Official Reporters have more copyright rights

Tim May tcmay at got.net
Wed Aug 1 09:31:05 PDT 2001


At 12:00 PM +0100 8/1/01, Ken Brown wrote:

>How the DMCA affects this I don't know. It goes way beyond the
>old-established ideas of copyright, and into the dodgy depths of trade
>secrets. It is one thing to say "this is mine, you can't use it" and
>quite another to say "this is mine, you aren't even allowed to know what
>it is". By analogy with real property, copyright says you can't have a
>party in my garden without my permission; DMCA says you can't even take
>photos of my garden from next door if you need to stand on a stepladder
>to do it. In fact it says you can't even own the stepladder.

An odd metaphor, but maybe useful. Here goes:

It's worse than that. It says that if I _deduce_ from people going in 
and out of his property and from noise levels and music that he is 
probably having a party, I am forbidden to tell others about it 
(because they might "circumvent" the secrecy and crash the party). 
And I am even forbidden from publishing or explaining in a public way 
how others may use my methods to deduce the existence of neighborhood 
parties.

(The DMCA has very nebulous language about how "strong" the original 
protection (cipher strength, security strength) must have been, to 
protect against ROT-13 and Pig Latin being DMCA-protected. Utterly 
subjective, probably, though Bruce Schneier will probably earn some 
nice bucks being called as an expert witness.)

>My guess, which you may put down to cynicism if you want, is that if
>your name is Disney, or Murdoch,  or Turner, or Sony, or Warner, or EMI,
>then the US courts will enforce your DMCA "rights". But if you happen to
>be called "sub-tARyANyAN-c00l D00DZ", they probably won't. Between those
>two extremes, it is likely to depend on your lawyers.

Some copyright holders are more equal than others.

I don't see anyone clamoring that Tim's copyrights are being violated 
when his articles are bounced around the Net in the same way I see 
_some_ people yammering that Declan's and "Wired Online's" copyrights 
are being violated when _his_ articles are being bounced around. The 
issue is not that some outlets charge money, as most clearly don't. 
The only real difference between the "New York Times" going after 
those who forward its items and "Joe Sixpack" not going after them is 
that the courts will do the bidding of NYT but not JS.

Nothing against Declan or "Wired Online," of course. Just noting that 
once again there seems to be a special status for Official Reporters, 
Official Publishers, Official Writers. Official Reporters are covered 
by Shield Laws, ordinary reporters are not. Official Publishers have 
law professors bemoaning violations of copyright, and so on.

The recognition of some "professionals" is a much larger issue. 
Official Priests, for example, have priest-penitent protections that 
Reverend Tim of the Church of Joe-Bob does not have. And so on for 
dozens of other professions which gubments choose to bless with 
Official Status. Wrongly, in my carefully considered opinion. We are 
all reporters, all writers, all religious persons (even if atheists), 
all consultants, all persons equal under the law. "Make no law" means 
no special privileges for Approved Religions, for Approved Reporters, 
for Approved Marchers, for Approved Anyones.

We went off the track a long time ago in deciding to grant 
quasi-official status to some members of some professions.


--Tim May

-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns





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