5 ms·

If you were an author (of any sort) could you claim that the transmissions of your material (text) that are under copyright were circumvented (DMCA) via a perma

If you were an author (of any sort) could you claim that the transmissions of your material (text) that are under copyright were circumvented (DMCA) via a permacookie under your "moral rights" as an author to publish anonymously?

roque 12y ago
If you are a content provider you may choose not to serve ads on your content.
- cyanbane 12y ago
  hmm, not talking about the content provider. I am saying if I am an author who was publishing something under anonymity and I assumed I was anonymous because I "cleared my cookies/Enabled Do Not Track settings" during the publication of the material - only to discover that my cookies had been circumvented via permacookie by a commercial entity - is my "moral right" of anonymity is now gone? could I claim the permacookie method was a circumvention under the DMCA?
  - dangrossman 12y ago
    There is no "moral right of anonymity" in copyright law. Even supposing there was, de-anonymizing you would not violate anything in the DMCA. The anti-circumvention section prohibits circumventing technical access control measures, not circumventing "rights" in general. Circumventing the rights that copyright law does provide an author is just called copyright infringement.
belovedeagle 12y ago
This gave me an interesting related idea... It may or may not work depending on the legal status of, among other things, the HTTP standards, but could you claim copyright on transmitted HTTP requests, at least if they contained sufficiently interesting contents? If you could, then presumably one would have to say that ISPs have implied license to transmit those (implicitly) copyrighted requests to a third party, namely, the server. However, that implied license would presumably not allow the ISP to transmit a derived work to the third party, i.e., the original request augmented with the tracking header. To argue this one would have to argue that the entire request, headers and all was copyrightable, but I suppose if one did something creative with the headers it could work; e.g., using the HTTP headers as a kind of poem. But of course there's ways to have creative content in something without it being art, just as long as the other side couldn't argue that the headers couldn't be copyrighted because the usual ones are largely predetermined by the standards. Basically this is just the same idea you had, except instead of invoking the moral right to anonymity, it's invoking the easier-to-digest moral right to the content itself. I'd say this was all baloney, but the DMCA is so ridiculously broad that it just might work. Of course, this is all pretending that the DMCA is meant to apply to corporations and not just us small folk.

roque 12y ago

If you are a content provider you may choose not to serve ads on your content.

cyanbane 12y ago
hmm, not talking about the content provider. I am saying if I am an author who was publishing something under anonymity and I assumed I was anonymous because I "cleared my cookies/Enabled Do Not Track settings" during the publication of the material - only to discover that my cookies had been circumvented via permacookie by a commercial entity - is my "moral right" of anonymity is now gone? could I claim the permacookie method was a circumvention under the DMCA?
- dangrossman 12y ago
  There is no "moral right of anonymity" in copyright law. Even supposing there was, de-anonymizing you would not violate anything in the DMCA. The anti-circumvention section prohibits circumventing technical access control measures, not circumventing "rights" in general. Circumventing the rights that copyright law does provide an author is just called copyright infringement.

belovedeagle 12y ago

This gave me an interesting related idea... It may or may not work depending on the legal status of, among other things, the HTTP standards, but could you claim copyright on transmitted HTTP requests, at least if they contained sufficiently interesting contents? If you could, then presumably one would have to say that ISPs have implied license to transmit those (implicitly) copyrighted requests to a third party, namely, the server. However, that implied license would presumably not allow the ISP to transmit a derived work to the third party, i.e., the original request augmented with the tracking header. To argue this one would have to argue that the entire request, headers and all was copyrightable, but I suppose if one did something creative with the headers it could work; e.g., using the HTTP headers as a kind of poem. But of course there's ways to have creative content in something without it being art, just as long as the other side couldn't argue that the headers couldn't be copyrighted because the usual ones are largely predetermined by the standards. Basically this is just the same idea you had, except instead of invoking the moral right to anonymity, it's invoking the easier-to-digest moral right to the content itself. I'd say this was all baloney, but the DMCA is so ridiculously broad that it just might work. Of course, this is all pretending that the DMCA is meant to apply to corporations and not just us small folk.