[nylug-talk] silly DMCA tricks

[Michael Sims]

On Friday 02 May 2003 11:02 am, alex at pilosoft.com wrote:

> It works for them, fine. It doesn't work for me.

You know that without trying it?  Impressive.

> What right do you have to tell me what is good and what is not for my
> business? When you write your code, feel free to release it under GPL.

Ho, hum.  You can be a bad businessman who disregards real, hard facts 
and numbers that go against his beliefs, but please don't be arrogant 
about your ignorance.  Saying that free samples increases sales is a 
proven fact at this point - many publishers, musicians, and artists have 
tried it and found that it works.  You are, of course, free to ignore it 
when running your own business - it's only your prosperity at stake.  
There are lots of things that people do wrong and still manage to have a 
profitable business overall.

> When I develop MY code, I either release it under GPL or I don't. If
> someone steals my commercial software

Steal?  They took it and deleted all your copies so you couldn't use it 
any more?  Matter for the courts.

> , I want a cudgel to hammer them
> and NOT having to wait months and years for courts to work their way,
> by which time the offender has likely to have moved to a different
> site.

Your wants aren't really pertinent here.  Most victims of any sort of 
crime or tort want "revenge", loosely defined.  Our legal system rarely, 
if ever, provides it.  That's not the goal of the system.

> > Which is to say, you don't have any real argument here.  The laws
> > that the RIAA and MPAA have proposed to legalize their hacking into
> > machines to stop copyright infringement are absolutely no different
> > than the notice-and-takedown process in the DMCA.  What the MPAA et
> > al. are saying, in effect, is that notice-and-takedown is too slow,
> > and they should be allowed to speed it up.  What's your problem with
> > that?
>
> Notice-and-takedown is merely a legal procedure where ISP is informed
> of infringing material and is confronted with a choice of accepting
> the liability for the material or taking it down.
>
> Again, to anyone of sane mind, comparison is ridiculous.

We seem to be at an impasse here.  I can't see any difference between 
hacking someone' website to shut it down and shutting it down in some 
other fashion, but apparently you can.  Certainly many of the people 
who've been victimized by takedown notices have found that they were 
*effectively* hacked: the ISP deleted their website, and they were 
forced to restore from not-very-recent backups.


-- 
Michael Sims