Dr. Andy's Poetry and Technology Hour Wednesday, July 16th, 2003 Guest: Seth Schoen from the Electronic Frontier Foundation [ Guest speaker at the July 21st Linux Users' Group of Davis meeting ] Audio transcribed by Bill Kendrick , July 18, 2003 [... ~45 minutes into the show] Well, I'm very pleased to introduce all of you to my second guest this afternoon, Seth Schoen. Seth will be giving a presentation this coming Monday at the Linux Users' Group of Davis, or LUGOD. We just heard a public service announcement about LUGOD. And he'll be talking about how industry giants like the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America and even Microsoft are stifling people's rights on the Internet. If you want to find out more about this meeting, it's this coming Monday at 6:30 at the Davis Public Library, you can go to LUGOD.org or you can go to the website of this show, which is CultureLover.com. Seth Schoen, of the EFF*, welcome to Dr. Andy's Poetry and Technology Hour. - Thanks, Dr. Andy Now Seth, tell us before we get to this LUGOD event this coming Monday, tell us what sort of chain of events brought you from Mass. to San Francisco and to your job at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. - Well, I went to UC Berkeley for a little while, so your sister school. Sure. - And I didn't finish there, but it did bring me out to the Bay Area, and I've stayed ever since. And I moved over to San Francisco; I worked at a Free Software technology start-up. And I've been with the EFF for about 2 years now. Oh that's wonderful. So what exactly is your job title, and what do you do for the Electronic Frontier Foundation? - So my job title is Staff Technologist. It was modelled on the Staff Attorney job title. We now have 7 staff attorneys, which is really quite a large number for a non-profit. Oh, absolutely. - And we have two staff technologists, which is also a large number. I was the first staff technologist of the EFF, and the basic idea is that I'm available to the attorneys as a consulting expert for court cases which we bring. And I also do research and writing about technology issues which affect the civil liberties interests which we defend. And I go out to conferences and meetings and give talks about those issues. Now I checked out one of your personal websites and find that almost anyone who's anyone in the technology world, especially if you're working as a consultant, more often than not these sorts of experts are blog writers as well, so it's interesting that the sort of writing skills that one learns in college or even in high school come back to be very important in terms of our ability to reach out to many readers who originally we probably never thought would be interested in the intricacies of our work. Can you tell me a little bit about your personal websites? - Well, I have a web diary. I don't like the term blog, personally. Ok. - My colleague, Dr. ??? who's right across the hall will probably be annoyed by this because he's famous as a blogger, and he likes the term. I personally prefer web diary. I have a web diary called "Vita Nuova," after Dante's poem, and I've been keeping that for around - for about a year, two years. And before that I had a diary on a site called Advogato, which is a free software oriented site, ran by ???. And I tend to comingle personal things and work things and technical things. Right. - I don't know whether people enjoy that. I see a lot of web diaries where people JUST write about their friends, or they JUST write about the law, or they JUST write about one particular topic, and I tend to throw in all sorts of things, and so I had a math proof and that was an entire entry. It turned out to be wrong. Yeah. Did someone point that out to you? - Someone did point that out. Now do you often get emails or comments posted from strangers on the other side of the Bay or the other side of the country, commenting on the topics that you bring up? - Well, I don't actually allow people to post comments, but I do get e-mail. And how would you characterize the e-mail, or is it so varied that it's beyond characterization? - It's pretty varied. It depends on what I was writing about. I guess that makes sense. Well, if you're just joining us, you're listening to "Dr. Andy's Poetry and Technology Hour" on KDVS 90.3FM. We are chatting this afternoon with Seth Schoen. He's giving a talk this coming Monday called "The Empire Strikes Back: Contraining Free Software Development." He represents the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where he is a Staff Technologist, and the Davis Linux associations, all of those folks, are very excited to have Seth come talk on Monday, but I imagine that the sort of topics that you'll be raising, Seth, will be of interest for non-technologists as well as Linux regulars. - Well those people who are interested in the politics of copyright law, I think they'll be interested. Politics of technology regulation. And can you tell us a bit about some of the concerns you're going to raise at this talk on Monday? - So the EFF has been working for several years. It's always funny to have a civil liberties organization on the opposite side of an issue from entertainment publishers. Right. - Because traditionally we think of entertainment publishers as being very concerned about the First Amendment. And I think the problem is that they've become almost proprietary about the First Amendment - feeling that the First Amendment is just there to protect THEM. Right. - And it's a great irony, because it took a long time for entertainment works to acquire full First Amendment protection. For example, when courts first looked at First Amendment protection for motion pictures, they said 'oh, regulations of motion pictures aren't regulations of speech; they're just regulations of a machine. They're regulations about the operation of a moving picture projector, which is a machine, and there's no First Amendment issue in regulation a machine.' - And it took a number of years before the courts were willing to grant First Amendment protection to motion pictures, for example. So I think it's a shame that motion picture publishers aren't willing to share the First Amendment, so to speak. That they feel that it's there for them, and not for people like computer programmers. So we have a lot of speech issues and a lot of other issues about the regulation of technology and of software in the name of copyright enforcement easier. These issues have really heated up since about 1995. - And they're really in full swing now; there's constant litigation over things like whether a technology maker; whether a software maker can be responsible for how other people use that technology or that software. And under what legal regimes, and under what legal standards, and under what circumstances. - And it's a difficult situation for programmers, to the extent that they want to program without having to consult a lawyer first. And there's almost a chilling effect, which is analagous to that which I was discussing with our first guest this afternoon, Christina B*. She talked about how big companies, and especially the government, are responsible for limiting, even the approaches to different stories by investigative reporters, because of how the backlash might affect their individual careers of those reporters. So I imagine that this is something analagous; that individual programmers are very careful about what sort of programs they create because of how big corporations might later sick their lawyers on them because of how those products are used. - Well before I joined the EFF, I worked on the movement to free Dmitry Sklyarov, who is a Russian programmer for Moscow, and Dmitry wrote a program which was legal in Russia, where he lived, and came to the US for a conference. And the program which he wrote was NOT legal in the US, and so when he was about to return home from speaking at this conference, he was arrested by the FBI, and he was held for around a month before he was let out on bail, and then he was required to stay in the US for about half a year. - So I was part of a movement to free him, and I remember that it really changed people's way of thinking about what was at stake, because organizations like the EFF had said 'the legal situation around copyright law and technology is not very good. The public is loosing rights under copyright which it HAD. Programmers are having their work constrained by media companies, and so on.' And it wasn't really real, or concrete for a lot of people. And then Dmitry came to the US and he was arrested, and he was handcuffed, and he was kept away from his family for months - his family was back in Moscow. - And it was this very traumatic thing. And fortunately, Dmitry reached an agreement through which he was released, and his company was aquitted at jury trial, so that turned out well. But, individual programmers thought 'this is really serious; this could happy to me. I could be arrested.' It's not just about being sued. It's about being locked up in a foreign country away from your family. That's the kind of thing which is at stake. - So I think it's become a lot more concrete to people, that the programs that they write, and the technology they develop, can have very serious personal consiquences for them. And it really makes the work of the EFF* all the more important. More can find out more about the EFF* at EFF.org. If one were to make a donation to your workplace, to the Foundation for which you work, how might that money be used? - It could be used in a lot of different ways. There are a lot of things we're working on. It might be used to pay for an EFF staff member to attend a meeting, at which otherwise the only attendees might be industry. I see. - And so, for example, I go to meetings where all of the other delegates at the meeting are representing industry. And they're negotiating about something. And from our out of view, they're not really taking the public's interests into account. And so we try to represent the public, and shed light on the process. You could send a staffer to a meeting of that nature. - It would pay the salary for a lawyer. We have many active court cases. We have seven attorneys. All of our cases are taken on pro bono. So we never charge any of our clients any money for representation. That's really amazing. - We work in that regard as a legal services organization, like the ACLU. We can't represent everyone, we have to choose our cases carefully. But if we do take your case, we'll never charge you a penny for the legal representation. That's great. Well Seth, I look forward to meeting you in person at the LUGOD meeting this coming Monday. Let me remind folks that that will be this coming Monday, the 21st from 6:30pm -- and they're asking folks to arrive on time -- to about 9pm. It's at the Davis Library, which is at 315 East 14th Street in Davis, California 95616. If you want to find out more about this event, you can visit LUGOD at LUGOD.org, and click on the EFF logo, to find out more about Seth Schoen's talk this coming Monday, "The Empire Strikes Back: Constraining Free Software Development." If the Empire is striking back, then you must be representing the Rebel Alliance. We really do appreciate that, Seth. And thank you very much for coming this afternoon on Dr. Andy's Poetry and Technology Hour. - Sure, thank you for having me. Sure. Well, we have just a couple minutes left on the program. Let's have some background music to my next couple comments. And here it is. (He said... Hopefully.) Alright, so this afternoon I received an e-mail from Richard Lowenberg. He is the 'Grand Poobah' at the Davis Community Network, and he wrote me, as he did many others, about the various activities that DCN has been participating in over these last couple weeks. Their Davis Community Network "In the Spotlight" website is the "Spare the Air" website, at SpareTheAir.com. So you might check that out, but please do visit the Davis Community Network at www.DCN.org. I was pleased to note that this interview that we just heard with Seth Schoen, as well as the promotion of the LUGOD event this coming Monday, were mentioned in that announcement. So thanks very much, Richard Lowenberg, for that e-mail, and for your good work on behalf of the Davis Community Network. [...]