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The author of the CNN article must not have read the bill yet.

It also includes a requirement that the National Institute for Standards & Technology (NIST) develop a "mark" that would be somehow affixed to the subject line of all sexually explicit advertising e-mail. Failure to use this mark would result in a prison term -- a longer one if the recipient of the e-mail was a minor.

No one seems to have the bill up online yet. Are they all out at CFP? Eventually the text of the bill should be available on Thomas. The bill number will be S. 2137, I'm told.

As always always always, my opinions are my own.

Liza

A few of these articles has this heading: "Please do not cite or quote without permission." This says much more than the article itself. Oops, i just quote from the article!

Posted on Tue, Apr. 16, 2002 Can We Design Fair Use into Content? Posted by Dan Gillmor I'm at the Computers Freedom and Privacy conference in San Francisco, attending a workshop on the topic of "fair use" -- a term that has many descriptions and applications. There's a lot of law on the whiteboard, including a variety of doctrines that show up in black and white in copyright law -- Sections 107, 110, 108 and a host of other elements. The vocabulary often incorporates more than what many copyright lawyers tend to discuss. Ann M. Bartow, assistant law professor at the Unviersity of South Carolina, argues that the law should ultimately incorporate what people do in real life -- and that we have to reduce the complexity inherent in today's statutes. Here's her presentation (PDF; 264 KB). "Don't we deserver a copyright law we can understand and follow?" she asks. Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is arguing for ambiguity. He thinks copyright law needs to leave room for innovation as new technologies come along. An audience member asks if this ambiguity is what lets lawyers threaten people with lawsuits for non-infringing uses, intimidating them into taking down Web content that should remain public. We need a floor, von Lohmann says, not a ceiling on permissible activities. The floor for the entertainment and other "content" industries is increasingly clear. They don't fundamentally believe in fair use, and they see technology as a way to turn everything into pay-per-view -- a system that would eliminate fair use almost completely. Turn that around. Can fair use be turned into code? That is, can we use technology to ensure it, just as we can use technology to take it away? Stefan Bechtold, from Stanford Law School, thinks it can -- at least in some circumstances. But the law is still going to be needed, he says. He thinks digital rights management can be progressive, while law is conservative. The key word is "can" -- and the evidence is not behind him. Both, as currently established, are highly restrictive. What's progressive is technology, which makes hash of attempts to control content. Any digital rights management system is going to be broken.