[105252] in Cypherpunks
Re: A question about the new ISP ruling and email... (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Stewart)
Mon Nov 9 05:07:45 1998
Date: Mon, 09 Nov 1998 01:36:47 -0800
To: Jim Choate <ravage@einstein.ssz.com>,
cypherpunks@einstein.ssz.com (Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer)
From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
In-Reply-To: <199811082137.PAA06514@einstein.ssz.com>
Reply-To: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
At 03:37 PM 11/8/98 -0600, Jim Choate wrote:
>> From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
>> What would the Copyright Office do if 10 million people filed as ISPs?
>
>I don't think that will fly. Any car can be a cab so do all auto operators
>need to license themselves as cabs?
>No, it will take something other than passive access by that end-users
>machine to require them to be registered under this. Now if they operate a
>mailing list or any sort of distribution mechanism then I suspect this will
>be true.
But this isn't _licensing_ ISPs (yet...) It's only offering them
specific protection against draconian copyright infringement laws,
and they can take it or leave it, at least until the Feds find a few
bad copyright violations by stupid providers and get friendly big businesses
to haul them into court, kick their asses, and create really bad precedent.
Then everybody will pretty much have to register, and then there'll
start being more restrictions on registration, which can be much more
strict and far-reaching for voluntary registrations than for
a mandatory license which not only is easier to fight in court
but harder to enforce.
>So what does this new law do to protect copyright holders over and above
>their current protection? I'd say nothing, that it's a veiled move to
>register the Internet in this country to control the spread of free speech.
Yup. Depends somewhat on how clever and visionary the Bad Guys are,
but it's fundamentally Bad Stuff.
>> >> "standard technical means"
>> I don't know what this one is going for - maybe some online equivalent
>> of DIVX that phones home with a payment when you download it?
>
>Things like digital watermarks, back-masked copyright statements, etc.
>was the way I interpreted it.
That was my interpretation also, but I didn't see how it made sense.
If the ISP deliberately removed watermarks, that would obviously be wrong,
but almost anybody who does things like that is publishing rather than
service-providing anyway - and it tends to be things like making thumbnails
of larger pictures, or converting from GIF to progressive-JPEG formats,
rather than deliberate de-watermarking, at least as far as I know.
Would ISPs be required to actively check for watermarks before
accepting/transmitting pictures? Sounds unlikely.
>Do cypherpunks only right code or do they sometimes fight social battles?
We write code, we right code, we write wrong code, but we also fight
social battles. Sometimes we do that with Cypherpunk hats on,
like announcing cracks of GSM, DES, Skipjack, etc., and sometimes
with other hats, whether EFF, ACLU, etc.
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
