[free-sklyarov] Copyright Contradictions

[Matthew T. Russotto]

On Thu, 8 Aug 2002 02:19:04 -0400, Seth Finkelstein wrote:

 >	But when someone talks about the possibilities of prosecution
 > to people who are *not* already members of the choir, I haven't found
 > the reaction to be an immediate "My God! I never realized it was so 
bad!"
 >  Rather, some common reactions *by skeptics* are (not exhaustively):
 > 1) You're paranoid, it won't happen, it's all in your fevered 
imagination.
 > 2) The ACLU or the EFF will defend you, they live for this sort of 
thing.
 > 3) Break the rules, get what you deserve.

These "skeptics" are unconvincable, and there's no reason to base 
anything on their reaction.  For any point on the continuum of 
"extremely unlikely DMCA use" to "certain DMCA use", they will give you 
one of those three answers.  If, at any point, you find a position where 
they previously claimed was "utterly paranoid" and which someone has now 
been arrested or convicted for, they will simply switch from 1 to 3, 
perhaps passing through 2.  You can't convince these people with 
arguments, nor with facts.  They do not wish to believe that their 
government is capable of such nastiness, and so they will engage in any 
sort of doublethink to keep that disbelief.  They are like Winston 
Smith's neighbor George in _1984_, who kept believing in Big Brother's 
benevolence even as he was imprisoned.

In ten years, these same people will be saying "Of course you need a 
license to program a computer, it would be anarchy otherwise" -- and 
pointing out to them that no license was required in the recent past 
will be utterly futile.

 > So my concern is that, perhaps counter-intuitively, this threat
 > is not going to aid momentum for DMCA changes. And that too much focus
 > on it as a DMCA poster-child is in fact going to *weaken* arguments
 > against the DMCA, because it doesn't capture anything unique or new
 > about the DMCA (being broadly written and used in threats is
 > unfortunately *not* unique or new).

So what can we use?  Can't use Felten; that's a dead issue.  Can't use 
2600, because that's a nasty hacker magazine and anyway instructions 
aren't protected speech (oops, there goes that doublethink).  Can't use 
Sklyarov, because he's a Russian and his company *sold* tools which 
could be used for "piracy".  (A lot of "skeptics" seem to think that 
selling the product makes it wrong. I don't understand the reasoning 
myself)

Fact is, any poster-child we come up with is going to have problems in 
the eyes of these "skeptics".