DeepLinks Archives, February 2005
Noteworthy news from around the internet.
Who Owns Your Desktop? You Do!
Posted by Fred von LohmannGoogle's Auto-Link adds links to certain kinds of content that appears on web pages (like a link to Google Maps for addresses, or Amazon for ISBNs).
Some people (like Dan Gillmor) are viewing this with suspicion. (The Trademark Blog has collected the commentary.) They shouldn't. The issue is simple: Who owns your desktop? You, or the owner of whatever webpage you happen to be browsing?
A meatspace analogy should make this clear: Imagine I have a butler whom I task with going through what drops into my mail slot each morning. His job? To annotate my snail mail. He goes through the advertising circulars and researches whether better prices are available anywhere else. He gets me a map of every return address. Maybe I ask him to anticipate needs I don't even know I have yet. If he does something I don't like, I replace him.
When I visit your website, and you send me a page in response, I should be able to do whatever I like to manipulate it on my end. Display it in purple, suppress images, block pop-ups, compare prices from other vendors, whatever. In the words of my colleague, Cory Doctorow, "it's my screen, and I should be able to control it; companies like Google and individuals should be able to provide tools and services to let me control it."
Of course, we have to make sure the butler doesn't try to take over and act like a jail warden (i.e., monopolists forcing you to take a butler). And we don't want the butler to sneak into your house when you're not looking (i.e., spyware). But Google's Toolbar seems to be a pretty good butler -- it's not like he hides his presence, and you can fire him anytime you like (it's not as though Google's leading position in search gives it much ability to force its butler on you; you can choose from lots of other "toolbar" apps that can submit searchs to Google).
So I say mark up my webpages for me, butlers of the world, make my web more useful!
Publius, RIP?
Posted by Donna WentworthEFF's own Fred von Lohmann has a monthly column at Law.com, and fortunately we have the freedom to publish these columns in their entirety here at the EFF website. This month's column is "Publius, RIP?" -- a look at why it's critically important to our society that we preserve anonymous speech on the Internet.
Here, an excerpt; click on "More" to read the entire piece:
In the classic New Yorker cartoon, the caption reads: "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog." Not so. Whether you're spouting off your views about the latest episode of Desperate Housewives on a fan website, complaining about your sinking stock portfolio on a Yahoo message board or, in the case of a Texas man recently, castigating your local politicians for misspending taxpayer dollars, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) knows you're not a dog. And it knows your name, address and telephone number.
....This technological fact is having a growing and profound impact on the constitutionally protected right to anonymous speech. In a spate of cases across the country, individuals upset by what others are saying online (and recently copyright owners claiming online infringements) have filed lawsuits in order to issue subpoenas demanding that ISPs give up the identities of online speakers.
Support EFF - Bid on "Freedom to Connect" Pass at eBay!
Posted by Donna WentworthIf you've been looking for a way to help out with efforts like fighting the broadcast flag and connect with other people who want to keep the Internet open, safe, and free, here's the pitch-perfect opportunity to do both!
David Isenberg, author of The Rise of the Stupid Network, will soon hold one of the most eagerly anticipated conferences of the year, The Freedom to Connect. To raise money to defend online freedom and help spread the word about the conference, EFF is auctioning off a conference pass at eBay.
Make your bid today. Every penny from the auction will go toward defending your rights!
Legal Clarity for Bloggers
Posted by Donna WentworthThere are two laudable legislative efforts in the works that could help clarify that online journalists are entitled to the same rights and privileges as traditional print journalists.
The first is the national OPEN Government Act (S.394), introduced by Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) and co-sponsor Senator Pat Leahy (D-Vt.). It's aimed at reforming the law to make it easier for journalists and others to access government documents -- and as the ACLU points out, that includes implementing "news media status rules that recognize the reality of freelance journalists and the Internet."
The second is a bill [PDF] that's just been introduced in the Maryland House of Delegates. The bill, HB 1140, would make it crystal clear that the state's strong shield law applies to bloggers:
The provisions in this section apply to any person who: (I) is, or has been, employed by the news media in any news gathering or news disseminating capacity; OR (II) [...] gathers or disseminates news or information to the public through a weblog.
Bravo. We can't imagine that we've ever needed this kind of legislation more than we do now.
For more details on the OPEN Government Act, see Sen. Cornyn's remarks from the floor and additional analysis from Robert Ambrogi at the Media Law Blog.
Apple Bites Students; the Woz Bites Back
Posted by Donna WentworthPeople in the Apple community are upset about the company's legal action against three Canadian students who allegedly posted a developer build of MacOS 10.4 via BitTorrent. Now the publisher of DrunkenBlog has posted responses from 25 members of the Mac community -- including one from none other than Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak:
I was shocked reading [DrunkenBlog's interview with the targeted students]. Everything fits into place that this is an unintentional oversight and the interviewed student appears to be one of the most honest people on this planet. I have to question who is most right in this case.
I wish that Apple could find some way to drop the matter. In my opinion, more than appropriate punishment has already been dealt out. In this age of professional spammers and telemarketers making fortunes, we're misusing our energies to pursue these types of small time wrongdoers. I will personally donate $1,000 to the Canadian student's defense.
Apple has been on a litigious streak lately. In an unrelated case, Apple v. Does, EFF is defending online journalists against subpoenas aimed at uncovering the identities of confidential sources who allegedly leaked information about upcoming Apple products. The facts in these cases are quite distinct, but we do agree with the sentiment expressed at DrunkenBlog by Brent Simmons of Ranchero Software: "I suspect that it's possible to pull back on the legal front and still accomplish the goal of stopping leaks. The company that I know and love is a humane company." Suing students and subpoenaing journalists to identify leaks should be Apple's last resort, not its first.
Broadcast Flag "Just As Important As Grokster"
Posted by Donna WentworthSo argues Susan Crawford in a post on the forthcoming oral arguments in ALA v. FCC -- that is, the legal challenge to the FCC's broadcast flag technology mandate (emphasis & hyperlinks, mine):
Did the FCC have jurisdiction to enter the broadcast flag order in November 2003? If it didn't, we'll need to go to Congress to discuss all this.
Like the Grokster case, the flag situation raises this question: can one industry force another to constrain new general purpose technologies in the name of copyright protection? Like the CALEA dispute (prompted by the demands of another great industry -- law enforcement), the flag represents an attempt to have high-tech innovators ask permission before innovating.
Read the entire post -- and don't forget to check out Prof. Crawford's Shortness of Vision: Regulatory Ambition in the Digital Age [word doc].
TV-Anytime Hubris
Posted by Seth SchoenOur friends at TV-Anytime are unusually candid in their dirigisme. Their working group on business models claims the obligation to predict "every conceivable present and future way that [a technology] can be used." Now that's ambition.
You can find the statement in question on the Business Models Working Group home page:
The Business Models working group's mission has been based on the premise that "no system can be properly developed without first imagining & documenting every conceivable present and future way that it could be used."
By this standard, none of the most important technologies of the past century could have been "properly developed." This way of thinking reminds us of the entertainment industry leader who said that the technology marketplace ought to be "polite" and "well-mannered" (with, we imagine, every technology introduced in its appropriate year, after elaborate cross-sectoral negotiation).
Here's a contrary view: information technologies are valuable particularly because we never imagine & document all the ways they're going to be used. People, often end-users, just keep on thinking of new ones. What a pesky, untidy process this is!
Tattoo Artist Sues NBA Star for Copyright Infringement
Posted by Donna WentworthBack in the day, a tattoo artist quite rationally saw your tattoo as a free advertisement for his art. Not anymore. According to this AP story, the man who put a tattoo on the right arm of Pistons forward Rasheed Wallace is suing to stop Wallace from "displaying" his artwork in ads for Nike basketball shoes. Wallace reportedly paid the artist, Matthew Reed of TigerLilly Tattoo and DesignWorks, $450.00 for the tattoo -- but evidently that wasn't enough. Reed told the Associated Press he "expected to benefit from the exposure."
Over the past year we've unfortunately witnessed some absurd examples of copyright overreaching, from attempts to extort online animators for parodying folk songs to efforts to ban video game players from pretending to be superheroes -- and now the suggestion that athletes should cover their tattooed arms if they wish to avoid lawsuits. Rarely has the need to defend fair use been so vividly illustrated.
For more examples of such overreach, check out the definitive reference tome, David Bollier's Brand Name Bullies.
We Love It, Too
Posted by Donna WentworthJ.D. Lasica today has a nifty review of David Bollier's Brand Name Bullies -- a book that should be at the very top of everyone's reading list:
Bollier, a co-founder of the public interest group Public Knowledge, has written a darkly funny, accessible account of horror stories and outrages both large and small. A few years back, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers send out letters to 288 camps in the American Camping Association, demanding that Brownies and Girl Scouts stop singing copyrighted songs like "Blowin' in the Wind" or "Row, Row, Row" unless the camping groups ponied over thousands of dollars in licensing fees.
The press had a field day with the story. Pro basketball player Shaquille O'Neal offers to pay a camp's royalties for 10 years. BMI offered to license its 3 million songs to the Girl Scouts for nothing. Duly chastened, ASCAP backed down.
Some of these issues -- such as mash-ups, fan fiction, The Grey Album or the Eldred decision -- will be familiar to those who have followed the recent shenanigans in IP law. (Indeed, as I write this review, I'm listening to John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" -- a melody that would be outlawed had it been recorded today.) But Bollier's chief purpose here is to introduce these stories to a wider audience. Few of the tales have the happy ending that the Girl Scouts enjoyed.
This is great book for explaining to friends and colleagues why we need to restore common-sense balance to the copyright system. Highly recommended!
One Face of Liberated DTV
Posted by Wendy SeltzerEFF Chairman Brad Templeton doesn't care much for football, but since he enjoys seeing the multi-million dollar commercials liberally interspersed with it, he held a reverse Superbowl party: fast forward through the game to watch the ads. To capture the show in high-definition and play it back around the house, he used a home-built MythTV system with pcHDTV's HD-3000 HDTV tuner card. Brad has posted a great account of the event:
At my party, it was very high-tech. An antenna on the roof fed the FOX HDTV signal coming over the air into a tuner card located in a server computer in my workroom. This computer ran the MythTV "backend" and did the fairly simple task of recording the video stream to the disk.
Another computer sat in my living room next to the HDTV. This was the "frontend." On my commands, it connected to the computer upstairs over my house internet and pulled down the video file at the time point we were watching. HDTV was literally coming into the living room over ethernet, and it felt very 21st century.
During one high-tech moment, it was also clear that the TV was really a computer display. After the buxom Godaddy censorship parody, somebody commented that Godaddy had a different ad that had gotten refused by Fox and it was on their web site. A few clicks and I had the Firefox browser on my screen. With my 6 megabit connection, I installed the latest Flash player in about 10 seconds and was quickly playing the refused ad. Then it was back to our regularly scheduled commercials.
Now all of this is fully within Brad's rights under copyright law. Not to mention that no broadcaster could complain about an audience that wanted to watch its advertisements. But in less than five months, it will be much harder to throw this kind of party. The broadcast flag mandate makes it illegal to make the HDTV tuners at the heart of this setup.
Brad's system will still work, as will those built at EFF's HD-PVR build-in, but it will be illegal to make the tuners for new HD devices without gumming them up with restrictions. Hobbyists and consumer electronics companies alike will be limited in what they can build, locking out the openness that let Brad design his own viewing experience.
We've sued the FCC over this rule, and the court will hear arguments February 22. But if you don't want to wait for the DC Circuit, check out EFF's Cookbook to get cooking with your own, unrestricted, digital recorder.
