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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."
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.
...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.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
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.
Dvorak is making sense.
Well, they aren't blaming ALL lawyers, obviously.
Maybe a better thing to blame is "lawyer-like approaches" to this sort of problem.
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
My understanding is that they were. The issue is that a takedown notice applies only to the posting(s) mentioned and new postings should require additional takedown notices. Digg was proactively removing postings before receieving additional takedown notices which users took to be them "caving" and which resulted in the revolt. At least that's how I understand it.
you digg your own grave rather than rob anothers.
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
Makes a damn good keyboard layout though
Wait a minute - Dvorak says to blame the lawyers??
Oh my... I am so conflicted..... who do I complain about?
Oh, right - Microsoft!
Three Squirrels
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:
(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- Preventing many Fair Uses
- Preventing access to the work even after it has entered Public Domain in the future
- 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.As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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.
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
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.
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
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
09 F9 11 02 9D
74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5
63 56 88 C0 rain
They received a legally-unenforceable cease and desist letter, but never a DCMA takedown notice. This is key: they were under no legal obligation to do anything at any time. They received a threatening letter and over-reacted. They pulled any stories remotely related to the AACS key, including several that did not mention the number, but only commented on Digg's censorship of it. They also banned the people who submitted those stories -- something that has never been a requirement of the DCMA.
That's what I was protesting. I never expected Digg to do anything illegal or take the issue to court.
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.
>That includes being able to yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theater. If you're not allowed to do that, then you do not truly have
>freedom of speech.
If the theatre happens to be on fire, then you will probably have the gratitude of the people within.
If the theatre happens to NOT be on fire, you may face consequences at the hands of those same people.
In no case was "yelling fire" illegal. However, intentionally causing a panic and creating a public nuisance, *is* illegal.
On the other hand, the allusion to yelling fire was meant to illustrate the basis for a doctrine that a compelling state interest existed that could justify the suppression of certain activities that would otherwise be protected by the First Amendment. In particular, "yelling fire" was an example used in a case that ruled it illegal to distribute flyers opposing the military draft during WWI. I think it is also important to understand that this ruling was overturned, which probably means it *is* legal to protest against a draft during wartime.
If you experiment with "yelling fire", you will probably find that no law actively suppresses your right to do it, and you will also almost certainly find that no law protects you from the ass kicking you receive as a result -- or from the harsh manner in which you are removed from the theatre by its proprietor or the police.
Oliver Wendell Holmes was helping to establish what rights were, and to what extent the expression of one's rights were allowed to abridge the rights of others.
Today, the test for whether first amendment protections my be abridged on any activity, is if the state can argue that it is intended to, and will likely incite "imminent lawless action", a stricter standard than the "clear and present danger" which had existed before 1969. Essentially the government may "place time, place and manner" restrictions on First Amendment activities, if it can argue that the activities are likely to cause a riot.
For what it's worth, I do believe the Federal Government has clearly failed to adhere to this standard on numerous occasions.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I did read the article and I do concede that in the takedown letters they state "Refrain from posting or causing to be provided any AACS circumvention offering or from assisting others in doing so, including by direct links thereto, on any website now or at any time in the future." However, I question how reasonable this is. First, there is the untested (AFAIK) issue if such a short string of numbers is really a circumvention device. We're not talking about code (eg. DeCSS) which actually does something, this is just a string of numbers. If this is ruled to be part of a circumvention device we're in trouble because by that logic the first part of the string '09' would be a part of a circumvention device and prohibiting people from distributing the number 9 would be rather unfortunate. Secondly, I don't think other recipients of takedown notices (eg. Blogspot/Google) are proactively preventing "...any AACS circumvention offering..." from being posted so my assumption would be that they are only acting on sites specifically mentioned in takedown notices and I wonder why Digg should be different. In any event, I was only stating what the reasons for the Digg revolt were; right, wrong or otherwise.
There's nothing hypocritical about this.
This is about a secret number. This number is, well, a number. You can't own a number. No number is a secret unto itself. That they use it as the key for their cryptography, that's the secret they want to keep private. Unfortunately for them, the number was available to anyone with a disk, a drive, and the right software. Someone was bound to tell. They tried to un-share the secret by squelching the mention of the number, not the association with their cryptography. That's censorship.
It's a popular topic here for a number of reasons, including:
There's a bunch more reasons, but you get the idea.
Frankly I think this whole protect-the-media-empire-profits mode the government has gotten into lately is treason against the people and the Republic. It's an example of legislation for hire. It's an erosion of civil rights to protect the unearned profits on Steamboat Willie. It is vile. But that's just my opinion.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Actually, although lawyers may not want you to know this, the safe harbor clause in the DMCA is somewhat redundant - almost as though they thought that by spelling out a particular case would make people think that other cases of the host not being liable do not exist. (Note: some of the framers of the US Bill of Rights were wary of spelling out certain rights because some idiot might decide that doing so excluded other rights.) Rather effective, it seems to me.
The "safe harbor" that would be relevant in digg's case is not part of the DMCA at all - it's Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (one of the few parts that has not been struck down as unconstitutional). It states that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." Whether or not it applies here is somewhat debatable, but I can assure you that this is how craigslist survives, how blogs and slashdot can have comments, and so forth. Additionally, this is how many websites that allow anonymous posting protect themselves when illegal content is posted.
So let's stop talking about the DMCA safe harbor, which we've long ago established is irrelevant here - that clause is a load of political bullshit if I ever saw one. Just giving my two cents.
There's an old saying that says pretty much whatever you want it to.
Ah, yes, "The music industry is decimated". LOL.
Now I know that it meant something different back in the Roman times, from which we inherited the word, but nowadays "decimated" means something a lot more drastic. You know, massive destruction. As in, "the population of Europe was decimated by the plague in the late middle ages." (When some documented outbreaks wiped out as much as 80% of a city's population, and, as statistics flukes often work, some smaller villages saw 100% deaths and became ghost villages.)
Did the music industry suffer anything even remotely callable "decimation". On what data do you or Dvorak base such statements? All the sales data I've seen indicated a steady, but relatively unspectacular decline in number of CDs sold, not some devastating dive at the end of Napster. And it becomes even less so when you consider how many people bought at least one track from an album on, say, iTunes, as basically the equivalent of one CD sale lost. Those people poached the one track that interested them, and are not gonna buy the whole CD now.
And let's be serious for a minute. If you think teenagers will start protesting DMCA en masse instead of trying to be fashionable among their peers, I have a nice waterfront property in Sahara to sell. Are you interested? I mean, heh, seriously, 90% of the high school population lives, dresses, eats and buys music based 100% on peer tastes. Even if they go for the rebellious independent teenager image, it's the exact image that their peers want to see. If among their peers it's fashionable to be a Britney Spears fan and have all her albums, that's what they'll do.
"There is no data that says otherwise"... actually, there is plenty.
1. Even if Napster went down, other P2P networks exist and existed. And by all estimates I've seen, the usage is rising steadily. Plus both pre- and post-napster there were pirate websites, ftp sites, binaries newsgroups, etc. What was so special about Napster among them? Why would piracy on Napster improve sales, but piracy on other networks cause sales to drop? Because that's what you're asking me to believe there, if Napster's death was single-handedly responsible for decimating the music business.
2. Last I've heard, most of the decline pre- or post-Napster also suspiciously correlated for a long while with a decline in the number of albums published. You don't need a conspiracy to start wondering about cause and effect there. Let's say Moraelin Music Inc publishes 20 albums in one year, and rakes 20 million dollars in sales. Then next year it publishes 19 albums and the sales dip to 19 million dollars. Hmm... Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky?
3. How about the correlation with iTunes and the other online music shops that I've mentioned earlier? Unlike pirating a song, which makes most people feel slightly guilty, this time it's an officially bought song. No reason to go buy the CD too. And it went a long way towards killing the album. While previously the music companies would sell you a whole CD, now you can poach individual tracks, for a tenth of the cost. Do you see how that would cause a loss of $$ in sales? And then there were sites like Allofmp3, which didn't even pay the music companies a cent, but allowed some people to put a "well, then copyright is their problem, not mine, I bought the song" blanket over their conscience anyway.
Or in other words, Dvorak is, as usual, talking out the ass. His job as a tech pundit is to sound all smart, and tell the readers what they want to hear. Or at least some outlandish prediction. It's a short-story writer job, not some real all-knowing oracle. And if you've read some of his other pieces (e.g., the now infamous whine about how the Windows idle process is eating up 99% of his CPU power), he's... a helluval less than all-knowing. In fact, he's an outright idiot.
So be a smart guy and don't base your understanding of the world on his clueless rants. I'm sure you can find better sources of information.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Are those lawyers still working? It won't last too long.
Exactly. Big corporations that want to censor some piece of information should really read up on the Streisand Effect.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Maybe h*s keyboard *s broke.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.