don't want to come to the logical conclusion.
These days, the debate over gay marriage for example gives me the willies with overzealous lawmakers spreading diatribes about their legal changes to the definition of marriage. Of course CNN would never carry the actual patches, but if I could go to a website and see for myself different positions. Group A was arguing to simply remove definition of husband and wife as male and female. Group B was coding a subclass of marriage called gay_union. And Group C was making changes to define marriage as a couple capable of producing offspring. Regression tests may tell us more about their intents than their 30 second commercial spots. Group B's gay_union subclass might not hold up as constitutionally valid as marriage and would be subject to court challenge. Group C's fertility requirement might keep certain old or infertile heterosexual couples from getting married. While Group A's dropping the gender definition might make for some funny changes to a 1913 New York subway law th
i.e., Where do you feel the rights and freedoms of individuals are best protected and/or recognized in law?
i.e.2., Is the USA still the "land of the free", or should that title be bestowed upon Canada, the EU, or foo?
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
Mike:
As privacy advocates, what can we do to impress the importance of privacy without coming off as tinfoil-hatted whack jobs?
An example was a presentation I prepared for co-workers a while back regarding grocery store "loyalty" cards. In it, even after detailing the California case of a store that in a slip and fall case in their store, tried to introduce the customer's purchases, tracked via a card, saying he may have been drunk at the time because of frequent alcohol purchases. Afterwards, I was hit with several questions about being paranoid. I used the standard "this is why we have envelopes and blinds instead of postcards and open windows" argument, and while most seemed to understand, some were obviously unimpressed. What can we do to convince people of the need for privacy without being over the top?
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
In 1981, computer programs were nonstatutory subject matter for patents. The US Supreme Court reiterated this in Diamond v. Dieher, but clarified that when you use software somewhere in a process, "the process as a whole does not thereby become unpatentable subject matter."
Today, with no change of law, we see software patents all over the place? What happened? I don't think it can just be re-wording of patents to make them sound like part of a system. The Diehr opinion had a whole section (IV) for the express purpose of heading such things off. "To hold otherwise would allow a competent draftsman to evade the recognized limitations on the type of subject matter eligible for patent protection."
So where did all these software patents come from?
I have always wondered why, when considering new spam legislation, they do not target the ultimate benefactor of SPAM. SPAM in my mind, is nothing but an advertisement for a product or service. For SPAM to be effective (which it must be, seeing how prolific it continues to be) money must exchange hand and contact information must be provided in some manner. Why not just follow the money, see where it lands and prosecute?
Before the flame, let me acknowledge the opportunity to target legitimate business by sending spam on behalf of a company without their knowledge to put the business in legal peril.
Don't go after the dealer, go after the supplier.
My ignorance is self-evident.
Do you believe networks similar to Freenet will be considered illegal? Without going through the entire tech details, just assume the following properties:
1) Each peer reserves some space on their HDD
2) The peer has no knowledge or control of the contents, which are all encrypted.
3) It's impossible (for the legal question) to
a) Determine who inserted information into the network
b) Determine who requested information from the network
c) Determine who provided information on the network
The only reasonable thing you can prove, is that one peer was the last proxy - it routed the information to you. It does not know the contents, and it only did so on your node's request.
Do you think such a network, should it grow popular, would be outlawed? And if so, how?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings