Category Archives: Law: Copyright and DMCA

EFF is seeking an intellectual property staff attorney for its legal team, based in the Bay Area. Responsibilities will include litigation, public speaking, media outreach, plus legislative and regulatory advocacy, all in connection with a variety of intellectual property and high technology matters.

Qualified candidates should have at least four years of experience with litigation in at least one substantive area of IP law (patent, copyright, trademark, or trade secret) and a solid knowledge of the litigation process. Candidates should also have significant experience managing cases, both in terms of overall case strategy as well as day-to-day projects and deadlines. Candidates should have good communication skills and interest in working with a team of highly motivated lawyers and activists in a hard-working nonprofit environment. Strong writing and analytical skills as well as the ability to be self-motivated and focused are essential. Tech savviness and familiarity with Internet civil liberties and high tech public interest issues preferred.

Interested applicants should submit a resume, writing sample, and references to ipjob@eff.org.

Further details:

• Salary range = $60-70k depending on experience
• Health, dental, and vision benefits

(Plus, you get to work with some really great people.)

Based on some of the comments elsewhere I guess I was too terse in my earlier post on the battle between free speech via technology and the counter-urge to monitor it (a technique which may not be designed to censor but enables censorship). [Good Defense Is Not A Victory. It Just Means You Haven't Lost Yet.]I agree there have been some good (lower) court decisions in the US, although I remain very nervous about what the Supreme Court will do to them. The problem is, though, that I don't think that the courts are the major battlefield here. The significant facts, to me, are in the legislature and the executive.

Perhaps the biggest worry is that the fix is in to try to do a CALEA to VOIP: just as they did with old fashioned phones, so now the governments of the world intend to require the service provides to build in the ability to wiretap large numbers of simultaneous internet-based phone conversations. Of necessity, that technology will also work for all other internet-based methods of communication. That’s major. (The cybercrime convention is just a warm-up exercise.)

A secondary issue is the move towards tightening screws on Internet access – more countries are showing an interest following Pakistan and China’s lead in requiring internet cafes and other kiosks to record who uses the service and when so that if something is traced back to that place and time the user can be identified. These are in effect speech licenses.

And, there’s stuff to worry about in the para-copyright realm. We can deal with copyright (trademark, other than famous mark rights expansion, and patent, other than process patents, I generally support more or less as applied). DMCA itself continues to throw an ugly shadow. And I am also concerned about intellectual property style protections for data compilations (databases).

Back in the day — going on ten years ago — we thought the 'net would change the world. We were right about that, but not in the ways we thought — we thought PGP and onion routing and an explosion of free speech meant an end to content control.

We vastly overestimated the speed with which non-techies would take up the toys; the growing and enduring dominance of one software platform that didn't take up the toys; and especially the ability of the empire to strike back via both tech (trusted user) and law (DMCA and worse).

Some time about four or five years ago, somewhere around the Article 2B/UCITA fight, of necessity we switched to fighting defense instead of offense. And don't get me wrong, that defense is important. But it's still defense.

But it's still disheartening to read real smart people writing that it's been a good year for those of us concerned about free speech, democracy, and creativity because we beat back the baddies.

I guess I think it wasn't a bad year, and yes there were some decent court decisions, but I call it not bad only because the hardware tech and the open source is still slowly spreading, and so far at least just keeping ahead of the Empire. And especially because of the growth of 'offense' movements such as the free culture movement.

[Sorry for the obscurity of some this post and the absence of links. I'm still digging out from under our move…and I have a ton of work.]

Tom's Hardware Guide: Tom's Hard News:

The record companies' next witness in the trial, Professor Leon Sterling, Adacel chair of software innovation and engineering, University of Melbourne, has filed two affidavits on his examination of Kazaa Media Desktop (KMD) documents.

In the affidavits, filed in court Tuesday morning, Sterling claimed that whether a system was managed centrally or peer-to-peer was only a design detail, not a technically significant characteristic.

Assuming this report is accurate — never a certainty — you have to wonder what planet this guy is living on. P2P vs. central server is no mere design detail. It's an entirely different philosophy.

Looks like Jamie Love, EFF and the other goods folks who have been working the refs at WIPO are making enough progress that someone is getting nervous.

UM has become one of the first ten universities to sign up for Napster's “free” online music access. Sadly, this came at the urging of the student government.

For a fixed fee paid by the University, all undergrads get unlimited access to Napster's music library, from which they download DRM'ed files that can only be copied twice and can't be put on DVD without paying a dollar per song.

Given the 3.5 year life of the average PC that means today's freshmen will lose their music libraries around when they get their Ph.D's.

And this is called “outsmarting the pirates”! More like “outsmarting yourself” I'd think.

For some useful background on this “service”, see the invaluable Ernest Miller's Notes on Napster's Matriculation at Penn State, where he collects links so I don't have to. See also Slashdot's debate.