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Re: Certificate / CPS issues

2003-06-06 09:50:10
Dan Kohn wrote:
Regarding a "passport" mechanism, have you taken a look at
www.habeas.com?  Specifically, they offer such a "this is not spam"
warrant mark, and the pricing for individuals is free.  The trick is
that they use copyright and trademark law as the enforcement mechanism. 

I'm surprised that Habeas has caught on even to the extent it has, as I
see a fatal flaw in this use of copyright to get legal control.  It is
reminiscent of a legal case I recall where a games console refused to
execute any game unless a certain copyright notice (ascribing copyright to
the console manufacturer) appeared in a known location in the game ROM.
Third-party game manufacturers put the notice in their games, and were
hauled into court.  The court held that the copyright notice in question
was a functional part of the interface between the game and the console,
and that this overrode its normal semantic of signifying copyright
ownership.  The notice that the console looked for therefore didn't
mean anything legally, and the notice elsewhere in the game (the real
notice, ascribing ownership to the game manufacturer) was the legally
significant one.

What Habeas does is akin to publishing a protocol or file format in
a copyrighted document, and then suing implementors of the protocol
for copying sections of protocol data from the document.  It's mixing
expression with content (copyright protects one and not the other).
We wouldn't stand for it if Microsoft did that, and I don't think the
courts would either.  In fact, Microsoft has tried things very similar to
this, and we didn't stand for it.  I'm astonished that members of this
overwhelmingly pro-freedom and pro-reverse-engineering subculture have
themselves tried to deploy exactly the same odious trick.  Although I
approve of Habeas' aims, for the sake of our freedoms I hope that their
technique is held to be ineffective.

FWIW, my spam filter picks up Habeas headers as a strong ham indicator,
appearing in 0.4% of ham in my corpus and not at all in spam.  I'm waiting
to see which of these numbers is going to increase more significantly.

-zefram
-- 
Andrew Main (Zefram) <zefram(_at_)fysh(_dot_)org>



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