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."

AACS-LA should learn...

[Tuoqui]

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

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

Takedown notice?

[lunartik]

Was Digg ever given a takedown notice? I haven't followed this since the original flap over it, but at the time it seemed like Digg cowered at the idea that maybe they could get in legal trouble (or lose an advertiser).

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:Digg is the most childish site ever..

[rtb61]

I though it was more along the digg wasn't paid to adjust reality and they are fighting to retain their right to sell the ability to mould their forum posters opinions. Like google they only censor and mod up for profit, never ever for free ;).

No Duh it's censorship

[Sloppy]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why do they say they have liberty?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

They say this because they have been reciting the Pledge of Allegience since birth. Theless generous might call this brainwashing.

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 USA claims to be it should be ranking a bit higher than 15/11 on http://www.worldaudit.org/press.htm [worldaudit.org]

Re:People just don't understand free speech.

[samkass]

Of course there are gray areas in "freedom of speech". For example, the United States has often equated giving money to a candidate as "speech". I personally disagree that the right to give arbitrary money to a candidate is equal to the right of free expression or even association, but it's certainly debatable. There's also the question of intent-- you may be free to say anything and not be locked up for the speech, but be locked up because the speech implied intent or guilt in another matter entirely. Depending on how silly and "thought-crime"esque other laws are, it may seem like it's speech itself that is being impinged.

Anyway, nothing is black and white, and especially not something as rich as speech.

In any case, in case this article leads anyone to any undue optimism, you can go read ABC news' editorial on the matter [go.com] to bring you back down again (or to make your blood boil, depending on your temperament).

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:People just don't understand free speech.

[Anonymous Coward]

Disney owns ABC. Disney makes movies that may be affected by the breaking of disc encryption schemes. Thus we probably won't hear anything of any value from ABC News on this matter, due to their inherent bias. And as we expect, the article you link to is essentially poop.

Re:I dunno

[Hal_Porter]

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.

Wow, that's spooky. TFA [eff.org] says

Is the key copyrightable? It doesn't matter. The AACS-LA takedown letter is not claiming that the key is copyrightable, but rather that it is (or is a component of) a circumvention technology. The DMCA does not require that a circumvention technology be, itself, copyrightable to enjoy protection.effect.

You know it's illegal here to RTFA before posting, right ;-)

Seriously, these "takedown notices" seem like prior restraint to me. I can't see how they could survive being examined by the Supreme Court for example and not be found to be unconstitutional.

Re:Yeah, yeah...

[brianosaurus]

As for the lawyers, they were just being lawyers.

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 ... how should i say it... "Lava Lamp" is a trademark of Haggerty Enterprises. And I was apparently causing irreparable harm by having called my Lava Lamp (TM of Haggerty Enterprises) a Lava Lamp, and having pictures of it on the Internet. I was in a hurry, so I did a search/replace of "Lava" with "[CENSORED]" and left it at that.

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...

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please someone make into t shirt

It makes perfect sense.

[symbolset]

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:

• "Wishing it away" will not erase the fact that true DRM is not possible -- a fact that is abundantly obvious to everyone except the *IAA. Even the geeks who are milking them with tales of bulletproof DRM and golden keys understand this and insist on being paid cash up front.
• It's an opporunity to bash lawyers - the only professionals that produce nothing, create nothing, serve noone, and gets a third of everything they touch. For the most part even lawyers despise lawyers.
• Laughing at the failures of incompetent executives is a popular sport around here. We laugh because we dare not cry. Read Dilbert and in time you'll come to understand.

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.

Re:Yeah, yeah...

[bucky0]

I think they probably sent the C&D because of trademark law. If they didn't go after people who called random lamps lava lamps, the term would be considered generic and they would lose the trademark on it. Hormel has to go after people who talk about spam. Kleenex also has the same problem

Re:AACS-LA should learn...

[Ilgaz]

Napster user threatening, bad name calling scandal effectively killed a band named Metallica which sold 57 million albums to that date.

You would think those suits learn or at least the PR army they use to spam (viral market!) HDDVD on sites like Digg would warn them.

Re:Digg is the most childish site ever..

[init100]

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

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