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EFF and Dvorak Blame the Digg Revolt On Lawyers
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun May 06, 2007 10:26 PM
from the jet-fuel-on-a-fire dept.
from the jet-fuel-on-a-fire dept.
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."
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Digg.com Attempts To Suppress HD-DVD Revolt 1142 comments
fieryprophet writes "An astonishing number of stories related to HD-DVD encryption keys have gone missing in action from digg.com, in many cases along with the account of the diggers who submitted them. Diggers are in open revolt against the moderators and are retaliating in clever and inventive ways. At one point, the entire front page comprised only stories that in one way or another were related to the hex number. Digg users quickly pointed to the HD DVD sponsorship of Diggnation, the Digg podcast show. Search digg for HD-DVD song lyrics, coffee mugs, shirts, and more for a small taste of the rebellion." Search Google for a broader picture; at this writing, about 283,000 pages contain the number with hyphens, and just under 10,000 without hyphens. There's a song. Several domain names including variations of the number have been reserved. Update: 05/02 05:44 GMT by J : New blog post from Kevin Rose of Digg to its users: "We hear you."
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By no means are my defending lawyers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:By no means are my defending lawyers (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe a better thing to blame is "lawyer-like approaches" to this sort of problem.
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You might be a Redneck AACS lawyer if... (Score:5, Funny)
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Yeah, yeah... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, yeah... (Score:5, Insightful)
Other than that, however, I have to disagree. As far as I can tell, there is no "reasonable" DRM. "Reasonable" DRM is a paradox. It would defeat its own purpose. No, I believe all DRM, no matter how cute and cuddly it may seem to be (*ahem* FairPlay), should be completely outlawed. It serves only one purpose: the circumvention of fair use, yet it is cloaked as an "anti-piracy" measure. In my mind, the only solution to the problem is to ban it, and prosecute those companies that do not comply.
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Re:Yeah, yeah... (Score:4, Interesting)
When the bottom fell out of the Internet Boom, and all those startups, which had beem generating constant stream of contracts, and privacy policies, and mergers, and all sorts of legal documents, all went under. Well not all of them, but enough of them. Probably half of the slashdot audience worked for at least one...
So all of a sudden, no one had new contracts. No one was buying out the new startups. No one really new what all those lawyers in the company's legal department really did. And all the people gettling layed off were particularly curious why their team was decimated (heh.. like the music industry), when there were so many lawyers sitting around doing nothing. So they had to justify themselves. And.. well... you know. The Constitution never explicitly granted the right to duplicate copyrighted materials on the Internet. Not explicitly (how could it have?). It didn't deny those rightseither, which technically is how it works for most things... but I digress. Where was I...
Right. So everyone putting anything online was surely violating someone's copyright or trademark, and later when people started putting programs online, they could violate patents! Woohoo! Paperwork galore! And lawyers LOOOOOVES them some paperwork!
I got a C&D way back in 1995. I had a web page with a live camera looking at a [CENSORED} Lamp that I had on my desk. And I mistakingly titled the page "Check out my Groovy [CENSORED] Lamp!" and had a flowery background and that lame sort of slang we think our parents used to say. After a while I got a cease and decist from
So anyway, I guess the writing was on the wall, but I didn't see it yet. But that's what lawyers were doing on the internet before anyone was really even looking at it.
Move forward to 2000, and now there's millions of lawyers that need to make themselves useful in the quickest and easiest way possible. Hypothetically, I mean.
I hope that covers my ass...
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Re:Yeah, yeah... (Score:5, Informative)
Neither the American Constitution nor the Bill of Rights "grant" rights. The "enumerate" them--that is, "specify one after another; list".
The 9th Amendment to the Constitution specifically states, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." And the 10th Amendment states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people."
Ergo, anything that is not forbidden to the people is permitted. Anything that is not permitted to the United States or the several States is forbidden.
A "right" in the Framer's language is either endowed by God, or in secular terms is a political condition necessary for the life of a morally autonomous being, in precisely the same sense that light is a physical condition necessary for the life of a photosynthesising being. One can neither "grant" nor "deny" the necessity of light to a photosynthesising being--because that is simply a fact about the being. If you take the light away, or give it in inappropriate amounts and times and spectra, the being will not thrive. The same is true, on the secular view, of rights.
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Re:Yeah, yeah... (Score:4, Insightful)
But banning is not required. They are attempting to do something which is fundamentally imposible anyway. They want to hand over to you encrypted content, a complete implementation of the decryption-algorithm AND all needed keys, and nevertheless prevent you from decrypting the data.
That does not work. Bruce Schneier said it best: Trying to make bits non-copiable is about as likely to suceed as an attempt to make water not wet.
All that is needed for the free market to dismantle such crap by itself is to let it.
That is -- remove any and all laws that protect these mechanisms. Kill the DMCA, basically.
DRM ain't dangerous. It won't and can't work.
DRM combined with laws preventing their removal and/or breakage is *very* dangerous.
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Re:Yeah, yeah... (Score:5, Insightful)
But better: Its freaking working! Here I was thinking that nothing I do can change the system. Then we add a few numbers in our sigs, and what have you, and now Dvorak is spouting off stuff that actually makes sense for once!
"The music industry is decimated" (John D.). Hellaf'in yeah, it is! I don't buy CDs anymore. I don't "steal" music either. I boycott it. I started boycotting the RIAA labels and their artists when Napster (the real one) got taken down. And now, only 8 years later, the mainstream press is getting the message. Napster (the REAL one) wasn't hurting anyone, or hurting business models. When Napster was running, CDs were selling like never before. When Napster went down, CD sales started to drop. There is no data that says otherwise, and the RIAA's own reported stats show it.
Even digg.com is going to become a household word over this. And just yesterday, my dad would have sworn "digging" is something you do with a shovel.
When "exploit ignorance through rampant douchebaggery" stops being the primary business model operating in the US (and I do think its primarily here, in the US), I'll be much, much happier.
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Ah, yes, the douchebag Dvorak (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Ah, yes, the douchebag Dvorak (Score:4, Informative)
No. If you want the "literal" meaning, it's exactly what the romans meant. To reduce by 10%, or in more direct terms: to randomly kill every tenth person. Such as when a new general was to take over some troops that didn't necessarily be fanatically devoted to him, he would start by decimating the troops to make sure they were obedient to him from now on... (and yeah, this worked most of the time, although today the technique is generally frown upon, as it is considered to be of questionable ethical judgement)
The point the grandparent was making was that (a) decimate now means something else, and usually more drastic than it mean to the Romans (b) the music industry isn't decimated in this new sense
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They used to call those 'laws'.
AACS-LA should learn... (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh yeah and the fact that DMCA take down notices only apply to servers in the US.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It also has the added side benefit (for the lawyers) of racking up thousands of billable hours in record time...
-=Geoskd
Takedown notice? (Score:3, Interesting)
When Digg changed their tune, some users rejoiced that Digg was now going to fight for them, possibly at the cost of the site. Digg even made a solemn pronouncement that they were taking some brave and bold step. But there was never any evidence of any fight. If there was a threat or takedown notice, Digg should have posted that.
Re:Takedown notice? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Takedown notice? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Takedown notice? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Takedown notice? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I dunno (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Takedown notice? (Score:5, Informative)
That's what I was protesting. I never expected Digg to do anything illegal or take the issue to court.
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Not a piracy code (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not a piracy code (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should you have to be a criminal to play your bought media on a different system?
If Mum sends me a WMV encoded clip from her camera of the new puppy, shouldn't I just be able to double click it in Linux, play it and enjoy it without having to feel like a dodgy guy for having not-so-legal Linux codecs installed?
I think, when you create a technology/protocol/service that is a fundamentally useful, standard that is a leading standard, this protocol/format should be open and exchangeable by everyone.
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Hell must have frozen over... (Score:5, Funny)
Insult Dvorak if you want, but he (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Insult Dvorak if you want, but he (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Insult Dvorak if you want, but he (Score:5, Funny)
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Blame the Lawyers (Score:3, Insightful)
They still don't get it though (Score:3, Insightful)
Blame the Lawyers! No blame Dvorak! (Score:5, Funny)
Oh my... I am so conflicted..... who do I complain about?
Oh, right - Microsoft!
No Duh it's censorship (Score:5, Interesting)
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.Apology and Advert. (Score:3)
publish and widely distribute a secret code used by the technology and movie industries to prevent piracy of high-definition movies.
He not only distorts the aim of digital restrictions, he's advertising and promoting newer movie formats. People who use MPAA language aid the MPAA whether they want to or not. The easiest way to foil the "anti-piracy" talk is to point out the failure of DeCSS. Commercial shops will have no problem making and selling exact coppies. Exact coppies can also be made and sent
It's not censorship, but the right to censor (Score:4, Insightful)
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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Huh? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5
63 56 88 C0 rain
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Bad Journalism at NYTimes (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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.
Dvorak doesn't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Digg is the most childish site ever.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Digg is the most childish site ever.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Digg is the most childish site ever.. (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Digg is the most childish site ever.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. Big corporations that want to censor some piece of information should really read up on the Streisand Effect [wikipedia.org].
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Re:Digg is the most childish site ever.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Are those lawyers still working? It won't last too long.
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Why do they say they have liberty? (Score:3, Interesting)
It is clearly a hyporcracy since, for instance blacks were hardly receiving the "liberty and justice for all" until very recently and many people do not at present. Say it enough and you don't doubt it. That those liberties and justice don't exist hardly matters - people still believe they have them.
Sure, USA is better than China etc, but to be the world leader in freedom that U
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:People just don't understand free speech. (Score:5, Informative)
>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.
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Re:Lawyers do what they are paid to do. (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A cease and desist letter takes about 20 minutes to write.
It makes perfect sense. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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