Froomkin joins EFF board

Tue Nov 23 05:51:42 PST 2004

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Congrats to Michael Froomkin, AKA Vinnie "The Pro" Bono, an anonymous
source of mine on cypherpunks back in the day, before he broke the ice
himself, once he realized we weren't all going to be hitting him up for
free legal advice. :-).

Cheers,
RAH
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<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/23/eff_griffin_froomkin/print.html>

The Register

 Biting the hand that feeds IT

The Register B; Business B;

 Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/23/eff_griffin_froomkin/

Griffin, Froomkin join EFF board
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco (andrew.orlowski at theregister.co.uk)
Published Tuesday 23rd November 2004 02:29 GMT

The future of digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation looks
faintly brighter today with the creation of an Advisory board, created to
help the group form some effective long-term strategies.

Amongst the 12 advisors named are the FSF's Eben Moglen, and Princeton
professor Ed Felten. But we're pleased to see two names familiar to veteran
Register readers, music entrepreneur Jim Griffin and lawyer Michael
Froomkin [home page (http://www.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/welcome.html) -
blog (http://www.discourse.net/)] of the University of Miami's law school.

Froomkin has devoted much of his time in recent years to examining how
consensus is formed to provide a legitimate basis for online institutions,
penning Habermas at discourse.net: Toward a Critical Theory of Cyberspace
(http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=363840) and although he
has used the word "meme" on his blog (tut, Michael, we think you mean
"theme" or "idea") he's proved himself a scrupulous and tenacious ICANN
watchdog.

Former Geffen CTO Jim Griffin, who co-runs the Pho mailing list, is
probably the most passionate and articulate advocate of modernizing the
compensation framework for the digital distribution of music. We
interviewed
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/02/11/why_wireless_will_end_piracy/) Jim
back in February, and your reporter drew heavily on Jim's persuasive
arguments when giving this talk
(http://www.theregister.com/2004/09/23/orlowski_interactive_keynote/) to
the music industry earlier this Fall.

All credit to the EFF for recognizing that fresh thinking is needed. The
group's most notable successes have been on behalf of individuals who've
falled foul of the rights' holders ugly use of litigation: such as "DVD
Jon" Johansen and Dmitri Sklyarov. But the group has been outflanked at
almost every turn by the better-funded copyright lobby. At times it's even
managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory: for example in the case
of Senator Orrin Hatch. Hatch was so disgusted by the way the recording
industry treated artists he threatened to introduce flat fee licenses
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/26/hatch_induce_act/), but was wooed
by persistent flattery from the RIAA. He's now one of the staunchest
pigopolist advocates.

And earlier this year much of the organization's outstanding work on
privacy was undone by Brad Templeton 'Google isn't so spooky'
(http://www.templetons.com/brad/gmail.html) analysis of GMail, which kindly
overlooked the implications of Google's defense of the service: that only
machines read your email. As former DoJ cybercrime czar Mark Rausch pointed
out here (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/15/gmail_spook_heaven/),
that's an invitation for the the FBI to point its machines at your email
too, and make the same defense.

Ah, what problems, what confusion these techno utopians create for
themselves! So not all of the EFF's ineffectiveness can be explained by a
lack of resources, or its location: 2,300 miles further from Congress than
its rival lobby groups. The organization was born out of the popular
technical ethos of libertarianism, in which compromise is distrusted and
direct political engagement is shunned for a faith in market forces. And
being lawyers, they like to fight cases, naturally.

"They like to lose - they feed on the indignation," thunders one reader,
who characterizes the EFF as "a bumbling third-rate ACLU with high-tech
airs. They're mucking about with some important cases, and every time they
lose, we lose."

Ouch.

While there are welcome signs that the EFF is shedding some of its
previously ideologically-hamstrung positions - such as advertising in
Rolling Stone, and sending a blogger to the WIPO discussions - there's some
way to go yet. The decision to advocate a "voluntary" collective license is
going to go safely nowhere, to the contentment of the recording rights
holders - as it's a compact that everyone in the world can sign up to
except the people who matter. (The rights holders themselves)

Still, the new appointments are a welcome sign that new tactics may be
deployed. At every turn the tech lobby has been outsmarted and outfought,
losing almost every important case it's engaged in, and we now practically
have to beg Congress not to detonate our computers. It's going to be a long
haul back. Sitting back and praying that either the market, or some as yet
unknown emergent phenomena, will take care of things is no longer an
option. B.

Related stories

Dirty rotten inducers - the law the IT world deserves?
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/26/hatch_induce_act/)
RIAA praises 'magnificent' P2P
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/16/bainwol_induce_letter/)
EFF asks US court to ditch vague patents
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/21/patents_brief_ambiguous/)
EFF BOFH arrested
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/03/13/eff_bofh_arrested/)
UK Sklyarov protestors picket US embassy
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/08/30/uk_sklyarov_protestors_picket_us/)

B) Copyright 2004

- --
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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