So when’s Mr. Movement coming out against the DMCA?
“…I think…Americans are dying for…someone who’ll listen to what they say, respond honestly and directly, and if he disagrees he’ll say why. I’ve heard him do that–I went to a fundraising party for him in Chicago a couple of months ago. The amazing thing about that was that I thought I’d go see a lot of my friends, and there were 500 people there and I didn’t know a single person. This is a movement.” - In These Times founder James Weinstein as quoted in Salon on Howard Dean.
The TeleRead take: OK, Governor Blogger, now show us that you have the guts to live up to the expectations of Weinstein. I’m skeptical. Howard Dean has used the Net to woo supporters, but after months and months, he has yet to denounce the DCMA and related horrors that threaten the medium and the First Amendment. The longer Dean waits, the less regard he seems to have for either. Like Wesley Clark’s campaign site, the Dean site leaves out mention of contact information for key advisors–and in fact doesn’t even list them by name. You really think the MPAA doesn’t know the main players? This is democracy in the best Lashmar tradition.
Memo to the League of Women Voters and the rest: Anyone care about the advisor issue? For all I know, Howard Dean’s think tank could be meeting daily in the Time Warner executive dining room. Same for advisors of Wesley Clark, my own favorite (at least he hasn’t had a chance to wimp out for as long on the DMCA and copyright-term extension). Whether the advisors are official or just a campaign Kitchen Cabinet, I want the full story. I know that the League proudly “encourages the informed and active participation of citizens in government” and “works to increase understanding of major public policy.” Time for some action on the I word in regard to the posting of advisors’ names? If nothing else, it would be fascinating to see how much overlap existed between the list of advisors and big campaign contributors.
June 28th, 2009 at 5:39 am
I believe the DCMA is going too far and is being used to silence critics of corporations such as eBay who server a notice on my host because the site I run at ebuster,co,uk contains documents relating to wide scale fraud on eBay and as such it is important that pages that are displayed are not tampered with.
This time I had some luck since eBay picked on a fake login page I displayed after I had asked eBay on several occasions to get the page remove and from what I can understand they are upset about the eBay log at the top of the pages but it’s not like the site trying to compete against eBay and provides hundreds of links back to eBay.
The reason I present copies of pages is because eBay often remove pages where a dispute is involved so just how can anyone present case of wide scale fraud when it is becoming impossible to present evidence without have a gag order place on your host.
Yes I understand the reason for the DCMA but using it’s powers in this manor strikes at the heart of democracy and is allowing eBay to do as it pleases and in some cases it is not possible to remove the logo as some of the pages displayed on the site have been hijacked by script injection using hexadecimal code to overwrite the original page and therefore making it all but impossible to remove the eBay tm logo and no I don’t have a zillion$ to get involved with eBays lawyers but I do have freedom of speech so if that involves moving the site offshore then that is what I will do