Another good thing about Pittsburgh is that it's easy to reach the New York or Washington metro areas when you want to enjoy some "big city" amenities like a Broadway show or a visit to the Smithsonian, but far enough away that the cost of living is ridiculously cheap. Grad students buy houses here. And Pittsburgh has had a TechShop for years. Also, the local government is actually supportive of Uber, which might explain why Uber built their Advanced Technology Center here for self-driving car research.
Boycott ResearchGate: they're spammers. If you enter your papers into ResearchGate they will spam all your co-authors and FORGE YOUR NAME as the sender of the spam. Every time I've informed a colleague that "they" have spammed me, they've been horrified and unsubscribed from ResearchGate. It's no surprise that such an unethical company brags about Bill Gates being one of their investors.
I teach a graduate course in computational neuroscience at CMU. My lecture notes, exercises, and Matlab software are all available online via my home page, at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst
I disagree with the notion that only professionals should speak publicly about their scientific work. Amateurs should be welcome in any branch of science. Who knows where the next contribution will come from? And there is plenty of disappointing work from tenured professionals. So read the journals, but be prepared to wade through a lot of straw to find the gold. One of the advantages of graduate school is that there are experts who can help you with this.
A lot of publications have picked up this IBM press release, resulting in what must be some of the worst science reporting of the year. Modha and his colleagues at IBM have not simulated a mouse or rat brain. No one can do that at present; the wiring diagram isn't known at that level of detail.
What they did was simulate a huge, randomly-wired network of grossly simplified "neurons" on a supercomputer. The number of units was roughly comparable to the number of neurons in rat cortex, and the statistics of short vs. long-range connections (intra vs. inter-cluster connections) was vaguely suggestive of the organization of cortex, But they used single-compartment, integrate-and-fire neurons that are vastly simpler than real neurons, which do lots of nonlinear processing in their complex dendritic trees. So their network didn't actually compute anything at all. What it did, basically, was oscillate.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1362627
Calling this a simulation of a severely brain-damaged baby rat being run through a blender while having an epileptic seizure would still imply far too much realism to this cartoon.
The Modha group's work is a useful step toward the long-term goal of eventually building large-scale simulations of cortical circuitry on a supercomputer. But to report that they've presently produced a simulation of "a mouse brain", as some of the news articles are saying, is ludicrous.
The amount of neuroscience that needs to be done, the number of people required, and the time and costs it will take to produce an accurate simulation of even a mouse brain are orders of magnitude larger than this modest $4.9 million research contract. I'm amazed that technology reporters can be so gullible.
For listings that have been removed at the request of the rights owner for copyright infringement, you may have the option of filing a Counter Notice with eBay... A Counter Notice is a form provided by eBay in compliance with the requirements of the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
What part of "for copyright infringement" did you not understand? Also, if you have read the DMCA, you would know that it applies only to copyright issues, and cannot be used to gain safe harbor in trademark, trade secret, or patent cases.
Another problem with counternotification is that it requires the person to disclose their true identity, including an address where they can be served with legal papers, and it requires them to agree to be subject to the jurisdiction of US federal courts. That is one reason why Andreas Heldal-Lund, the owner of Operation Clambake and a citizen of Norway, does not use counternotification.
eBay's counternotification policy for VeRO takedowns applies only to claims of copyright infringement. (Read the page you linked to.) Scientology is using bogus trademark infringement claims to take down E-meter listings. Therefore, counternotification is not available.
While I can completely understand that you would be very unlikely to have evidence showing CAGW took money from the COS, what information do you have that suggests that CAGW basically ran with an article / story of the COS? Did they parrot a criticism weighed against you by the COS elsewhere, for example?
Yes, the articles's main themes come directly from the material the Scientologists were circulating: (1) that CMU's
cybersecurity initiative was somehow incompatible with my free speech work -- a nonsensical attack they also successfully shopped to WPXI-TV, and (2) that CMU President Jared Cohon's service on the Homeland Security Advisory Council was also incompatible with my free speech work. This latter point had been made previously by the Scientologists and no one else.
I also noticed that your site, scientologywatch.org, isn't up anymore. Is that a result of the COS attempt to take your domain name down for infringing on their trademark, or is there some other problem?
I still own that domain, but it apparently is no longer functional after my colleagues and I moved a bunch of sites to a new hosting company. We didn't have time to keep it updated, so it's not a big loss. My main anti-Scientology web site is here. And yes, I did receive trademark infringement threats from Scientology over the ScientologyWatch.org domain; I simply told them to get stuffed.
The cagw.org article you linked to, nowhere mentions Scientology.
Of course not. These people aren't stupid. But at the time the article came out, Scientology was conducting a defamation campaign against me that included, among other things, anonymous faxes to various media outlets, most of whom were too smart to take the bait. But CAGW was eager to cooperate -- and very sloppy in their "reporting". Failing to contact me or the university for a response is simply inexcusable, but it's what one would expect with a deliberate hit-piece.
Citizens Against Government Waste once ran a hit piece on me, prompted by the Church of Scientology. (What I don't know is whether the Scientologists actually paid them cash to do it, or merely supplied the material.) They ran this piece without ever attempting to contact me or Carnegie Mellon University to verify their facts, or ask for a comment. They also didn't have the guts to post the URL for the web site they were complaining about, which concerned the Sherman Austin free speech case. As far as I can tell,they're just a bunch of clowns pretending to guard the people's interests while cynically pursuing their own -- much like the rest of Washington.
Last week I published a confidential Scientology document showing that the cult expects to kill other members the same way they killed Lisa McPherson. The document is a release form saying that Scientology cannot be held liable if they seize a mentally ill member, hold them in isolation against their will, and subject them to Scientology processing in lieu of emergency psychiatric care. Even if the member is injured or dies, Scientology cannot be sued. (These terms are probably unenforceable.)
Both scanned and HTMLed versions of the document are available on my web site at Carnegie Mellon.
For News picked up the story, as did the New York Post. But the local papers in Tampa and Clearwater, Florida (where a major Scientology bas is located) have not covered the story. I think they're afraid to touch it, even though their own readers' lives are at risk. Maybe someone should ask the Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times why they've lost their nerve.
The ultimate expose of Scientology's Narconon scam was done by Chris Owen, and is available at Narconon-Exposed.org, hosted at Carnegie Mellon. Scientology hasn't gotten around to complaining about this web site yet, but they surely will.
As previously reported on Slashdot, Sony has opened up the API for the AIBO, and it can be programmed in C++. My lab has created an application development framework for the AIBO called Tekkotsu that we think people will find helpful. The code is open source and GPLed. Visit Tekkotsu.org for an overview, downloads, demos, and documentation.
ARCHIVE.ORG has blocked my entire web site: all of www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst. My home page. My list of professional publications. My research project web pages. The Gallery of CSS Descramblers. Tutorial pages, Lisp book, everything I've written.
I don't exist. I've never existed. I've been erased from Internet history.
All because I dared to have some Scientology material on my web site.
ARCHIVE.ORG boasts a relationship with the Lbrary of Congress and with the National Science Foundation. I wonder if they are receiving any government funding. Surely it is impermissible to do the bidding of an abusive cult, at the expense of honest citizens, while taking government money?
As the owners of SlatkinFraud.com, one of the websites that has been
blocked completely from the Internet Archive, we were left puzzled and
disturbed by the recent explanation provided by archive.org for our site's
omission.
While we understand that the organization behind the Wayback Machine does
not want to unwittingly contribute to copyright infringement, we are
distressed by the way in which the removal of our site was conducted, and
the lack of feedback that we received from archive.org when we questioned
this decision earlier this year.
When a Wayback Machine user attempts to access the archived
version of SlatkinFraud.com, they are instead provided with a misleading
message claiming that the 'site owners' requested that it not be included
in the archive. This is wholly untrue, and entirely in contradiction to the
actual views of the website owners in question, who would very much like to
see our site become part of the Internet Archive.
The material contained within SlatkinFraud.com is wholly owned and maintained by its site owners.
Unfortunately, as has become clear in recent days, SlatkinFraud.com is not
the only site that has been summarily removed from the Archive based on
complaints from the Church of Scientology. In the explanation recently
provided by archive.org, the writer notes that the Church "asserted
ownership" of an unknown quantity of material that was, at the time,
available through the Wayback Machine archives. The maintainers of
archive.org, however, have apparently made no effort whatsoever to inform
site owners of these complaints lodged against their material, and in
fact, until now, had not even replied to direct questions regarding the
removal of certain sites when asked by the site owners in question.
This is clearly not an acceptable system for determining what sites or
material should be archived by the Wayback Machine, since it does not
adhere to one of the main provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act: the counter-notification process.
Under the DMCA, the owner of a site that has been alleged to contain
infringing material has the right to challenge that claim via a
counternotification letter to the hosting ISP if he or she believes that
the material in question does not infringe on the copyright in question.
After receiving this counter-notification from the user, the ISP is
obliged to replace any files that were temporarily removed pending the
complaint, at which point the original complainant must either initiate
formal legal action against the owner of the site, or drop the matter
entirely.
This system provides an important check to the sometimes perilous balance
between the rights of copyright owners, and those of users. By formalizing
the process, and allowing a response from the individual responsible for
the alleged infringement, it frees the hosting company from the annoyance
of dealing with frivolous claims.
A similar situation that arose resulted from similar complaints made by
Church of Scientology lawyers about certain listings on the popular search
engine Google. These complaints initially resulted in the wholesale removal
of several Scientology-related sites from the Google database. Once this
omission was discovered, the decision taken by Google to remove the sites
without notice led to an outcry from its users. In fact, on closer
examination of the complaints from Scientology, it became immediately
obvious that the Church's lawyers were acting in bad faith by deliberately
mixing trademark and copyright complaints, even though trademark complaints
are not covered under the DMCA at all.
The ensuing barrage of criticism and media coverage both national and
international forced Google to reconsider its decision. After several days,
the company replaced the links in question, and agreed to make public any
further DMCA complaints in cooperation with Chilling Effects, a non-profit
website dedicated to preventing abuse of existing copyright law. This
solution was welcomed by Google users, who had felt betrayed not only by
the removal itself, but by the lack of disclosure on the part of Google
regarding the initial complaints.
The explanation offered by the Internet Archive does not mention whether
the original complaints received from the Church of Scientology were made
under the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Such
information would be helpful to site owners such as ourselves, as it would
assist us in determining whether a complaint is justified, and remove any
infringing material on our own volition.
Assuming that it was, in fact, a DMCA request, it would serve archive.org
well to follow the same procedure as that eventually and successfully - -
adopted by Google, and make every effort to inform site owners of such
complaints in a timely manner. This could be done through a simple email
alert system that would inform the site owner that a complaint had been
made, or through a similar policy to that of Google, and publicizing the
letters, either on the archive.org website itself or through an interested
third party such as Chilling Effects.
This would allow the site owners to decide whether or not to issue a
counter-notification, and relieve the Internet Archive of any concerns over
contributory liability that may have played a role in its decision to
remove the material without warning. It would also discourage copyright
owners from making frivolous complaints about material that is obviously
protected by fair use, since the process requires that formal legal action
be taken within thirty days of receiving the counter notification letter.
Should archive.org decide not to re-list a site within the Wayback Machine
at this point, which is, of course, its right, it should also refrain from
suggesting that this was at the request of the site owner, and instead,
explain its own concerns over potential infringement.
Finally, given the enormity of the Internet Archive project, and the
benefits that it has provided, and, we hope, will continue to provide to
the online community, it is essential for the Library maintainers to be
open and transparent about the methodology used in selecting sites to be
archived. Removing sites from the archive in a clandestine fashion, as
dictated by the current policy, will only lead to increased concern that
the Archive itself is rewriting the Internet history that it seeks to
chronicle.
The Internet Archive's stated commitment is to provide a useful,
wide-ranging resource for researchers, historians and scholars. It is
surely in part due to such an admirable mandate that the Internet Archive
has benefited from contributions from sponsors such as Alexa Internet,
AT&T, Compaq and Xerox PARC, not to mention many individual supporters who
believe in the idea of an Internet history that is freely accessible to
all. It is doubtful that these supporters would want to see this
ambitious initiative tainted by the suggestion that the integrity of the
archive itself has been corrupted by those who would misuse copyright and
trademark laws to censor views with which they disagree. The risk of such
silent, selective discrimination against protected speech is great; the
power to prevent such abuses by making all information related to such
attempts to discriminate will always be greater.
Clearly, the best course of action is for the Internet Archive to adopt
policy that is not only transparent, but dedicated to protecting not only
its own interests, but those of copyright owners, site creators and, of
course, the thousands of individuals who use the Wayback Machine and other
Internet Archive services on a daily basis. On balance, the approach taken
by Google, modified appropriately for the particular situation faced by the
Internet Archive, would seem to be an excellent roadmap for the Internet
Archive to follow.
I'm amazed at how many ways the lawyers and big corporations have found to abuse the DMCA. The list seems to grow on a weekly basis. You can read more about this at the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse.
One of the FBI's reported reasons for the raid was that RaisetheFist.com was publishing bomb-making information in the form of something called the "Reclaim Guide". You will not find this part of the web site at ARCHIVE.ORG. However, I have reconstructed it from the Google cache.
It's a pretty lame document; much better information can be had from other sources. But the FBI's citing this Reclaim Guide as a violation of the USA PATRIOT Act raises serious questions about what the feds think they're doing. If they want to nail the kid for defacing web sites, fine. Why make this claim about disseminating bomb-making information being illegal?
I've mirrored the documents in question, and publicly announced the mirror to Politechbot and Cryptome, and now Slashdot. This will be an interesting experiment.
ISPs frequently use the DMCA as an excuse for boneheaded behavior on their part. The notion that the DMCA requires an ISP to shut down an account because of a mere accusation of copyright violation is just bullshit. The DMCA says no such thing.
The DMCA does not require an ISP to do anything about mere allegations of copyright vioation. However, the DMCA says that if an ISP receives proper notification of a claim of infringement, and it takes down the allegedly infringing material and notifies the user of the details of the situation and gives the user the proper opportunity to respond, then the ISP cannot be sued by either the accuser (for contributing to copyright infringement) or the user (for breach of contract.) This is spelled out in 17 USC 512, and you can read about how to respond to an accusation of copyright violation here. If you follow this form of reply, your ISP has to put your files back.
Warner Cable's actions were not justified under the DMCA. Since the infringing files were posted to Usenet, there's nothing the DMCA requires Warner Cable to do except delete the posts from their own news servers. But as they're a division of Time-Warner we shouldn't expect any kind of reasonable or moral behavior from these clowns. At least not this early in the game. They are still many clue sticks away from enlightenment.
As for Hemanshu Nigam, I've had
dealings with him as well. He seems to be the perfect straight man for those who want to point out the idiocy of the MPAA.
While I've long been an admirer of Richard Stallman's work and a supporter of the idea of Free Software, I was not at NYU yesterday and I did not introduce Stallman's talk. I have no idea why the originator of this thread (timothy) thinks I was there.
Remember, people, if you're too stoned to operate heavy machinery, you shouldn't be posting on Slashdot either.
I've picketed with Keith Henson in Clearwater, FL.
He is totally nonviolent. I watched OSA (Scientology's dirty tricks squad) try to bait him and fail miserably. Keith just loved talking to them, no matter what they said to him. The guy is unflappable; he's having WAY too much fun. It's maddening. Enough to drive a cultist right up the wall. (And Scientology operatives HAVE assaulted Keith in the past.)
I'd also like to point out the correct
citation for Henson's "destroy them utterly" quote. It comes from L. Ron Hubbard's 1955 article "The
Scientologist, A Manual on the Dissemination of Material".
Hubbard wrote: The law can be used very
easily to harass, and enough
harassment on somebody who is
simply on the thin edge
anyway, well knowing that he
is not authorized, will
generally be sufficient to
cause his professional
decease. If possible, of
course, ruin him utterly.
This is one of the most famous of all Hubbard quotes, having been cited in dozens of legal cases against the Scientology cult. It is a reflection of Scientology's "fair game" policy, which is still in full effect today. Keith Henson is just the latest in a long string of victims. But he may yet have the last laugh.
Omri Schwartz has written some Perl scripts that automatically translate C code to English, and the English back to C. This is similar to the c2txt2c program that was used to encode blowfish, but Omri's code is a more general and robust solution that has successfully encoded css-auth.
Omri's code and the output it produces for css-auth can be found in the Gallery of CSS Descramblers.
The URL for the Gallery is cited in the amicus brief. I'm proud to point out that among the co-sponsors of this brief there are four Carnegie Mellon faculty, including the dean of the School of Computer Science. MPAA has been keeping a hands-off attitude toward the Gallery, perhaps because they realize how bad it would look if they tried to censor an academic work.
Back in 1995 when Arnie Lerma posted a court document containing secret Scientology scripture, and I turned it into a web page, the Scientologists went nuts. Not only did they sue Arnie and threaten me, they sent threats to every single Usenet poster who dared to quote from the scripture. A little four-line quote (in which L. Ron Hubbard instructs his followers to use their telepathic powers to communicate with plants and animals) was enough to generate a legal threat from the now-notorious Helena K. Kobrin.
The motion picture industry is now following Scientology's example, suing a t-shirt vendor for disclosing their trade secrets, all the while knowing that this makes them look like total loons.
Here's a clue, Mr. Valenti: IT'S NOT A SECRET ANYMORE. Scientology had to learn that lesson the hard way. It's a pity the motion picture companies, who are just down the street from the Scientology "pod palace", couldn't have learned from that example.
Slashdot Mirror
Another good thing about Pittsburgh is that it's easy to reach the New York or Washington metro areas when you want to enjoy some "big city" amenities like a Broadway show or a visit to the Smithsonian, but far enough away that the cost of living is ridiculously cheap. Grad students buy houses here. And Pittsburgh has had a TechShop for years. Also, the local government is actually supportive of Uber, which might explain why Uber built their Advanced Technology Center here for self-driving car research.
Boycott ResearchGate: they're spammers. If you enter your papers into ResearchGate they will spam all your co-authors and FORGE YOUR NAME as the sender of the spam. Every time I've informed a colleague that "they" have spammed me, they've been horrified and unsubscribed from ResearchGate. It's no surprise that such an unethical company brags about Bill Gates being one of their investors.
I teach a graduate course in computational neuroscience at CMU. My lecture notes, exercises, and Matlab software are all available online via my home page, at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst
I disagree with the notion that only professionals should speak publicly about their scientific work. Amateurs should be welcome in any branch of science. Who knows where the next contribution will come from? And there is plenty of disappointing work from tenured professionals. So read the journals, but be prepared to wade through a lot of straw to find the gold. One of the advantages of graduate school is that there are experts who can help you with this.
A lot of publications have picked up this IBM press release, resulting in what must be some of the worst science reporting of the year. Modha and his colleagues at IBM have not simulated a mouse or rat brain. No one can do that at present; the wiring diagram isn't known at that level of detail.
What they did was simulate a huge, randomly-wired network of grossly simplified "neurons" on a supercomputer. The number of units was roughly comparable to the number of neurons in rat cortex, and the statistics of short vs. long-range connections (intra vs. inter-cluster connections) was vaguely suggestive of the organization of cortex, But they used single-compartment, integrate-and-fire neurons that are vastly simpler than real neurons, which do lots of nonlinear processing in their complex dendritic trees. So their network didn't actually compute anything at all. What it did, basically, was oscillate.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1362627
Calling this a simulation of a severely brain-damaged baby rat being run through a blender while having an epileptic seizure would still imply far too much realism to this cartoon.
The Modha group's work is a useful step toward the long-term goal of eventually building large-scale simulations of cortical circuitry on a supercomputer. But to report that they've presently produced a simulation of "a mouse brain", as some of the news articles are saying, is ludicrous.
The amount of neuroscience that needs to be done, the number of people required, and the time and costs it will take to produce an accurate simulation of even a mouse brain are orders of magnitude larger than this modest $4.9 million research contract. I'm amazed that technology reporters can be so gullible.
What part of "for copyright infringement" did you not understand? Also, if you have read the DMCA, you would know that it applies only to copyright issues, and cannot be used to gain safe harbor in trademark, trade secret, or patent cases.
Another problem with counternotification is that it requires the person to disclose their true identity, including an address where they can be served with legal papers, and it requires them to agree to be subject to the jurisdiction of US federal courts. That is one reason why Andreas Heldal-Lund, the owner of Operation Clambake and a citizen of Norway, does not use counternotification.
eBay's counternotification policy for VeRO takedowns applies only to claims of copyright infringement. (Read the page you linked to.) Scientology is using bogus trademark infringement claims to take down E-meter listings. Therefore, counternotification is not available.
Q: What's the difference between Microsoft and the Church of Scientology?
A: One is a wealthy and powerful criminal enterprise bent on world domination, while the other, ah, ummm.... Microsoft has better health benefits.
Yes, the articles's main themes come directly from the material the Scientologists were circulating: (1) that CMU's cybersecurity initiative was somehow incompatible with my free speech work -- a nonsensical attack they also successfully shopped to WPXI-TV, and (2) that CMU President Jared Cohon's service on the Homeland Security Advisory Council was also incompatible with my free speech work. This latter point had been made previously by the Scientologists and no one else.
I still own that domain, but it apparently is no longer functional after my colleagues and I moved a bunch of sites to a new hosting company. We didn't have time to keep it updated, so it's not a big loss. My main anti-Scientology web site is here. And yes, I did receive trademark infringement threats from Scientology over the ScientologyWatch.org domain; I simply told them to get stuffed.
Of course not. These people aren't stupid. But at the time the article came out, Scientology was conducting a defamation campaign against me that included, among other things, anonymous faxes to various media outlets, most of whom were too smart to take the bait. But CAGW was eager to cooperate -- and very sloppy in their "reporting". Failing to contact me or the university for a response is simply inexcusable, but it's what one would expect with a deliberate hit-piece.
Citizens Against Government Waste once ran a hit piece on me, prompted by the Church of Scientology. (What I don't know is whether the Scientologists actually paid them cash to do it, or merely supplied the material.) They ran this piece without ever attempting to contact me or Carnegie Mellon University to verify their facts, or ask for a comment. They also didn't have the guts to post the URL for the web site they were complaining about, which concerned the Sherman Austin free speech case. As far as I can tell,they're just a bunch of clowns pretending to guard the people's interests while cynically pursuing their own -- much like the rest of Washington.
Both scanned and HTMLed versions of the document are available on my web site at Carnegie Mellon.
For News picked up the story, as did the New York Post. But the local papers in Tampa and Clearwater, Florida (where a major Scientology bas is located) have not covered the story. I think they're afraid to touch it, even though their own readers' lives are at risk. Maybe someone should ask the Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times why they've lost their nerve.
The ultimate expose of Scientology's Narconon scam was done by Chris Owen, and is available at
Narconon-Exposed.org, hosted at Carnegie Mellon. Scientology hasn't gotten around to complaining about this web site yet, but they surely will.
It will be interesting to see how long this case survives now that Mr. Max has legal representation.
As previously reported on Slashdot, Sony has opened up the API for the AIBO, and it can be programmed in C++. My lab has created an application development framework for the AIBO called Tekkotsu that we think people will find helpful. The code is open source and GPLed. Visit Tekkotsu.org for an overview, downloads, demos, and documentation.
ARCHIVE.ORG has blocked my entire web site: all of www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst. My home page. My list of professional publications. My research project web pages. The Gallery of CSS Descramblers. Tutorial pages, Lisp book, everything I've written.
I don't exist. I've never existed. I've been erased from Internet history.
All because I dared to have some Scientology material on my web site.
ARCHIVE.ORG boasts a relationship with the Lbrary of Congress and with the National Science Foundation. I wonder if they are receiving any government funding. Surely it is impermissible to do the bidding of an abusive cult, at the expense of honest citizens, while taking government money?
-- Dave Touretzky
While we understand that the organization behind the Wayback Machine does not want to unwittingly contribute to copyright infringement, we are distressed by the way in which the removal of our site was conducted, and the lack of feedback that we received from archive.org when we questioned this decision earlier this year.
When a Wayback Machine user attempts to access the archived version of SlatkinFraud.com, they are instead provided with a misleading message claiming that the 'site owners' requested that it not be included in the archive. This is wholly untrue, and entirely in contradiction to the actual views of the website owners in question, who would very much like to see our site become part of the Internet Archive. The material contained within SlatkinFraud.com is wholly owned and maintained by its site owners.
Unfortunately, as has become clear in recent days, SlatkinFraud.com is not the only site that has been summarily removed from the Archive based on complaints from the Church of Scientology. In the explanation recently provided by archive.org, the writer notes that the Church "asserted ownership" of an unknown quantity of material that was, at the time, available through the Wayback Machine archives. The maintainers of archive.org, however, have apparently made no effort whatsoever to inform site owners of these complaints lodged against their material, and in fact, until now, had not even replied to direct questions regarding the removal of certain sites when asked by the site owners in question.
This is clearly not an acceptable system for determining what sites or material should be archived by the Wayback Machine, since it does not adhere to one of the main provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act: the counter-notification process.
Under the DMCA, the owner of a site that has been alleged to contain infringing material has the right to challenge that claim via a counternotification letter to the hosting ISP if he or she believes that the material in question does not infringe on the copyright in question. After receiving this counter-notification from the user, the ISP is obliged to replace any files that were temporarily removed pending the complaint, at which point the original complainant must either initiate formal legal action against the owner of the site, or drop the matter entirely.
This system provides an important check to the sometimes perilous balance between the rights of copyright owners, and those of users. By formalizing the process, and allowing a response from the individual responsible for the alleged infringement, it frees the hosting company from the annoyance of dealing with frivolous claims.
A similar situation that arose resulted from similar complaints made by Church of Scientology lawyers about certain listings on the popular search engine Google. These complaints initially resulted in the wholesale removal of several Scientology-related sites from the Google database. Once this omission was discovered, the decision taken by Google to remove the sites without notice led to an outcry from its users. In fact, on closer examination of the complaints from Scientology, it became immediately obvious that the Church's lawyers were acting in bad faith by deliberately mixing trademark and copyright complaints, even though trademark complaints are not covered under the DMCA at all.
The ensuing barrage of criticism and media coverage both national and international forced Google to reconsider its decision. After several days, the company replaced the links in question, and agreed to make public any further DMCA complaints in cooperation with Chilling Effects, a non-profit website dedicated to preventing abuse of existing copyright law. This solution was welcomed by Google users, who had felt betrayed not only by the removal itself, but by the lack of disclosure on the part of Google regarding the initial complaints.
The explanation offered by the Internet Archive does not mention whether the original complaints received from the Church of Scientology were made under the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Such information would be helpful to site owners such as ourselves, as it would assist us in determining whether a complaint is justified, and remove any infringing material on our own volition.
Assuming that it was, in fact, a DMCA request, it would serve archive.org well to follow the same procedure as that eventually and successfully - - adopted by Google, and make every effort to inform site owners of such complaints in a timely manner. This could be done through a simple email alert system that would inform the site owner that a complaint had been made, or through a similar policy to that of Google, and publicizing the letters, either on the archive.org website itself or through an interested third party such as Chilling Effects.
This would allow the site owners to decide whether or not to issue a counter-notification, and relieve the Internet Archive of any concerns over contributory liability that may have played a role in its decision to remove the material without warning. It would also discourage copyright owners from making frivolous complaints about material that is obviously protected by fair use, since the process requires that formal legal action be taken within thirty days of receiving the counter notification letter.
Should archive.org decide not to re-list a site within the Wayback Machine at this point, which is, of course, its right, it should also refrain from suggesting that this was at the request of the site owner, and instead, explain its own concerns over potential infringement.
Finally, given the enormity of the Internet Archive project, and the benefits that it has provided, and, we hope, will continue to provide to the online community, it is essential for the Library maintainers to be open and transparent about the methodology used in selecting sites to be archived. Removing sites from the archive in a clandestine fashion, as dictated by the current policy, will only lead to increased concern that the Archive itself is rewriting the Internet history that it seeks to chronicle.
The Internet Archive's stated commitment is to provide a useful, wide-ranging resource for researchers, historians and scholars. It is surely in part due to such an admirable mandate that the Internet Archive has benefited from contributions from sponsors such as Alexa Internet, AT&T, Compaq and Xerox PARC, not to mention many individual supporters who believe in the idea of an Internet history that is freely accessible to all. It is doubtful that these supporters would want to see this ambitious initiative tainted by the suggestion that the integrity of the archive itself has been corrupted by those who would misuse copyright and trademark laws to censor views with which they disagree. The risk of such silent, selective discrimination against protected speech is great; the power to prevent such abuses by making all information related to such attempts to discriminate will always be greater.
Clearly, the best course of action is for the Internet Archive to adopt policy that is not only transparent, but dedicated to protecting not only its own interests, but those of copyright owners, site creators and, of course, the thousands of individuals who use the Wayback Machine and other Internet Archive services on a daily basis. On balance, the approach taken by Google, modified appropriately for the particular situation faced by the Internet Archive, would seem to be an excellent roadmap for the Internet Archive to follow.
Kady O'Malley, Dave Touretzky, and Scott Pilutik
Owners of Slatkinfraud.com
I'm amazed at how many ways the lawyers and big corporations have found to abuse the DMCA. The list seems to grow on a weekly basis. You can read more about this at the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse.
One of the FBI's reported reasons for the raid was that RaisetheFist.com was publishing bomb-making information in the form of something called the "Reclaim Guide". You will not find this part of the web site at ARCHIVE.ORG. However, I have reconstructed it from the Google cache.
For your reading pleasure: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/raisethefist
It's a pretty lame document; much better information can be had from other sources. But the FBI's citing this Reclaim Guide as a violation of the USA PATRIOT Act raises serious questions about what the feds think they're doing. If they want to nail the kid for defacing web sites, fine. Why make this claim about disseminating bomb-making information being illegal?
I've mirrored the documents in question, and publicly announced the mirror to Politechbot and Cryptome, and now Slashdot. This will be an interesting experiment.
The DMCA does not require an ISP to do anything about mere allegations of copyright vioation. However, the DMCA says that if an ISP receives proper notification of a claim of infringement, and it takes down the allegedly infringing material and notifies the user of the details of the situation and gives the user the proper opportunity to respond, then the ISP cannot be sued by either the accuser (for contributing to copyright infringement) or the user (for breach of contract.) This is spelled out in 17 USC 512, and you can read about how to respond to an accusation of copyright violation here. If you follow this form of reply, your ISP has to put your files back.
Warner Cable's actions were not justified under the DMCA. Since the infringing files were posted to Usenet, there's nothing the DMCA requires Warner Cable to do except delete the posts from their own news servers. But as they're a division of Time-Warner we shouldn't expect any kind of reasonable or moral behavior from these clowns. At least not this early in the game. They are still many clue sticks away from enlightenment.
As for Hemanshu Nigam, I've had dealings with him as well. He seems to be the perfect straight man for those who want to point out the idiocy of the MPAA.
Remember, people, if you're too stoned to operate heavy machinery, you shouldn't be posting on Slashdot either.
-- Dave Touretzky, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst
I'd also like to point out the correct citation for Henson's "destroy them utterly" quote. It comes from L. Ron Hubbard's 1955 article "The Scientologist, A Manual on the Dissemination of Material". Hubbard wrote: The law can be used very easily to harass, and enough harassment on somebody who is simply on the thin edge anyway, well knowing that he is not authorized, will generally be sufficient to cause his professional decease. If possible, of course, ruin him utterly.
This is one of the most famous of all Hubbard quotes, having been cited in dozens of legal cases against the Scientology cult. It is a reflection of Scientology's "fair game" policy, which is still in full effect today. Keith Henson is just the latest in a long string of victims. But he may yet have the last laugh.
The URL for the Gallery is cited in the amicus brief. I'm proud to point out that among the co-sponsors of this brief there are four Carnegie Mellon faculty, including the dean of the School of Computer Science. MPAA has been keeping a hands-off attitude toward the Gallery, perhaps because they realize how bad it would look if they tried to censor an academic work.
Hey! I'm only 41. But thanks.
The motion picture industry is now following Scientology's example, suing a t-shirt vendor for disclosing their trade secrets, all the while knowing that this makes them look like total loons.
Here's a clue, Mr. Valenti: IT'S NOT A SECRET ANYMORE. Scientology had to learn that lesson the hard way. It's a pity the motion picture companies, who are just down the street from the Scientology "pod palace", couldn't have learned from that example.
Visit the Gallery of CSS Descramblers to learn more.