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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.
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
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.
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?
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
Almost good. How about,
What do you think needs to be done to ensure that our rights of Fair Use are preserved in this digital age?
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.
In a related question - do you think the Google cache is open to legal challenges the way it is currently implemented?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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?
And the other side of the coin:
What do you think needs to be done to ensure that the rights of creators and artists are preserved in the digital age?
Suppose it is determined that a solution that both protects the producer's copyrights and the consumer's fair-use rights is not possible. Which side's rights deserve more protection?