|
This C/Net news article on Andrew Huang's attempts to publish a book on Microsoft's X-Box is a chilling example of the economic sledgehammer effect the DMCA has on small business. By writing on a controversial subject -- not an illegal subject, mind you, but a controversial one -- Huang has lost both a publishing contract with Wiley and been refused service by an e-Commerce company.
Here again we have companies bolting from projects on the simple fear that they will be accused under the DMCA, because the law is so badly written, and the costs of defending against it so high, that the economic incentive to pursue even mildly questionable projects is gone.
[...] I get a lot of e-mail from a lot of people, and sometimes you see the subject line and freeze for a moment, thinking, "This is it, they're coming to get me." And then it just turns out to be an innocent question. But the fact that Americart felt it had to reject my book shows how jittery people are. [...]
The DMCA may well be the most economically damaging piece of legislation of the last century, and only now are we beginning to see the unintended consequences of letting media conglomerates write laws for their own benefit. But the public outcry is having some effect. As the article points out highly public DMCA attacks, such as the Wal-Mart case, have raised substantial negative publicity for the plaintiffs. What we are seeing now are more subtle effects of having a legal bludgeon wielded against individuals and small businesses, in discrete efforts that try to insulate major players from public stigma.
In short, the DMCA is rapidly turning into a tool to oppress and monopolize markets at the expense of small business and individuals. The law was never intended to "protect the artists and creators", it was intended to establish legal monopolies. Of course, had any of our Congressmen been doing their jobs in 1997 and 1998 they would have held some modicum of debate on the issue, and maybe even discovered just how badly they were being snookered. But they didn't. They took the money from lobbyists and signed the bill without a comment. Now we are left to clean up their mess.
Xbox hacking book aborted by the DMCA. Bunnie Huang, the MIT grad student who hacked the Xbox, has had his publishing deal with Hungry Minds for a book on hacking the Xbox killed because the publisher is scared that MSFT will come after them with the DMCA. So he decided to self-publish the book, but the shopping-cart service he used also got scared off by the DMCA.
"The thing I have to emphasize is that the book itself is not criminal," Huang said. "It'd be like saying that breaking and entering is illegal, so you can't write a book on how locks work."
[Boing Boing Blog]
|
