John Young at Cryptome has made available a PDF with the now-suppressed slides from Mike Lynn’s controversial presentation at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas this week. Unfortunately, it’s tough to get through to Cryptome due to demand - so I’m making the file available via the Coral distribution network so that everyone can read it without beating up on John’s server too badly.
Matt Homann suggests “Blogging Insurance“, whereby some benevolent organization - such as big law firms, or blog software firms, or Google ,(or Santa Claus?) will pay for insurance, meant to fund the legal defense (or indemnification?) where bloggers are sued.
Apparently the genesis of this discussion (other commentators have proposed a “Blogger Legal Defense Society“) came when a blogger posted first an audio clip, then a transcript, of the episode of Jeopardy where the record-winning contestant finally lost. Sony TV sent him cease-and-desist letters, and the blogger took down the content because he was concerned about his ability to enter into a war-of-attrition lawsuit against Sony.
I don’t imagine that the people who are talking about “blog insurance” or “blogger legal defense” really intend to exclude Internet authors or publishers who aren’t using blog software, or who aren’t creating traditional frequently-updated informal-tone websites. At least I hope they don’t intend that. More reasonably, I expect that what they’re proposing is some sort of general protection for little guys who are threatened by big evil bullies. That’s a nice sentiment, and hopefully people are, and will continue to be, sympathetic to underdogs.
There are two problems with the approaches discussed, however. The first is known to economists as “moral hazard” - the tendency of people to alter their behavior when they know another party is bearing the risk associated with their behavior. The second, related problem involves distinguishing between defensible and indefensible claims.
It’s not clear to me that it makes any sense to create an environment where we’re effectively saying “Write anything you want - you don’t need to be worried about accuracy, some nice people will pay for your attorney if you get sued.” It’s especially ironic to adopt that posture with respect to (stereotypically) individuals, but to expect others (stereotypically “corporations”) to scrupulously comply with laws regarding privacy, fair information practices, and accurate credit reporting.
I think it’s even weirder to imagine that perhaps the AmLaw 200 - the firms who make their money representing, typically, the Fortune 500 - will somehow pony up cash to pay for insurance to cover the defense costs for the defendants who are creating the problems that AmLaw 200 are hired to solve.
Ok, I’ll admit that it actually makes sense, in a perverse way, but I don’t think that’s what the original commenator intended. Going back and reading his post again, it’s clear that it’s not - his message has plenty of qualifiers discussing frivolous litigation and in-the-right bloggers - but not a defense fund, or an insurance fund, for everyone who manages to piss someone else off, whether they deserved it or not.
Ultimately, I think the EFF already does a pretty good job taking care of this - they provide active assistance in cases they find particularly important or egregious, and maintain a “cooperating attorneys” mailing list to help find volunteer or low-cost attorneys for cases where EFF isn’t going to intervene directly.
I don’t mean to say that there’s no problem here, or that since EFF exists nobody needs to care about free speech, but I think it makes a lot more sense for individual defendants to continue to seek help as individuals based on the righteousness of their individual circumstances, rather than lump true underdogs-in-need together with people who deliberately seek drama and excitement and trouble, and won’t be satisfied until they find it.
John Young pointed out that the ND CA PACER site now has images online for the ND CA MPAA suit - I grabbed them, here they are for free. I skipped paying for the ADR order and the notification to the Copyright Office that suit had been filed. I don’t have time to monkey with an index page for that directory right now, but the files are there if anyone’s interested.
I haven’t seen any substantive discussion of the progress of the case, so here’s my 30-second version: the MPAA has sued 12 unnamed defendants (all SBC Internet customers, as I read the complaint) for distributing movies using P2P software. The defendands are sued as “john does”. The MPPA asked the court for permission to conduct discovery against SBC Internet to learn the identities of the 12 defendants, whose IP addresses are disclosed in the complaint. The judge granted permission for discovery from SBC against only the first defendant, discussing problems which arose in other DirectTV anti-piracy litigation.
So the MPAA has apparently filed suits across the country against P2P filesharers allegedly sharing copyrighted movies. MSNBC mentions that a suit has been filed in the Eastern District of Missouri (St. Louis) - the documents in the case are available via PACER. I downloaded the docs that looked marginally interesting and am making them available here to save everyone else having to pay $.07/page. Here’s the complaint, Exhibit A, the disclosure of corporate interests, the civil cover sheet, and the certificate of original filing.
One more link with lots of good data about how electronic voting systems work (or don’t) - this report prepared for the Ohio Secretary of State in December, 2003.