Re: [Patents] GregNews: copyright shutting down 321 studios

["Christian Beauprez" <beauprez@beauprez.fsnet.co.uk>]

Dear Hartmut,


> Greg Aharonian's Internet Patnet News Service and this law was deadly to
> 321 Studios, (http://swpat.ffii.org/players/aharonian/) reports about a
> DMCA lawsuit against 321 Studios Inc, a company that was writing software
> for circumventing copy-prevention mechanisms.  Because the DMCA contains
> the word "copyright" in its name, Greg concludes that copyright is a very
> dangerous weapon, more dangerous than patents.

Once again Greg changes his viewpoint more often than he changes his
underwear. Doesn't anyone remember how only a month or two ago Greg was
saying how copyright is impotent because the "method of operation" is not
protected? Oh I must have been halucinating but didn't Greg also write this
paper on the "impotence of copyright"?

http://lists.alt.org/pipermail/fsl-discuss/2002-June/000543.html


What is particularly amusing to me is a while ago he accused me of having
contempt for the law and physics. But in this paper it is Greg who
criticises every single Judge and Commissioner in every major copyright law
case or review for the past 30 years (effectively implying that they were
stupid or misguided for applying the written law), and presents only a
handful of cases where copyright was found not to adequately stretch to
computer programs. - Something which has been rejected incidently by the
vast majority of case law as can be seen in his own paper.

In regards to problems with copyright, I don't believe that anyone is blind
to the excesses of corporate lobbying happening in copyright law as well as
patent law. But the great protection copyright has in it is the limiting
factor of the idea/expression dichotomy. Of course Greg argues that because
there is no concrete line between an idea and the expression of that idea
that we should throw the entire copyright law book away and introduce
patents on ideas.

This however is laughable taughtology since we could also say that "civil
rights" and "reprimanding criminals" are difficult concepts to balance with
no concrete physical line or absolute rule. But I haven't heard anyone say
that we should do away with individual freedom or the criminal justice
system entirely to make it simpler and more predictable. Likewise claiming
abstract ideas lock, stock and barrel at the most abstract level of software
is  not an answer to the problems of copyright. (most of the critics of
copyright argue that it is protecting too much of the idea itself and not
too little.)

Incidently copyright has evolved new doctrines to deal with these problems
such as merger doctrine that states that where there is only one way to
express an idea that they have merged and it is no longer copyrightable, but
then of course Greg will complain about  impotence of copyright since it
doesn't allow people to block the use of "their" concepts- even if those
concepts are necessary building blocks used independently by others. So
whichever direction copyright takes whether looser or more stringent he will
always find a way to rubbish it and either say it is either "impotent" or
the biggest threat to civilisation since the asteroid that wiped out the
dinosaurs.




Christian