unintended consequences

This document collects reported cases where the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA have been invoked not against pirates, but against consumers, scientists, and legitimate competitors.

In practice, the anti-circumvention provisions have been used to stifle a wide array of legitimate activities, rather than to stop copyright infringement.

Back in January, while in France, I experienced firsthand one of the "unintended consequences" of France rushing forwarding with a "three strikes" law that kicks people off the internet based on accusations (not convictions).

Because of that, the idea of open WiFi is now pretty much gone (which, amusingly, was pissing off the very same music execs who were such big fans of the law).

Yesterday, Microsoft’s search engine Bing was down for a period of time, displaying only a cryptic error message to the perplexed users.

A TV station in Alabama is learning that live Twitter billboards sometimes deliver unintended consequences.

Windows Vista users trying to upgrade to Windows 7 can face some unintended consequences if they also use .NET Framework 4 beta 1 and Visual Studio 2010 beta 1.