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Law & Technology
Law and TechnologyPlaying Games to Save Your Rights
By Deborah Pierce
Jun 18, 2002 -- The concepts of privacy and "fair use" are too often discussed in technical and legal jargon, which makes the issues seem abstract. Once people understand the real-world implications of losing their rights, however, they care passionately about these areas. As well as avoiding the jargon, a good way to bridge the gap is to illustrate the issues with situations and choices that people encounter in real life."Carabella, Episode 1: The Quest for Tunes" is an online game that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Privacyactivism (my organization) have put together to help give you information about your privacy and fair use rights online - and what you can do to protect those rights.
The game (available from http://www.privacyactivism.org or http://www.eff.org/cafe/drmgame/) follows our heroine, Carabella, as she tries to track down songs by her favorite band, Secret Irises. Along the way, Carabella must make several choices about how to get her songs. Each of her choices impacts rights involving privacy and fair use, and those choices are reflected in the score at the end.
The people who have seen the game so far have said that they've learned something while having a good time. In this article, I wanted to give a little more background and point out some useful things to think about, and questions to ask yourself, while you're playing the game.
| How to play: |
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Play "Carabella, Episode I: The Quest for Tunes" on the EFF or Privacyactivism web sites: At EFF: http://www.eff.org/cafe/drmgame/ At Privacyactivism: http://www.privacyactivism.org |
With this game we hope to show you, in an entertaining way, not only how your privacy can be lost, but how you can protect it too. For example, Carabella can surf the Net anonymously - or not. Some of the people who have tested the game so far told us afterwards that they didn't even know they could surf anonymously, and they appreciated the fact that we have links to several of the more popular anonymizers. One interesting thing to do is play the game a couple of times, seeing how Carabella's privacy is affected if she does (or doesn't) use an anonymizer.
Another way that your online privacy can be compromised is by the software that you download to share files. Play the game a few times and see what happens when Carabella uses a peer-to-peer system to download music. Her privacy is impacted in different ways when she uses LimeWire, AudioGalaxy, and KaZaA.
As you're playing, keep in mind that your data can be collected throughout any of the choices that Carabella makes, and that this information can be used not only to market to you, but to create profiles about your behavior too. Remember too that there are very few laws on the books to protect your privacy online. We have a law that protects against sharing information about the movies you rent, but there is no analogous law that protects against sharing information about your music listening habits if you subscribe to a music subscription service.
Copyright - Fair Use
The ways the music industry has decided to enforce copyright, both online and off, impacts our fair use rights as well as our privacy rights.
With that in mind, another goal of the game is to explain the concept of "fair use" and how our current fair use rights are being limited by copy-protected CDs and "digital rights management" (DRM) technologies that music copyright owners are using to enforce their copyright. Fair use is the right to make a reasonable use of someone else's copyrighted work, without having to ask their permission first. It's an important limit on copyright law that allows us to do many of our day-to-day activities without breaking copyright law. For instance, videotaping a television show that you want to watch at a later time is fair use.
The game focuses on how Carabella can use the songs that she's looking for. Carabella has several choices about how she gets the songs, and each choice involves different DRM which limits what she can do with the music. For instance, if she buys a copy-protected CD or gets the songs from an online music subscription service, she probably won't be able to play the songs on her MP3 player or car stereo. As you're playing the game, try out the different choices, think about what things you'd want to do with the music, and see what uses are limited.
Play the game
There are many other interesting privacy and digital rights issues that we feel are worth exploring. In the future we expect to develop Carabella's quest for tunes further to include some of these, as well as adding other episodes for other online activities.
Play the game and see how you do at protecting Carabella's privacy and fair use rights.
When you're done, please send comments to EFF at carabella@eff.org or to Privacyactivism at carabella@privacyactivism.org.
And a final note: even though EFF and Privacyactivism staff "directed" "Carabella, Episode I: The Quest for Tunes," the hard work was done purely by volunteer animator/illustrators, programmers, lawyers, and law students. Please look at the "credits" page at the end of the game. A big thanks goes out to them!
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| linsey | Jul 01, 2003 | Gretna, Nebraska | poet |
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