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At our February meeting, a panel of three (Neal McBurnett, Carl
Oppedahl and Eric Robison) engaged with the audience in a lively
discussion about legal constraints on netizens. There was a broad
degree of concern and agreement among the panelists and audience, but
several points caused divisions, as usual.
On the Domain Name/trademark front, Carl did not allow Eric to
downplay his role in establishing some good legal precedents. Eric's
determination to defend his rights, at considerable personal cost, in
the face of a very well-funded adversary (Hasbro), has helped level
the playing field for all of us. He won 4 important judgements
against either NSI or Hasbro. MI.com, one of the beneficiaries of one
of those rulings was so appreciative of his efforts that they forced
the people that sued them to pay damages to Eric's lawyers.
Go to http://www.clue.com/legal/index.html.
to read more and to donate
to the cause. See Carl's advice about domain name disputes at
http://www.patents.com/dno.htm.
And see the 1996 FRUUG meeting on
this topic at
http://www.fruug.org/Archive/1996-09/writeup.html
On the copyright/patent debate, Carl started off by noting that it is
no surprise that the legal system is mostly focused on helping
maintain the status quo, and help those that already have wealth and
power try to preserve it. He said the patent laws end up helping the
little guy against the big players more often than most laws. He
recommended that even people who disagree with the current system of
patents and copyrights should take advantage of the protections it
offers. If you officially register your copyrights, you can
recover legal fees, which is a rare and valuable privilege.
Neal suggested that given the large number of simply bogus
patents in the software area, society in general loses out even if a
"little guy" gets exclusive use of an idea for up to 20 years because
of a patent. The very existence of patents and copyrights, unlike
classical property law, is allowed in the constitution for a specific
purpose: "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". If
they have the opposite effect in certain fields (e.g. software patents
and digital copyrights) under current conditions, the laws ought to be
updated.
One recent posting on the Copy Protection issue comes from John
Gilmore, at http://www.toad.com/gnu/whatswrong.html
He points out many ways in which the media interests are lobbying for
stricter laws controlling what end-users can do. And he makes the
stronger point that they are combining those laws with technological
measures which prevent even traditional "Fair Use" of materials
the user has paid for. In fact many new products don't even let
individuals make high-quality recordings and copies of their
own work.
As the technological miracle of cheap duplication of information
continues to work its way into society, conflicts with traditional
ways to reward creative efforts will grow larger. How these conflicts
are addressed will have major implications for the future. Pay
attention!
The handout from the meeting is available at http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/talks/yokes.html
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