On 05/25/2000, Jon Noring <noring[_at_]netcom.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 24 May 2000, Dodi Schultz <schultz[_at_]compuserve.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 23 May 2000, Jon Noring <noring[_at_]netcom.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > having the police go house to house and search each one without a
> > > search warrant is also *helpful* to fight illegal drugs [... ] if
> > > a person is law-abiding, they wouldn't care if their house is
> > > searched. Yes, it's dismaying to see restrictions on the police
> > > who can't simply search a house when they want if they suspect
> > > something amiss.
> > >
> > > [...]
> > > as it stands now, if anybody doesn't like something at a web site,
> > > they can simply claim they own the copyright and it is taken down,
> > > even if it is clearly a Fair Use excerpt of their work. It doesn't
> > > take a rocket scientist to figure out how terribly wrong this is [...]
> > >
> > > Our civil liberties and constitutional rights should trump copyright
> > > law when the two conflict.
> >
> > To suggest that an invasion of a private home by armed officers of
> > the law is equivalent to requiring a commercial operation to remove
> > text from a Website -- when the *author* claims copyright infringement,
>
> > not when an opponent objects to content -- is, in my opinion, and
> > putting it as politely as I can, without merit. This is not a civil
> > liberties issue. It is an intellectual property issue.
>
> My point is that one cannot separate civil liberties from intellectual
> property issues. They are intertwined at several levels. Where they
> conflict, civil liberties *must* be given precedence.
>
> The "notice to takedown provision" can and has been abused to stifle
> Free Speech (e.g., Organization of Scientology). No actual copyright
> infringement has to occur (e.g., Fair Use) for it to be wielded to
> infringe on Free Speech.
>
> A law that can be abused to infringe on Free Speech is not a good law.
> You don't seem to see this, and being as polite as I can, I find this
> very disconcerting.
There are many laws that can be used to obstruct free speech in addition to copyright, such as libel laws (witness Oprah Winfrey's case in Texas), trademark law, and trade secret law. That doesn't mean that such laws are inherently evil, or that they don't serve a valid purpose. There are even laws that directly "infringe" on the rights of free speech (making incitement to riot a crime, for example) that have been upheld by the courts as reasonable. All of these laws can be abused by the unscrupulous, but surely that is not a sufficient reason to strike them down entirely.
Your statement "A law that can be abused to infringe on Free Speech is not a good law" constitutes, at best, an oversimplification. The fact that the DMCA can be used by some to attempt to stifle the expression of others does not make the law inherently bad or unfair, although it might be for other reasons.
Kevin Grierson
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