December 24, 2024

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Misleading Term of the Week: "Content Owner"

September 4, 2002 by

Many discussions of copyright refer to “content owners.” The language of ownership is often misused in these contexts, for example by saying that Disney “owns” The Lion King, or by saying that I “own” the content on this site.

The simple fact is that I don’t own the content on this site – at least not in the same way that I own my car. All I own is the copyright on the content. The copyright gives me a certain limited bundle of rights, and leaves for you, the reader, certain other rights, whether I like it or not. Using the rhetoric of “content ownership” confuses the issue, by falsely implying that the copyright owners have more rights than the law really gives them.

(It’s relatively harmless to refer to “my book” or “my film,” as long as everybody understands that you’re not claiming ownership of the content but merely stating a relationship, just as you might refer to “my brother” or “my hometown” without implying that you own either one.)

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Greece Bans Electronic Games

September 3, 2002 by

CNet reports that Greece has banned all electronic games, including ones that run on PCs or on mobile phones, apparently in an effort to crack down on gambling.

This is yet another example of the inflationary theory of censorship. A ban on gambling would be too hard to enforce, because there is no way to tell whether a person playing, say, a card game is playing it for real money. So the censorship expands to a larger boundary that is supposedly more defensible.

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Sites Blocked In China

September 3, 2002 by

Jonathan Zittrain and Ben Edelman at Harvard have a site listing URLs that are blocked in China. In addition to some obvious sites (related to things like Chinese dissidents, the Taiwanese government, and Falun Gong), there are some curious sites on the block list, including the U.S. Federal Court system (uscourts.gov).

You can go to their site and try out any URL you like, to see if it is blocked in China.

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The Inflationary Theory of Censorship

September 3, 2002 by

China’s recent decision to block its citizens’ access to Google has been much discussed. Google does not itself offer “subversive” content, so the goal must have been to keep people from finding “subversive” content from elsewhere.

This illustrates a general truth about attempts to censor general-purpose communication technologies like the Net. These technologies are so flexible that no limited censorship campaign can work. People will find a way to get the information through. Assuming the censors don’t just give up, their only recourse is to censor more material, to protect the flanks of their previous censorship attempts.

But expanding the censorship just invites the same kind of countermeasure, and still more censorship becomes “necessary.” The cycle repeats itself indefinitely. On-line censorship must keep expanding, or it will die.

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Apple Uses DMCA Threat Against Competing Product

August 29, 2002 by

Declan McCullagh at news.com reports on Apple’s use of a DMCA threat to force a useful product off the market.

Apple’s iDVD application allows the user to burn DVDs – but only on Apple-brand drives. A DVD drive vendor called Other World Computing shipped its drives with a “DVD Enabler” program that modified iDVD so that it could burn DVDs on any FireWire-connected drive.

Apple was displeased, so it used various threats, including one based on the DMCA, to convince Other World to back down and yank DVD Enabler from the market. According to the story, the main reason for Other World’s quick backdown was a general desire to stay on Apple’s good side. But clearly Apple thought the DMCA threat would have some impact, or they wouldn’t have made it.

Apple’s use of the DMCA here has nothing to do with preventing copyright infringement, since Apple-brand drives can make infringing copies just as easily as other brands can. The real motive is to weaken competition in the market for Mac-compatible DVD drives.

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