Thursday, 23. January 2003
Use the right language for the right effect.
Doc Searls writes about language used by the different sides in the Eldred Trial:
Catch the language. While the one side talks about licenses with verbs like copy, distribute, play, share and perform, the other side talks about rights with verbs like own, protect, safeguard, protect, secure, authorize, buy, sell, infringe, pirate, infringe, and steal.This observation is a problem I have thinking of for a long time. First you can't steal immaterial goods. At least not in Germany. Thivery in German law consists of taking away a thing from the owner and usurp it for yourself or somebody else. software and music are no thing. And you can't take them away. You might steal the medium where it is embodied on, but that's a different thing. In the usual form of infringement you even the owner does not even mention that you have "something" more, since the gread thing about digital goods is the fact that they can be copied without degeneration in source and copy.
While you shouldn't allow this fuzzy terms to lead you to fuzzy thinking you might try to use it against your opponents. Try phrases like:
- Privacy Rape
- Hardware mutiny
- DVD Player insubordination
- freedom hijacking
- monopoly enforcement tool
- subjugation contract
- anti-copy protection
- fair-use prevention device
Lenz Blog
Just found the blawg of Prof. Karl-Friedrich Lenz who is teaching German and European law at the Aoyama Gakuin university, Tokio.
Mr. Lenz has done some very interesting publications like an Article "Criminal Law and the Internet" and a creative commons licensed book "Limits of the patent system - concrte measures against patent inflation" (both in german).
Moving Servers overseas to avoid US Courts.
Lenz suggests repeatly (and again) that
The Japanese copyright term is 50 years after death of the author, in line with Article 7 of the Berne Convention and Art. 9 of TRIPS.
So if people want to do something about it, one idea would be to set up the part of > the Eldred web site illegal in America on a server in Japan.[..]
So even if America has decided not to free that particular part of culture yet, Mr. Eldred might still be able to post that part on the Internet. All he needs is one free country left on the planet and someone ready to operate a server for the part illegal in America in that country.
The U.S. Supreme Court, while rather important for America, has only local influence on the Internet.But as Mr. Lenz points out himself, this doesn't help Mr. Eldred:
The other objection was that if Mr. Eldred would set up a server abroad he might still be sued in the USA, as in the ICraveTV case.
That objection is important. To avoid this kind of risk, supporters of Mr. Eldred abroad would need to act on their own will, leaving Mr. Eldred with no responsibility for their acts.And this even may not help people who want to consume the Invormation hosted on the Servers in this one free country (call it Japan, San Marinao or Sealand). The US Media already tries to block foreigen sites they don't like. This might be directed at first against US based users but a great deal of other nations IP traffic traverses the US too. So if the US backbone providers block a site significant parts of the rest of the world will aso be hurt by this. Or may be they decide not to block IP traffic but to screw with de Root Nameservers which are still more or less 0wned by the US.
So concerning the Internet the U.S. Supreme Court, is not only important for America, has global influence on the Internet. The only way arround this might be cryptology but it hadn't worked out up to now.
disLEXia, a research project by Maximillian Dornseif
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