DeCSS, Ausdrucksfreiheit und Urheberrecht

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

Kürzlich hatte ich mit einem Swpat-Befürworter folgenden Wortwechsel:

> > Additionally, software is completely functional, and therefore (at
> > least in the US) should not be, and should never have been,
> > protectable by copyright.
 
> Functional texts such as operation manuals are also creative and
> protectable by copyright.  Anything text qualifies for copyright, that is
> built on individual human ingenuity and that we don't want people to
> simply copy but rather to take as a source of inspiration for their own
> creative writing.

Dieses Argument scheint zu wenig bekannt zu sein.  Wenn unter

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/02/1228252

geschildert wird, welche Schwierigkeiten die DeCSS-Verteidiger und das
Gericht mit der Anwendung der Ausdrucksfreiheit auf Rechnerprogramme
haben, komme ich da nicht ganz mit.  Entweder erkennt man an, dass das
Urheberrecht auf Software passt und impliziert damit, dass Software
auf kreativem Ausdruck beruht, dessen plumpes Kopieren oder Plagiieren
man verhindern möchte.  Oder aber man verneint dies und kommt dann zu
der Schlussfolgerung, dass nicht nur die Freiheit zur Veröffentlichung
von DeCSS etc keinen Schutz verdient sondern auch das Kopieren und
Verkaufen von anderer Leute Programmen erlaubt sein sollte, sofern
diese Programme nicht patentiert sind.  Was wiederum dazu führen
müsste, dass man jede Spur von Individualität als "neu und
erfinderisch" interpretiert und zum Patent anmeldet, also im Schnitt
vielleicht 1000 Patente für ein mittelgroßes Programm.  Denn so
funktional das Programmieren auch sein möge: deterministisch ist es
nicht.  Und auch Kunst ist funktional.

Hier ein paar Auszüge aus dem Slashdot-Bericht:  

> Yesterday in a toasty courtroom in lower Manhattan, Stanford Law School
> dean Kathleen Sullivan faced off against lawyers for the world's biggest
> movie companies and a lawyer for the U.S. Justice Department with oral
> arguments in the appeal of the 2600 case. One of the three judges
> hearing the case -- Jon Newman -- appeared to be the designated
> questioner. He asked nearly all of the questions in both this case and
> the ones heard earlier in the day. He probed both sides about equally,
> trying to find flaws in the arguments of whoever was speaking at the
> time. I'll cover the hearing below, and there's possibly a few areas
> where the Slashdot crowd could assist in the case. 
> 
> Sullivan spoke first. She argued that since the DMCA restricts speech,
> under the First Amendment the government must narrowly tailor the law to
> only restrict those specific areas of speech that it is targeting.
> Furthermore, the government bears the burden of proving that the speech
> it is restricting is a problem in some way -- usually it does this by
> holding hearings, getting testimony, etc., in the process of passing a
> law. She noted that none of this was done for the DMCA, and that the
> DMCA restricts many areas of speech that cannot constitutionally be
> restricted.

... 
 
> She ran into her first really hard question when she stated that
> computer programs were expressive, and the judge asked her to explain.
> Her answer was that programs were beautiful in and of themselves, that
> they could represent scientific research, that they could be poems, and
> that they could do things -- their functional nature. I felt the
> response was lacking. Sullivan managed to work in the recent ruckus over
> a Princet on scientist unable present his work due to DMCA threats,
> which was cunning of her. If a Slashdot reader can create a pithy and
> short explanation for how and why a computer program is expressive
> speech and/or what it expresses, it might be useful.

...
 
> The judges took the case. They also requested one last brief from both
> sides, due by May 10th, to cover anything that came up at the hearing
> and the parties think needs to be explained further. I would suggest
> that it's likely that the people who draft the brief will read this
> article; and that insightful comments could be of assistance. I think
> there are a couple of key areas which people may be able to answer:
> 
> 1. Why and how is a computer program expressive speech? What does it
> express? 2600's lawyers are entirely familiar with Touretzky's Gallery,
> so forget about those. Assume you have some C or perl staring at you,
> any random block of code in any random print-out. What does it express?
> Why should that code be protected expression?
> 
> 2. What examples of fair uses absolutely require access to the work in
> its most modern, digital, uncorrupted, un-macrovisioned form? The only
> one that jumped out at me is making a backup copy in case the original
> is destroyed. But perhaps there are others.

-phm