Critical Commons at Open Video Alliance

Editor's Notes

• #3: In Lawrence Lessig's 2002 Open Source Convention presentation he issued the following challenge to open source and free software advocates: There's a handful, we can name them, of people you could be supporting, you could be taking. Let's put this in perspective: How many people have given to EFF? OK. How many people have given to EFF more money than they have given to their local telecom to give them shitty DSL service? See? Four. How many people have given more money to EFF than they give each year to support the monopoly--to support the other side?
• #6: In the legislation signed by Bush2 establishing a cabinet level Copyright Czar position, the Senate stated its belief that: “ (5) terrorists and organized crime utilize piracy, counterfeiting, and infringement to fund some of their activities;” The Pirate Bay (often abbreviated TPB) is a website that serves as an index for .torrent files that it tracks. It bills itself as "the world's largest BitTorrent tracker" and is ranked 97 (as of 10 May 2008) in the Alexa ranking list and ranked 258 (as of 1 February 2008) by Quantcast.[1] [2] Initially established in November 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån ('The Piracy Bureau'), it has been operating as a separate organization since October 2004. The site is currently run by Gottfrid Svartholm ("anakata"), Fredrik Neij ("TiAMO") and Peter Sunde ("brokep").[citation needed] The Pirate Bay is known in the online "file sharing" community as one of the more prominent websites which distributes torrents that point to unlicensed copies of copyrighted material as well as open source free content. In some countries, offering copyrighted torrent media could be considered an illegal inducement of copyright infringement,[3] but in other countries this is not the case.[4] In Sweden, torrent trackers have not been found to be illegal. On 31 May 2006, the site's servers, located in Stockholm, were raided by Swedish police, causing it to go offline for three days. Upon reopening, the site's number of visitors doubled, the increased popularity attributed to greater exposure through the media coverage. The raid, alleged to be politically motivated and under pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA),[5] was reported as a success by the MPAA in the immediate aftermath, but with the site being restored within days and the raising of the debate in Swedish culture, The Pirate Bay and other commentators considered the raid "highly unsuccessful".[6] On 31 January 2008, Swedish prosecutors filed charges against four of the individuals behind The Pirate Bay.[7]
• #8: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/ On January 20, 2000, United States District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the Southern District of New York issued a preliminary injunction in Universal City Studios et al. v. Reimerdes et al., prohibiting the defendants from distributing computer code for reading encrypted DVDs. The defendants had been sued under 17 USC 1201(a)(2), also known as section 1201(a)(2) of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Judge Kaplan subsequently issued a memorandum order in which he indicated that executable source code was not subject to First Amendment protection against prior restraint of speech. This finding is contrary to that of the 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals, who ruled in the Bernstein cryptography case that source code is indeed protected speech. In their decision, The 9th Circuit even quoted some Scheme code from the declaration of MIT Professor Harold Abelson, explaining why source code is an effective and sometimes preferred means of human communication. Professor Andrew Appel of Princeton University also filed a declaration explaining the importance for computer science of being able to publish source code. More recently, the 6th Circuit US Court of Appeals ruled in the Junger cryptography case that, independent of its functional significance, the expressive nature of source code affords it First Amendment protection. If code that can be directly compiled and executed may be suppressed under the DMCA, as Judge Kaplan asserts in his preliminary ruling, but a textual description of the same algorithm may not be suppressed, then where exactly should the line be drawn? This web site was created to explore this issue, and point out the absurdity of Judge Kaplan's position that source code can be legally differentiated from other forms of written expression.
• #14: http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/
• #15: http://www.archive.org
• #16: http://www.chillingeffects.org
• #17: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr