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!):
* EFF Needs Your Help
* EFF Receives Digital Music Award, Advances Audiovisual Freedom
* Send Us Your Stories About Blocking Products
* EFF Announces Matching Funds Drive
* Administrivia
For more information on EFF activities & alerts: http://www.eff.org
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EFF Needs Your Help
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.
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EFF Receives Digital Music Award, Advances Audiovisual Freedom
EFF to Rock the NY Music & Internet Expo
Civil Liberties Org Advocates for Artist Empowerment & Free Expression
For Immediate Release April 16,2001
Contact:
Robin Gross, EFF Staff Attorney for Intellectual Property,
+1 415-863-5459
robin@eff.org
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:
1. Piracy of an artist's work is illegal. Fair use is not.
2. We have the right to hear, speak, learn, sing,think, watch, and be
heard.
3. No one should assume by default that we're criminals, and the
technology we use shouldn't do so either.
4. We have a right to use technology to shift time & space (including
using a media player of choice, when we want, and where we want,
with content we legally have access to.)
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
April 21, 2001 1:15 pm - 2:15 pm (Room A)
* John Perry Barlow, Co-Founder, EFF/Grateful Dead Lyricist
* Eben Moglen, Professor, Columbia Law School
* John Marttila, EFF CAFE Director
* Patrick Norager, Radio EFF Station Manager
* Robin D. Gross, EFF Staff Attorney for Intellectual Property
(moderator)
For More Information on EFF's Panel Discussion on CAFE, see:
NY Music & Internet Expo: www.newyorkexpo.com
For More Information of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, see:
http://www.eff.org
For More Information on the Free Software Foundation, see:
http://www.fsf.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
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EFF Wants to Hear Your Stories About Blocking Products
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.
* Kansas City, MO April 25-26, 200
* Salt Lake City, UT April 26-27, 2001
* San Diego, CA May 2-3, 2001
* Blacksburg/Roanoke, VA May 8-9, 2001
* Miami, FL, dates to be determined
Whenever possibly, please provide copies of your testimony to EFF for
use in responding effectively to Internet blocking policy proposals.
Specific locations for open testimony and agendas for each regional
meeting/site visit are available at:
http://www4.nas.edu/cpsma/cstb/itas.nsf/44bf87db309563a0852566f2006d63bb/1235607911a65f498525686d0061bf0b?OpenDocument
More information on the project is available at:
http://www.itasnrc.org
Please send the Internet blocking materials, preferably online, to
Will Doherty at wild@eff.org
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EFF Announces Matching Fund Drive
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.
To contribute, please see our Support EFF pages at:
http://www.eff.org/support
or contact EFF's development director Jance Mantell at
jmantell@eff.org.
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.
BACKGROUND:
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
EFFector is published by:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation
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http://www.eff.org
Editors:
Katina Bishop, EFF Education & Offline Activism Director
Stanton McCandlish, EFF Technical Director/Webmaster
editors@eff.org
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