[Foundation-l] Texas Instruments signing key controversy

Thu Mar 4 14:08:03 UTC 2010

You've identified one of the criticisms of OCILLA/DMCA -- that it can be
easily abused by copyright holder to keep stuff offline. (This is what the
EFF is probably getting involved over). However, the proper response to that
is for the alleged infringer to request sanctions against the copyright
holder for misrepresentation. It's not the Foundation's place to get
involved, nor the proper use of their resources to second and third-guess
these decisions. They take the office action, remove whatever it is, and if
the underlying legal battle gets fought, they can then go and reverse it. So
no, there's no obligation to interject ourselves, but more importantly I
think we DO have an obligation to respect the existing legal system as well
as protect the entire project from litigation.

Dan Rosenthal

On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 10:32 PM, <wjhonson at aol.com> wrote:

>
>  But Dan your reply allows any illegitimate claim of copyright infringement
> to be acted upon as an office action.
>
> It's possible that we could say that the office cannot know whether a claim
> is legitimate or not, but if the office is informed through a reliable
> source that a claim is illegitimate and they have taken action, are they
> obligated to refuse the positive action they've taken?
>
> That's the issue.
>
> W. J.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dan Rosenthal <swatjester at gmail.com>
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Sent: Tue, Mar 2, 2010 7:26 pm
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Texas Instruments signing key controversy
>
>
> I think you're misconstruing who is doing what here. The Foundation is not
> the
> "person" required to send the counter notice, nor do they have the freedom
> or
> the obligation to involve themselves in a copyright dispute between TI and
> another user. It's not their determination to make whether the action is
> necessary or not.
>
> -Dan
> On Mar 2, 2010, at 9:50 PM, Techman224 wrote:
>
> > It has come to my attention that the Wikimedia Foundation through its
> "Office
> actions" policy removed and oversighted the signing keys for Texas
> Instruments
> calculators under a DMCA takedown notice on October 7, 2009. Cary Bass then
> oversighted all revisions that had the signing keys. Let me just say it
> might
> not be necessary to continue to block the signing keys. The Electronic
> Frontier
> Foundation has reported that they warned Texas Instruments about the DMCA
> notices as noted, "the DMCA explicitly allows reverse engineering to create
> interoperable custom software like the programs the hobbyists are using."
> [1].
> Further Texas Instruments failed to respond to the letter and the deadline,
> so
> the bloggers who put up the codes put them back up. [2] Also a student at a
> university who posted the keys to his own personal page at the university
> filed
> a DMCA 512 counternotice. With all of this is mind, as since the keys are
> still
> up today, could we please remove the Office action an
>  d allow the keys to be posted, and un-oversight all the revisions so we
> could
> end all this vandalism and controversy on-wiki? It would be a good step to
> tell
> Texas Instruments that this is just a "Baseless Legal Threat". Also, if
> it's not
> lifted, could the Foundation explain why isn't removing the Office action?
> If we
> do allow the keys on Wikipedia, I pretty much think the EFF would support
> us all
> the way.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Techman224
> >
> > Links:
> >
> > [1] http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/10/13
> > [2]
> http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/10/texas-instruments-stop-digging-holes
> > _______________________________________________
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>
>
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