Tying the Threads Together
Essays
6/5/2000; 7:15:31 AM April 18, 2000: A brief essay tying together many international stories, showing that the ability to simply run to another country if things get hot in your own may not necessarily be as viable as people might think.

CACIB Troubles Country Watch: Britain6/5/2000; 7:15:29 AM April 17, 2000: I hope that Britain's example of how badly things can go wrong when you rule that content providers are responsible for content sends a clear warning to other countries (and courts!) who might consider ruling this way. Slashdot today has an article about the British site that's protesting the Godfrey result and the subsequent wild censoring, the Campaign Against Censorship of the Internet in Britain. The CACIB had to run to the United States because their British ISP shut them down, fearing they would libel someone!One wonders if the ISP didn't think at least a little about the legitimacy that might give the organization... but nevertheless, the ISP is on the right side of the law... and that's horrible.

ZDNet: News: Judge to rule against Bidder's Edge General IP Issues6/5/2000; 7:15:27 AM April 17, 2000: "A federal judge said he plans to issue a preliminary injunction against Bidder's Edge Inc. in a suit brought by eBay Inc., a victory for the big online auctioneer in a battle that could have wide implications for Internet commerce."This has been a long time coming and opens the door to more debates then you can shake a stick at. "Daniel Bergeson, a partner at Bergeson & Eliopoulos LLP in San Jose, said eBay's argument is simple. 'When you visit a site, you can't take that information and use it for your own purposes, especially for commercial purposes,' he said."I think in this case, "commercial purposes" on the part of Bidder's Edge is pretty clear. But how about search engines? Is that commercial use of site data... or just use of the site data that happens to have advertisements on it, independent of the search results?I think that the only consistent answer is that no, you CAN'T just abscond with another sites data and use it for commercial purposes... and yes, search engines are 'commercial purposes'. However, with search engines, a good case can and should be made that they are already common practice, and that it is well known how to stop polite search engines from searching your site by using a standardized file called robots.txt.A reason I think this is fair is that it cuts both ways. It also means that nobody can walk off with your weblog and proceed to make big bucks with it. It doesn't just protect eBay, it levels the field for everybody. The alternative, that you can walk off with content and profit off of it, results in big money always winning.(And a gentle reminder that if you give permission to somebody, they can do whatever you gave them permission to do. Userland's weblog search engine would be unaffected by this ruling, because you have to explicitly ask them to index your weblog.)

Copy Protection Personal Notes6/5/2000; 7:13:57 AM Random thoughts: Remember copy-protection on software? Will Gnutella and the like, making "piracy" a matter of opening a program and typing in the name of the desired software, rather then a 30-60 minute hunt on the web for a working FTP site, bring back the days of black print on dark wine red paper?

Of course, such a low tech solution now-a-days would be of little use. Copy protection stopped because it ceased to be worth annoying the consumer; it might start being worth it again in the near future for commercial companies.

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Missing the point on Microsoft General IP Issues6/5/2000; 7:13:51 AM April 10, 2000: I missed this article on Friday... it has some great stuff in it.

The state is involved in creating [intellecutal-property based] monopolies, because there are choices to be made in designing property systems. Lots of them, in fact. One can agree with the idea that there should be intellectual property rights without answering the question "How far should those rights stretch? What conditions should Microsoft be able to attach to its software licenses? Restraints on competition? On criticism? To get the benefits of the state property grant, should it have to make source code available under a compulsory license? Should it be able to use copyright law to restrict its competitors from making "interoperable" products?"
In the Microsoft case, indeed in almost all of the digital monopoly cases, the dominant company will have to build its strategies around the contours of the original state monopoly we call intellectual property. Expand those rights, and the monopolies form quicker, grow larger.
If I had my way, when all was said and done, while I'd clean up the system and eliminate a lot of ambiguity, which might immediately seem to constrict the rights people currently seem to have (like, oh, say, public annotation), it would actually contract the 'rights' of the owners significantly. Kiss the DMCA goodbye, for instance. (Making the act of breaking copyright protection for the legal purpose of creating a backup copy? Nonsense!)

Microsoft has been bringin' me down over IE5.5 for Windows Misc.6/5/2000; 7:13:47 AM April 10, 2000: Even as I've been going into spastic twitching fits over Mozilla (If you've ever seen Disney's Alladin, think Jafar's first few seconds of being a genie... "The power! The incredible power! The stars leap at my command!" or something to that effect), Microsoft has been bringin' me down over IE5.5 for Windows. The Web Standards Projects had some stuff to say about it, and I second it.

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Digital signatures a threat to privacy? Privacy from Companies6/5/2000; 7:13:45 AM April 10, 2000: Update: Wesley Felter points out the the article incorrectly states what a digital signiture is. *D'oh* should have noticed that myself. Still, I was too busy being in a holy rage about holding the consumers responsible for all screw-ups... yeah, that's it...

Digital signatures a threat to privacy?: "The problem for anonymous users is the amount of personal information that is encoded with the signature. For example, a site selling beer online may ask for proof of age. Current digital certificates would not provide that information but would identify the user by name or an ID ... [much later]Currently, two congressional bills will put consumers in the hot seat if their digital signature is used improperly. [National Consumer Law Center?s] Saunders said such laws can only hurt consumers and online businesses both."

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Opinion Reconsidered Personal Commentary6/5/2000; 7:13:38 AM April 7, 2000: I'm feeling bad today and I'll soon be going home (where my Internet access is really bad) for the weekend, so no more updates.

However, I reconsidered my opinion on the recent ruling as code-as-expression, and I'm not as optimistic as I was. I posted this in the Userland DG, but I'll reproduce it here:

My logical train of thought asks, "If code is protected speech, how can you patent it? Shouldn't it be more analogous to a trademark?"
No, trademarks are only identifying marks for companies and products; you can't protect code that way. You might put code in your trademark (like composing the letters "IBM" out of "Hello World" or something), but that still wouldn't prevent me using the code in a program, only in displaying the code in the form of that trademark.

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