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."

Comments

AACS-LA should learn...

[Tuoqui]

...that trying to issue a thousands of DMCA take down notices is the fastest way to proliferate something :)

Oh yeah and the fact that DMCA take down notices only apply to servers in the US.

No Duh it's censorship

[Sloppy]

This isn't just a matter of one party making a civil threat against another; the government is neck-deep in their involvement. By passing a law as bizarre as DMCA, which the people didn't even ask for, they've outlawed certain types of speech. Argue the merit of censorship, but don't say it's not.

BTW, the NY Times writer is an MPAA-apologist:

..publish and widely distribute a secret code used by the technology and movie industries to prevent piracy of high-definition movies.

(And he makes at least two other references to the crypto being an "anti-piracy" measure.) Anti-piracy is very likely a large part of the motivation for the creation of this system, but as it clearly serves the much more general function of "limiting access." To let things like

1. Preventing many Fair Uses
2. Preventing access to the work even after it has entered Public Domain in the future
3. Controlling the player market(!)

all fall under the umbrella of "preventing piracy" is a pretty distorted way to report the news. If NYT wants to take sides and promote a certain agenda, that's their right, but they should get called on it.

Re:Lawyers do what they are paid to do.

[geoskd]

Although I hate them as much as the next guy, they did not cause this mess. This mess is caused by out-dated business models, corrupt legislation, impunity and progress, amongst other factors that have historically caused civil disobedience. To blame the lawyers is not only a cliché, it is confusing the issue. Lawyer language can be aggressive, but when you bring in lawyers it means you have already tried nicely.
The porblem isn't that the lawyers didn't do what they were told, nor even that they did do what they were told. Lawyers have a responsibility to their clients not only to take legal action when required, but also to advise their clients on the likely outcomes of their actions, as well as the likelihood of success. Any halfway honest lawyer should have told their client "You will pay us thousands of hours, You will not acheive your goal, and this will backfire causing yet another in a bad series of negative press about your company". The implication here is that the lawyers did not do this. Given the above statement, I find it hard to beleive that an executive at XYZ company would pursue this approach when a legal professional told them to call it a day and move on.
The lawyers should have known this would happen. Posting a song for others to download requires speical software (e.g. napster, kazaa, bittorrent, etc...), and people still manage to do it on a *massive* scale. Posting a 32 digit number is so easy, any 12 year old kid can post it in thousands of places in the space of a day or so. The lawyers all have plenty of precedent to say that takedown notices are more likely to backfire than to succeed, ergo it is their responsibility to advise their clients against this kind of behavior.

-=Geoskd

Re:Digg is the most childish site ever..

[init100]

Trying to censor something is the quickest way to make sure everyone knows about it.

Exactly. Big corporations that want to censor some piece of information should really read up on the Streisand Effect.