Chilling Effects Clearinghouse — A joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and University of Maine law school clinics.
Now this is long overdue.
For the past several years, webmasters have been fighting a losing battle with intellectual property lawyers and the corporate interests they represent. Someone will put up, say, a fan site for their favourite hockey team. The next thing they know, they get a sternly-worded letter from the NHL’s lawyer ordering them to remove logos, photographs and other material. That letter is often copied to their web hosting company… which often plays it safe, and pulls the plug on the site.
I’m not sure if the numbers are out there, but I’m willing to bet that cease-and-desist letters have brought down more web sites than hacking has.
Most of these web sites are run as a labour of love. The webmaster happens to be a huge fan of Wonder Woman, Apple Computers or Star Wars. And when the legal hammer comes down, these folks can’t afford to consult an intellectual property lawyer. Instead, they knuckle under, shut down their sites and delete the files.
Well, it turns out that those cease-and-desist letters may not always have the law on their side… and that they’re often intended more as a way to stifle perfectly legal activity than as a defence of legitimate rights.
Enter the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, bringing togeter some pretty impressive names in law and online freedom. They have a large and growing database of those cease-and-desist letters, and offer commentary and information that can be a lifeline for beleaguered webmasters.
“We are excited about the new opportunities the Internet offers individuals to express their views, parody politicians, celebrate their favorite movie stars, or criticize businesses,” the site’s authors say.
“But we’ve noticed that not everyone feels the same way. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some individuals and corporations are using intellectual property and other laws to silence other online users. Chilling Effects encourages respect for intellectual property law, while frowning on its misuse to ‘chill’ legitimate activity.”
On the face of it, some of it seems frivolous: the Lyons Partnership going after a site that “incorporates the use and threat of violence towards the childrenÔø?s character Barney without permission from Lyons Partnership,” for example.
But if you think suppressing this kind of site isn’t the thin edge of the wedge on freedom of expression, think again. Take the notorious Church (sic) of Scientology’s ongoing efforts to shut down its critics.
As the online Yale Law School journal LawMeme reports, Scientology’s lawyers convinced the folks at Google to stop linking to an anti-Scientology site called Xenu.com. Google has since restored links to the site’s front page, but another service — the Wayback Machine, an archive of web sites — has given in.
Chilling Effects covers that case extensively, as well as online parody, criticism (the Radio Shack lawyers apparently blew a fuse over the site “radioslack.com”), fan fiction (“Kirk shuddered as Spock’s fingernails raked his thighs”), online anonymity and a host of other issues.
They point out that there are legitimate interests protected under IP law: “Certainly intellectual property rights should be respected — and we hope this site will aid you in doing so — but they shouldn’t be misused to impede legitimate activity.”
They’re careful provide information only, and not to prejudge cases (which is unfortunate, because I can’t wait to find out how the Australian penis enlargement case turns out).
Good for them.
I wonder, though, about the whole idea of legitimate intellectual property.
As a writer, I’d like to be compensated for the use of anything I’ve created. But I also recognize that content creation is a vast, powerful industry.
Disney, to take just one example, spends untold millions on saturation advertising, doing all it can to make its trademarked characters part of the fabric of our (and pretty much every other) culture. Disney’s stories and characters have become part of our lives and our way of understanding the world, for better or worse.
Doesn’t there come a point where a company can no longer claim exclusive jurisdiction over the symbols and images they’ve worked so hard to hammer into our heads?
