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EFF and Dvorak Blame the Digg Revolt On Lawyers
enharmonix writes "A bit of an update on the recent Digg revolt over AACS. The NYTimes has taken notice and written quite a decent article that actually acknowledges that the take-down notices amount to censorship and documents instances of the infamous key appearing in purely expressive form. I was pleased to see the similarity to 2600 and deCSS was not lost on the Times either. More interesting is that the EFF's Fred von Lohmann blames the digg revolt on lawyers. And in an opinion piece, John Dvorak expands on that theme."
esp. the business/IP type.. but don't the EFF have/employ a lot of lawyers?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Blame the lawyers instead of figuring out a reasonable approach to DRM that doesn't burden the consumers while protecting the producers. The worst part is that some of these now blamed lawyers will run for Congress to make a bigger mess.
Dvorak's wrong, at least about one thing. AACS does absolutely nothing to stop us from copying the discs. So called 'copy protection' is the biggest joke of the whole DRM movement. All that AACS accomplishes is making it difficult for people who have legitimately purchased discs from watching them on their linux-powered media centers.
Somebody should write the NYTimes a letter and let them know that the code is just the code you need to play the movies you own and paid for. Piracy doesn't figure into it at all.
In situations like this it is not always correct to blame the lawyers and to give the company that hired the lawyers a free pass on the blame. These companies have in house intellectual property divisions charged with protecting the company's assets. Those corporate minions hire the lawyers and give them a job to do. The lawyers are more than happy to do what they have been asked to do, and generally there is not a whole lot of leeway on the implementation of that job. If the company wants to avoid bad press, then it ought to reconsider its options, legal and otherwise, available to it and change its strategy.
I think it is on slashdot because the whole Digg revolt is actually showing a new socio-political form of protest, bringing civil disobedience into the virtual world. Before you would have to show up to a rally, carry a big sign, shout and chant stuff and then get beat up by police with nightsticks, peppersprayed, shot with rubber bullets, tear gassed, ect... but who has the time or energy for that these days.
Sit at home, find a piece of info that some company does not want the world to know and post it onto a site like Digg, Slashdot or some other popular site and kick back and watch the fireworks. The reason it is/was so successful was because of the response it got from AACS-LA, they issued hundreds or thousands of DMCA take-down notices. If it looked like they did not give a crap then odds are high that nothing would have happened.
This is 100% the result of a big bad corporation deciding to try and stomp on the rights of the consumers and citizens and in this case instead of laying down and taking their beating like a good citizen is supposed to they stood up and gave AACS-LA a kick in the balls. Trying to censor something is the quickest way to make sure everyone knows about it.
Plus sometimes it takes a childish tantrum to get people to take a look at a real problem (DMCA)
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
The AACS is not a 'copy prevention' or 'copyright protection' code. It has always been possible to copy a DVD and it still is. The AACS is an 'anti fair use' code. As such, it has *nothing* to do with the DMCA.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
It's clear what the people want. So why does the law dictate the opposite?
Everyone's so busy looking at copyright and missing the bigger picture! Our 'democracy' doesn't work.
This "we're going to go down fighting" was obviously some nonsense invented by Digg's public relations team.
Digg is venture capital funded, its management would be replaced by the end of the day if they seriously intended to risk any amount of equity in the company over some symbolic statement like that.
They'll obviously now just wait for the DMCA notices to take the offending material down, at which point we might expect more grandeur from their PR department if anyone notices.
Will you have me believe that the explosion of p2p mp3 sharing had nothing to do with a) the proliferation of broadband, and b) free music? That if the RIAA hadn't gone on a massive lawsuit campaign, no one would want free music?
Well, I think that you are full of it.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
It couldn't have been a DMCA "we own the copyright, now take it down" takedown notice, because those only apply to copyrightable works.
What probably happened was Digg got a letter saying, "You have posted a DRM circumvention tool. If you don't remove it, we will sue your testicles into the stratosphere."
It's different from a takedown notice, but it had the same effect.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
...that trying to issue a thousands of DMCA take down notices is the fastest way to proliferate somethingIt also has the added side benefit (for the lawyers) of racking up thousands of billable hours in record time...
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Check out this quote:
> Some people believe that such systems unfairly limit their freedom to listen to music and watch movies on whatever devices they choose.
What the is that? Could they maybe cite one of many sources who will freely give that opinion? Fox pioneered this terrible technique of interjecting their own opinion via the construct "Some say...", and it's terrible journalism. I imagine this article was written off the cuff, but just give the EFF or anyone else a buzz for a quick quote.
If someone drops a fort on Will, he makes a reflex save.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
The more they push, the harder we push back.
That summarizes it pretty well too.
They pushed very hard with the thousands of DCMA take downs and we pushed back, taking out a popular site in the process.
Threatening to file a lawsuit sometimes works, and even if it doesn't there's no law that says you have to file that suit you threatened someone with.
It only works when you are sending one or two notices to people who are doing things that are *clearly* going to get them in trouble. In these kinds of cases, you would have a very hard time pinning anything on the original posters, and they know it, so they continue posting anywhere and everywhere just to spite the company using the heavy handed tactics. The balance of power is shifting back into the hands of the masses, and the masses know it.
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Please tell me you don't actually entrust others with the responsibility of telling you what's funny and what isn't!
>Suppose, for example, that someone's Valuable Intellectual Property were, through pure coincidence, protected by the key
>"sony.com", by the contents of http://www.riaa.com/ or by the image of Mickey Mouse?
I think the only successful attack against the **AA will come from within. One of its own members will see the light, recognize the organization as competition, and destroy it.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Um, in what way is AACS maintaining private information? AACS is a flawed encryption scheme applied to information sold to the public. It's only real-world purpose is to remove rights that traditional copyright law wouldn't touch. Without AACS, I'd be able to watch movies in my choice of player, make backups before my kids scratch the disk, or upload them to my private LAN for easier management of my collection. I would argue that it also prevents the material from entering the public domain. However, considering nothing recorded using a vinyl, magnetic, or laser disc medium has ever entered the public domain, current copyright law also prevents that.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
Not entirely true.... The revolt started after they proactivly removed posts that /talked/ about the takedown notice, or talked about AACS in any way. they BANNED the accounts of users posting stories such as "where did that other story go?" and the revolt started from there. from how i understand it
it sure would be nice if it was some sort of modern form of protest, but its digg for cripes sake. its just 15 year olds pulling the same shit they pull on every other forum. no free speech issue. no copyright issue. just your standard overzealous admin meets overzealous user scenario.
It's a classic case of inmates running the asylum.
All I see is lawyers generating more work for lawyers. They are not stupid - of course they know that there is no way anyone can keep the lid on this, which suits them perfectly.
My other SIG is a Sauer.
We're not talking about code (eg. DeCSS) which actually does something, this is just a string of numbers.
Code also is just a string of numbers. Music, movies, and electronic books are strings of numbers as well. An interesting thing about strings of numbers is that when combined they become one number. You often hear people say that a number can not be copyrighted but obviously that is not the case because every thing digital can be represented by one single number.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Yes, a computer program is just a series of 1's and 0's in the end; but his point is that the AACS key is a number that doesn't do anything on its own.
I'm really not arguing against you or the OP and clearly understand his point. My point is that since everything digital can be boiled down to a single number those who wish copyright to survive are going to have to accept restrictions on the use of numbers.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Are those lawyers still working? It won't last too long.
The reason this is not an issue of free expression is that the number, in itself, is meaningless. It has not intellectual or expressive content. It is merely a secret, and nothing more. Most people advocating the spreading of this number acknowledge the right of private parties to have secrets. They are mortified when sloppy IT practices expose social security numbers.
Does it make a difference why we say the takedown efforts are bad? I think it does. Framing the issue this way claims too much and too little. It claims a right to publish secrets that come into our hands, an idea most of us don't endorse. It claims too little, because the it obscures what is at stake: preventing private industry from taking control of cultural and political discourse using laws designed to encourage expression.
In other words, we must not allow the consortium to confuse the means and ends here. The average person will see clearly enough that the number is merely a secret, and secrets are legally protected as part of our right of privacy. It is the use to which the secret is put that is pernicious to individual freedom. The industry cannot assert it has suffered a loss of privacy with "clean hands". The takedowns are not censorship, they are protecting the means of censorship. The publications are not free expression, they are protecting the means of free expression.
Publishing the number is an act of civil disobedience. Again Thoreau has something important to say here:
This is marvelously apt to the issue of copy protection. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. The injury that AACS does to individual freedom comes from the power of the state. Furthermore, it prevents the public from experiencing and therefore understanding their rights of free use. Ultimately, it may cripple free political discourse itself, as the machinery of control becomes ubiquitous, and the means for evading control remain illegal.
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