May 15, 2024

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Defense of Berman-Coble Bill Offered

September 5, 2002 by

In Politech today, Congressman Berman (through an aide) offers a defense of the proposed Berman-Coble bill. (This bill would legalize certain forms of hacking by copyright owners against users of file-sharing systems.)

The gist of the defense is that the bill would only shelter copyright holders from liability to the extent that they were actually preventing redistribution of their copyrighted works, but that any impairment of unrelated activities or legal file sharing would still be liable as under current law.

If that’s actually a correct reading of the bill, then the bill might not be as bad as people say. But it’s far from clear that that is the correct reading of the bill.

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Adobe Files DMCA Challenge

September 4, 2002 by

Adobe has filed a federal lawsuit seeking a declaratory judgment that its Acrobat product does not violate the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions. (Here’s Adobe’s press release. I don’t have a link to the court papers yet.)

Here is the story, as far as I can tell at this point:
Any TrueType-compatible font can be labeled with bits saying whether permission is granted to embed the font into documents. Adobe Acrobat apparently does not always obey the bits’ commands. Adobe says they have good reasons for this, and that in any case Acrobat’s use of fonts does not infringe any copyright. The other party (International Typeface Corporation, or ITC) says that Acrobat is a DMCA-violating circumvention device.

It’s way to early to speculate about the merits of Adobe’s case. But there is some karmic justice in the fact that Adobe, which kicked off the Sklyarov/Elcomsoft DMCA mess, now finds itself on the other end of a DMCA threat.

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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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