FC: More on sex sites, DMCA, celebrity names, and AdultCheck

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

Previous message:
http://www.politechbot.com/p-03355.html

---

From: "Ethan Ackerman" <eackerma () u washington edu>
To: <declan () well com>
Subject: RE: DMCA means sex sites must not mention celeb names, AdultCheck says
Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2002 13:02:04 -0700
Message-ID: <NDBBLEBDGLEDPDMLNBFJKECECFAA.eackerma () u washington edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
        charset="Windows-1252"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal

Greetings Declan,

While I'm sure you have no shortage of correction emails coming in, I
thought it important to note that the two most recent politech posts re:
Britney Spears, the DMCA, and AdultCheck are somewhat misleading.  It is
implied in the title that the DMCA is somehow the law behind such
blacklisting.  While it is fair, to a first approximation, to say the DMCA
is quite foul, it is likely that unrelated state "right-of-publicity or
privacy" laws are why AdultCheck is curbing it's affiliates.

(Unless counsel is quite uninformed, or I am uninformed) the DMCA addresses
copyright circumvention, not rights to personas and names.  That is
primarily the realm of "right-of-publicity or privacy" laws, and to a
limited extent, trademark.  Fortunately, most state "right-of-publicity or
privacy" laws are explicit in their subservience to the 1st Amendment.
AdultCheck was probably killing two birds with one stone in their
announcement, which looks to be titled "DMCA / ROP Policy Update."

The dirt on the DMCA is considerable and ubiquitous, let's kill it with just
the true dirt.

-Ethan


Ethan Ackerman
Senior Research Associate,
Shidler Center for Law, Commerce & Technology
University of Washington School of Law
1100 NE Campus Parkway
Seattle, WA 98105
Tel:  206.440.0853/Fax: 206.616.3427
http://www.law.washington.edu/lct/





-------------------------------------------------------------------------
POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list
You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice.
Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/
To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html
This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Politech dinner in SF on 4/16: http://www.politechbot.com/events/cfp2002/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------