EFFector, Vol. 14, No. 7; Apr. 20, 2001

EFFector Vol. 14, No. 7 Apr. 20, 2001 editor@eff.org

A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ISSN 1062-9424

IN THE 167th ISSUE OF EFFECTOR (now with over 27,400 subscribers!):

For over ten years, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been happy to offer you our online newsletter, EFFector, free of charge. EFFector currently has over 27,000 subscribers, and we're so pleased that you're interested in learning about our cutting edge work to protect freedom in the digital world. While we're extremely sensitive about spam, we find it imperative that we ask you now to join with us so we can continue doing this important work.

EFF is a member-supported nonprofit organization. Over 75% of our $2 million annual budget comes from memberships and individual donations. Yet EFF currently only has 3,000 active members. We need your support to stay on the cutting edge, taking on such foes as the U.S. government and the movie industry. From Steve Jackson Games (email privacy) to Bernstein (encryption) to 2600 Magazine (reverse engineering and linking), EFF has taken on some of the most precedent-setting cases of our time. Our future looks bright, but we need the financial support of the Internet community--people like you who "get it."

Please consider joining EFF today. You can join online at http://www.eff.org/support, or email us at membership@eff.org. Thank you for helping us work toward a digital future where everyone's basic right to free speech, privacy and free and open communications are maintained and enhanced.

EFF to Rock the NY Music & Internet Expo

Civil Liberties Org Advocates for Artist Empowerment & Free Expression

For Immediate Release April 16,2001

Contact:

New York: The Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) co-founder and board member John Perry Barlow will receive an award at the New York Music & Internet Expo, the third annual digital music conference geared toward independent musicians. Barlow, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, is being recognized for his work to promote liberty and artist empowerment at a private VIP party at Madison Square Garden on April 21st.

EFF will also be exhibiting at the conference and producing a panel discussion introducing its Campaign for Audiovisual Free Expression (CAFE) that advocates for laws and technologies which promote freedom, while empowering artists and audiences. Barlow and several EFF staff members will participate on the April 21st panel with Free Software Foundation's Legal Counsel Eben Moglen to discuss the importance of preserving liberty to use audiovisual technology. EFF's CAFE panel discussion will explore how artists are effected by the recording industry's treatment of fair use, the public domain, privacy concerns, and other civil liberties issues related to intellectual property.

"It is extremely prescient of the New York Music & Internet Expo to embed a discussion of the EFF's Campaign for Audiovisual Free Expression in its program," said the cyber-liberty organization's Vice-Chairman John Perry Barlow. "We are honored by the opportunity and the award, which I am happy to accept on behalf of EFF."

The online civil liberties group launched CAFE in June 1999 to address complex social and legal issues raised by new technological measures for protecting intellectual property. EFF believes that new intellectual property laws and technologies harm - nearly eliminate - the public's fair use rights, and makes criminals of people doing perfectly legitimate things. Our Campaign for Audiovisual Free Expression (CAFE) advances the following principles in response to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and related intellectual property holder "land grabs" against your rights:

For more information on EFF's Campaign for Audiovisual Free Expression (CAFE), see:
http://www.eff.org/cafe

Special Presentation: The Electronic Frontier Foundation Presents CAFE: A discussion of the EFF's Campaign for Audiovisual Free Expression

For More Information of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, see:
http://www.eff.org

About EFF:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil liberties organization working to protect rights in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF actively encourages and challenges industry and government to support free expression, privacy, and openness in the information society. EFF is a member-supported organization and maintains one of the most linked-to Web sites in the world:
http://www.eff.org

What Experiences Have You Had with Internet Blocking Products?

Help EFF Let the World Know

EFF is seeking individuals who have had experiences with Internet blocking (aka filtering or censorware) products to document how these products affect Internet users, especially students in public schools and library patrons in public libraries.

Please write up your experiences in as much detail as possible, including any supporting product documentation, screen snapshots, etc., so that we can best understand and make that information available during research and policy evaluations of Internet blocking products.

There is also an opportunity to provide input to "a study on tools and strategies for protecting kids from pornography and their applicability to other inappropriate material on the Internet". At the request of the U.S. Congress, the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies (which include the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine) is conducting the study.

The study organizers are seeking a diversity of comments by holding hearings in a variety of accessible locations as EFF Online Activist Will Doherty discovered when providing comments to them via a video conference link at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference in Cambridge, MA, on March 8, 2001.

Regional meetings and site visits will be held in the following locations and on the following dates.

Whenever possibly, please provide copies of your testimony to EFF for use in responding effectively to Internet blocking policy proposals.

Please send the Internet blocking materials, preferably online, to Will Doherty at wild@eff.org

Matching Fund Drive: The USENIX Association recently renewed its support for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) by committing $150,000 over the next three years to protect copyright and fair use rights related to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) legal cases. EFF is opposing the anticircumvention rules of the DMCA as violating constitutional rights to free expression. Help us to match this $150,000 amount with your dollars during our April "DMCA/DVD legal fund drive." These cases willl cost us $1.5 million over the next three years -- we need your help to win.

The cases build on EFF's earlier precedent-setting victory, Bernstein vs. U.S. Department of Justice, where a federal appeals court ruled that code is free speech and, therefore, protected by the Constitution. The USENIX Association also helped fund the Bernstein case in 2000. For more information about the case, refer to DMCA and DeCSS Project. For more information about EFF, visit the EFF web site.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act was introduced in Congress several years before it actually passed in 1998. From its inception, the law was rife with problems for free speech and the growth of technology. Most particularly, the anticircumvention rules of section 1201 of the DMCA give content holders much broader rights to digital content than they ever held with non-digital content. Concerned about fair use and reverse engineering, EFF, with several other groups, including members of the library and scientific communities, lobbied hard against passage of the DMCA. However, the music, movie and software industries, with their bottomless funding bases, lobbied hard for its passage, and, ultimately, the DMCA became the law of the land.

This law is problematic on several levels. Most importantly, it will eviscerate the public side of the copyright bargain -- the part that recognizes that the goal of the copyright monopoly is to give authors the incentive to produce works so that eventually those works will fall into the public domain or be available for fair use or ordinary use to all people. The DMCA effectively eliminates fair use by letting content owners use technology to completely control all uses of their works. This has already come to a head in the 2600 case (see below), where content owners have gone after an electronic newspaper for publishing computer code.

Also troublesome is the criminalization of circumvention software based upon its possible misuse, even though it has plain and important acceptable uses. This has also come to a head in the 2600 case, where software that circumvents the encryption code used on DVDs was posted on the Internet to facilitate the creation of a DVD player using the Linux operating system. The court held that since the software could be used to pirate DVDs, it was in violation of the DMCA.

Finally, the impact on science could be quite severe, since those who seek to do encryption research that could be used for circumvention by others must effectively clear their work ahead of time with the content industry or face liability for publishing it. Science rarely works that way, even where the results could impact national defense.

The problem presented by section 1201 of the DMCA is that if circumventing encryption or providing tools that can circumvent is illegal, then you never get to the "use" at all, even if it would be deemed fair use. Put another way, it simply doesn't matter if you could copy the work legally if accessing the work is itself illegal. Similarly, if the providing of tools that allow access to the work is banned, then there is no way for most people to exercise the right of fair use.

For further information on EFF's Campaign for Audiovisual Free Expression (CAFE), also see EFF's website:
http://www.eff.org/cafe

Administrivia

The Electronic Frontier Foundation
454 Shotwell Street
San Francisco CA 94110-1914 USA
+1 415 436 9333 (voice)
+1 415 436 9993 (fax)
http://www.eff.org

Editors:
Katina Bishop, EFF Education & Offline Activism Director
Stanton McCandlish, EFF Technical Director/Webmaster
editors@eff.org

Reproduction of this publication in electronic media is encouraged. Signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of EFF. To reproduce signed articles individually, please contact the authors for their express permission. Press releases and EFF announcements & articles may be reproduced individually at will.

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IN THE 167th ISSUE OF EFFECTOR (now with over 27,400 subscribers!):

EFF Needs Your Help

EFF Receives Digital Music Award, Advances Audiovisual Freedom