May 2, 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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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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Business Week: Internet is Evil

August 29, 2002 by

Business Week has an amazing article characterizing the Internet as a cesspool of crime and depravity. The article approvingly quotes somebody saying “[More than] 70% of all e-commerce is based on some socially unacceptable if not outright illegal activity.”

To give you an idea of the tone, the main body of the article starts with this:

Warning: You are about to enter the dark side of the Internet. It’s a place where crime is rampant and every twisted urge can be satisfied. Thousands of virtual streets are lined with casinos, porn shops, and drug dealers. Scam artists and terrorists skulk behind seemingly lawful Web sites. And cops wander through once in a while, mostly looking lost. It’s the Strip in Las Vegas, the Red Light district in Amsterdam, and New York’s Times Square at its worst, all rolled into one–and all easily accessible from your living room couch.

The remainder of the article reveals that there are bookies, con artists, and drug dealers on the Net. Thank God we don’t have those problems in the real world.

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