more on good question DMCA used to shut downcampus IDsecurity talk

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Dave Wilson <dave () wilson net>
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 10:15:51 -0500 (EST)
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] more on good question DMCA used to shut downcampus
IDsecurity talk


I probably should have been more specific. Unlike pretty much everything
else you buy, from books to autos, software sales are generally governed
under contract law (those little licenses you have to click through to
startup). And pretty much all those contracts say the software developer
isn't liable if the software doesn't work as advertised. While it's true
there's a lot of noise about how such contracts are not enforceable for
various reasons, and indeed a couple of cases in which such contracts have
been found void by the courts, at the moment that's the exception and not
the rule. For those paying attention, *this* is the real hazard behind
legislation like the DMCA and tools designed to protect digitized
intellectual property: That system removes intellectual property rights
from the domain of copyright law and turns them over to contract law, where
each publisher decides unilaterally what is permissable (and having once
again stated a very complicated argument in a single sentence I'm sure
there'll be a lot more people jumping in on this too :-).

-dave

------ End of Forwarded Message

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