Perhaps this will be my last DMCA-bashing post of the year. Or perhaps this post will force me, my ISP and Radio Userland (the weblog's host company) to shut down.
This article from Wired is as depressing and frightening as anything I've seen all year. To me, it's every bit as frightening as watching the towers fall on 9-11-01.
The article describes how Dow Chemical took offense to a site making fun of them, and used the DMCA to force the site to shut down. Because of a stupid move on the parody site creator's part, I think Dow was within their rights to do so (the creator registered the domain with Dow's President). What happened next is the scary part. The top-level ISP (Verio), scared of Dow and the DMCA, shut down the entire web hoster and all its clients - it cut them off from the Internet, effectively shutting down hundreds of people and businesses having nothing to do with the conflict. The Wired article included this quote from the web hoster:
"One of my users said it's as if an offensive poster mocking a company was put up on a building, and when the company's lawyers couldn't reach the building owner immediately, they got a bulldozer and knocked down the whole neighborhood," Staehle added.
Freedom of speech is possibly the most powerful political idea ever created. It's possibly the major reason our nation has ascended to the top of the world heap. And yet we have pissed it away in a single law created to protect the music and movie industries - the DMCA. Thank you, President Clinton.
If we generalize the events described in the article just a bit, we'll find that:
- A corporation lampooned by Saturday Night Live or Mad TV could demand that the show or perhaps the broadcast network be shut down
- Individuals using encryption for private email or chat could be prosecuted and jailed
- Public speeches or presentations that use content from a corporation to make a negative point about that corporation could be prosecuted
After that, who knows. The sad irony is that the owner of the site described in the Wired article is looking to re-host the site in Europe. Think about that - in Eurpope! At this moment there's more freedom of expression in the European community than in the US, at least online.
So this will be my one New Year's resolution for 2003: To get more informed and to get more involved in the fight to protect personal freedom in the US, particularly freedom of speech. I'll write, I'll contact Congress-critters, and if I can find an organization that is doing something constructive about all this, I'll join it. It appears to me we've taken the first couple of steps toward becoming a police state as bad as anything seen since the Cold War, and we now have technology that gives a bad law very, very long arms.
I still have faith that we'll get turned around as a nation - that we'll preserve the creative chaos that made us great - but it's a dark time at present.
7:26:27 AM 
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