Cyber Liberties Under Attack

In the modern world, Civil Liberties include Cyber Liberties also.

Recent laws, proposals and court cases have restricted civil liberties related to technology and communications, including Internet blocking in libraries, helping media conglomerates deny Fair Use of copyrighted materials to their customers and prohibit the right to reverse-engineer software (DMCA), requirments on how computer hardware is designed (CBDTPA), etc.

How do these trends affect the future of ideas? How do they relate to the constitutional rationale for copyrights and patents: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"

Notes by Neal McBurnett, available at http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/talks/cyberliberties.html

It is increasingly the case, especially as the Internet gains increasing attention among lawyers, that the rights of users are being affected. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has been construed to not only prevent people from reverse engineering technology and freely sharing the results, but even from including relevant hyperlinks on their web pages. The success of Napster at allowing individuals to find and share copyrighed music from the big record labels has threatened the ability of emerging artists from using the same technology to promote their work. We must preserve the right share our own work in the spirit of the Constitution's actual language on the subject.

• Science and technology has created the miracle of cheap information distribution, lauded in books like Freeman Dyson's "The Sun, the Genome and the Internet" as one of the big 4 advances in civilization. Issue: too cheap to meter => too cheap to police.
• John Gilmore on What's wrong with Copy Protection? at http://www.toad.com/gnu/whatswrong.html: "Why should self-interested companies be permitted to shift the balance of fundamental liberties, risking free expression, free markets, scientific progress, consumer rights, societal stability, and the end of physical and informational want? Because somebody might be able to steal a song? That seems a rather flimsy excuse."
• Specifically, right to hyperlink, "fair use" of copyrighted materials, publish your own source code, learn how things work and share it with others. Demise of open and interoperable technologies. Right to innovate.
• US Constitution, Section 8:

  The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

  But what if copyright and patent laws are inhibiting the progress of science and useful arts?
• Current strategy by media conglomerates: get more protection than the laws allow by using flimsy "encryption" technologies and then using the new DMCA to prohibit users from defeating the extra technological protections.
• The Internet vastly complicates issues of jurisdiction
• Peer-to-peer networking and technologies like Freedom from Zero-Knowledge Systems make it impractical to police file transfers.
• DMCA - Digital Millennium Copyright Act introduces "anti-circumvention" law.
• Gallery of CSS Descramblers:
• Recent DMCA appeal by EFF - link below
• Napster judgement from the Ninth Circuit, 2001-02-12: "contributory liability may potentially be imposed only to the extent that Napster: (1) receives reasonable knowledge of specific infringing files with copyrighted musical compositions and sound recordings; (2) knows or should know that such files are available on the Napster system; and (3) fails to act to prevent viral distribution of the works. ... The mere existence of the Napster system, absent actual notice and Napster's demonstrated failure to remove the offending material, is insufficient to impose contributory liability."
• See US Rep Boucher's interview on Slashdot on these topics. He is planning to introduce legislation to preserve fair use, and explains how you can get involved.
• Conclusions: DMCA restrictions on Fair Use need to be overturned. Future of copyright vs innovation is big debate.... In the meantime, sharing Technologies must not be prevented from allowing easy sharing of content with permission of its owner.

Links

John Gilmore's Copy Protection paper.

Future of Music Coalition - Artists representing themselves.

EFF "Intellectual Property Online: Patent, Trademark, Copyright" Archive

DVD for Linux et al (DeCSS) - Reverse-engineered version of DVD CSS (Content Scrambling System)
http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/MPAA_DVD_cases/20010119_ny_eff_appeal_pressrel.html

DeCSS Central
http://www.lemuria.org/DeCSS/ Gallery of CSS Descramblers - excellent exposition of techniques for communicating and hiding information via the Internet et.al (text, pictures, MIDI, steganography, from DVD-CCA's own DNS servers! ...):
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/De CSS/Gallery/
See also: http://decss.zoy.org/

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA):
http://www.eff.org/ effector/HTML/effect13.11.html#I

Napster and peer-to-peer networking:
http://www.napster.com/pre ssroom/001013.html

http://www.bearshare.com - Gnutella network - Much harder to shut down than Napster.

League for Programming Freedom (patents, user-interface copyrights):
http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/

FRUUG presentation on "Legal constraints on Netizens: DeCSS, Napster, Clue.com, etc.", Thu 2001-02-15.

Clue.com's legal battle:
http://www.clue.com/legal

Considerations for innocent domain name owners:
http://www.patents.com/dno.htm