Slashdot Mirror

Actually the book does stress heavily the reasons behind registering your bots and getting an OK from the site owner/responsible party and generally behaving like a decent human.

I agree with you to some extent, but if I am grabbing a dozen freely available pages from a site and storing the information for my own use (not selling it or publishing it), no foul. Otherwise they could go after people who print/write down/copy-paste the info under the same act.

PS: Thanks for showing me that, now my head hurts. ;-)

PSS: My example doesn't fit into their definition of Liability or Injury per SEC. 3 as it's not made public. (I am not a lawyer, YMMV)

Here's what it's used for - violating H.R. 3261, the Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act Guess I'm going to buy it very soon ;) -B

"... the principal behind the U.S. copyright term--that it protect the author and at least one generation of heirs--remains unchanged by the bill....

"As the foregoing discussion indicates, the primary purpose of a proprietary interest in copyrighted works that is descendible from authors to their children and even grandchildren is to form a strong creative incentive for the advancement of knowledge and culture in the United States. The nature of copyright requires that these proprietary interests be balanced with the interests of the public at large in accessing and building upon those works. For this reason, intellectual property is the only form of property whose ownership rights are limited to a period of years, after which the entire bundle of rights is given as a legacy to the public at large."

SCO's contention that copyright is primarily for the economic benefit of the copyright owner is utterly without merit. Copyright law exists to promote the advancement of knowledge. One of the tools it uses is allowing authors to be rewarded.

A better example would be "Linus Torvalds, who used the notoriety he received from Linux to allow him to do what he wanted to do: write code."

(I'm a computer geek, not a lawyer)

"... the principal behind the U.S. copyright term--that it protect the author and at least one generation of heirs--remains unchanged by the bill....

"As the foregoing discussion indicates, the primary purpose of a proprietary interest in copyrighted works that is descendible from authors to their children and even grandchildren is to form a strong creative incentive for the advancement of knowledge and culture in the United States. The nature of copyright requires that these proprietary interests be balanced with the interests of the public at large in accessing and building upon those works. For this reason, intellectual property is the only form of property whose ownership rights are limited to a period of years, after which the entire bundle of rights is given as a legacy to the public at large."

SCO's contention that copyright is primarily for the economic benefit of the copyright owner is utterly without merit. Copyright law exists to promote the advancement of knowledge. One of the tools it uses is allowing authors to be rewarded.

A better example would be "Linus Torvalds, who used the notoriety he received from Linux to allow him to do what he wanted to do: write code."

(I'm a computer geek, not a lawyer)

Flames from an Anonymous Coward are much more effective when they are at least brief, especially when they are so off the mark. Rather than imagine you scouring the FCC website while your neighbors are out having fun with one another, I'll charitably locate your Sunday 3:30AM EST posting in a country outside these United States, where your beloved FCC is a quirky little Commission we invented to codify how we use some of our stuff here in the US.

My country has an old-fashioned government, which we made up after kicking out the old government, which was running around like the *king* was the source of power, with some kind of direct line to his god. We told him to get lost, in a stubborn letter called the Declaration of Independence. Look in the second paragraph, where it reads "unalienable rights" - we've updated our language over the centuries to "inalienable", but the principle still means "cannot be given or taken away". Read The Friendly Post ; your prattle about FCC "laws" are trumped by my rights. When I fill the space in my home with electromagnetic waves of my choosing, my property rights are in control. Now, if you want to hand your rights in your own home over to the FCC, that's your problem. But don't expect me to cooperate. Especially when you ignore how the people institute governments among men to secure these rights, and alter or abolish them when their form becomes destructive to the security of those rights.

Don't worry, Anonymous Coward, your envy of my being right all the time is a sign that you can learn from me. Don't squander my patience.

not trying to sound like a troll, but to all the people saying that privacy is a right, i ask you this: a right granted by whom?

fyi, the united states bill of rights says absolutely nothing about privacy. neither does the constitution. a bit scary, but its true. look it up.

the 4th amendment to the bill of rights sorta hints at privacy, but its obvious that our forefathers could not even begin forsee the type of privacy issues we deal with today.

Is that not what 'Patriot' means? To understand and embody the founding fathers? 'Patria' means 'lineage' in Latin which comes from 'Pater' which means 'Father'. So before you can do that you need to take one simple step. Read and understand the founding father's writing -- the Constitution, the federalist and anti-federalist papers.

I see you are Baptist from your URL. Would you believe anyone who said they were a Christian if they had never even opened the Bible, had never said the 'Lord's prayer', didn't know who Jesus was and who had never heard of the 'golden rule'?

It's not so much that people are violently opposed to the taxes that support their country, but right in the Constitution it explicitly enumerates the powers of the Federal government. As you are aware, enumeration does not mean 'a rough outline'. Enumeration means a listing of all the things that belong to it. Anything that is outside that enumeration does not belong to it.

Later in the 9th and 10th amendment to the Constitution it spells this out explicitly. More than anything, the Constitution is a binding contract between the citizens of the united States and the appointed government employees. We are obligated to foot the bill as long as they are abiding by the contract. Expecting us to pay for things we never contracted for, is a little like Darl McBride expecting us to pay him for something he neither created nor has the rights to just because he crows it from the highest tower. Expecting us to happily pay for things we never contracted for is a little like expecting us to happily pay Darl. Even if he had a shotgun to our heads we might have to, but we wouldn't be expected to like it.

I tell you that, if your are a Patriot you will come to understand that 99% of the budget expenditures of the Federal government are explicity prohibited to it by law.

So what should you do? I've looked at this situation for over a decade now and I'm pretty sure there is nothing you can do. The united States have been hijacked by the high courts since approximately 1938 when the Supreme Court decided that the 'Social Security' tax was Constitutional under the welfare clause. Of course under that line of reasoning nearly anything is within the scope of federal power. That the most 'learned' legal minds of the time had done this to us could only be interpreted as treason. Even a cursory reading of historical documents and earlier Supreme Court decisions would have made this abundantly clear.

Look at the bright side. Until this country truly devolves into a complete police state you are a free man. As long as you are truly free, not even the constitution binds you to anything. I'd say you have at least five to ten years until that happens. Until then do what you can because no com mon law binds you to a contract in breach.

No group of men can bind further generations of free men to contracts and debts just like no father can bind his son to debt. (substitutue the politically correct gender equivalent) The only thing that can be chained down by a Constitution is government.

Good luck and learn as much as you can about your rights. It's a lonely world out there once you understand what your true freedoms are. Very few people have been educated in them because history is being taught by the victors. Don't expect understanding from your fellow citizens, most men are fools who are more interested in the daily baseball scores than the destiny of their country. Bread and circuses, my man.

Don't take my word for it. Find out for yourself.

The US Constitution (brazenly published by the contract breachers themselves).

The Bill

Sign the online petition to support HR 2239.

A voter-verified paper trail is the only way to verify that the system is working. Under this system, the machine would produce a paper ballot, which the voter checks then deposits into a locked box. The paper receipts are counted in the event of a recount (unlike our current requirements, where totals from an end-of-night printout can be used, assuming the machines total the votes accurately). The bill also requires a recount in 0.5% of districts chosen at random to verify that the machines are totalling accurately.

First, they let the geeks do all the hard work in making it technically possible, then they attract attention to all the bells, whistles and general hype, they solidify the sale with the educational angle, then legislate it into a tasteless substance that no one in their right mind would ever swallow.

But the public will have bought the infrastructure, hook, line, and sinker. It's like watching Jethro Clampet get excited over them fancy city folk fads.

I could do more with a 56K dialup connection on a P120 with 16megs of RAM than I'll be able to do with a Pentium 7, 24Ghz with 16Tb of RAM and a connection speed at twice the speed of light.

Most of the people will be content just to "oooooo" and "aaaaah" the blinky lights.

I would definately do it again. The archival quality image that I downloaded printed with incredible clarity. YMMV. The best thing to do is call one of the national chains that's local and ask what file formats they support and whether or not they can handle large size prints. You should be able to get an estimate over the phone.

I'd bet any decent frame shop could frame a very large image. I'd guess they'd charge you several hundred dollars for the custom frame though.

(A) a database generated, gathered, organized, or maintained by a Federal, State, or local governmental entity, or by an employee or agent of such an entity, acting within the scope of such employment or agency;

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:HR032 61:@@@L&summ2=m&#status

If one is local to you, I urge you to write them and tell them to discourage this bill.

One word in the article that unnerves me is assert. This means that no proof necessary, we say it's ours: IT'S OURS. PERIOD>. Applied to common knowledge, in this case. So what if they've filtered out all of the 35-year-olds who masturbate to pictures of their mothers, that may qualify as common knowledge too.

The link to the .gov site isn't much as far as telling you what the bill actually does. the second link is better, although biased.


whoa. started out as a karma whoring post, but i may have actually had a point.
final thoughts? The mere concept of this bill is insane, and I'm just plain pissed off about it.

-D

Okay here's the RIAA/MPAA Spin on it. Take i360, have them harvest p2p users and IP addresses and viola - something that's Excluded!-
(B) EXCLUSIONS- The term database does not include any of the following:
(i) A work of authorship, other than a compilation or a collective work.
(ii) A collection of information that principally performs the function of addressing, routing, forwarding, transmitting, or storing digital online communications or receiving access to connections for digital communications, except that the fact that a collection of information includes or consists of online location designations shall not by itself be the basis for applying this clause.

Hmmm.. what kind of subscriber lists are excluded?
Damn this pisses me off.. time to read up...

The bill is S. 1933. It doesn't appear that Congress' website has the text of the legislation up yet, but I believe this link will take you there when it's up. (Congress has a weird linking scheme, so I'm not quite sure if that's a temporary or permanent link.) Now, don't Slashdot Congress, kids ... Homeland Security's just looking for an excuse to visit Cmdr. Taco. ("Now, sir, why do they people who go to this website call you by a military title? What sort of militia are you building up?")

Great works of classical music, drama, and literature were written, ultimately, to make money...

No, the ones you eventually heard may have been created that way, but the ones that moved the people and created the culture that those works grew out of were created from the heart and the soul. A lot of them are lost to history. No record was made of them because no money was involved and recording them on paper and maintaining the record were, historically, things only the rich had the power to do. Cave men, sitting around the fire, singing and banging on hand-made instruments didn't do it for the money. They did it to create and maintain their culture. It's the human spirit that motivates these things, not money.

A rare and significant example of the real tide of culture was recorded by John Lomax who traveled the country, funded by the Smithsonian (thank you government) to record musicians where they lived. That's real stuff, not manufactured pablum and it would have been lost to history had he not been there to record it. In fact, there was a man born in Tupelo, Mississippi with a certain swivel in his hip and a voice that made women swoon. But that man never made a nickel because he was black. Then a couple of years later, Elvis came along and the rest is history. Record makers believed they couldn't make money on black artists so they picked white ones who emulated their black peers.

Britney Spears isn't popular because her music is culturally significant. She's popular because she's the tip of huge marketing machine. It just sounds like the ka-ching of a cash register to me or the beep of a truck backing up -- just the sound of money being made. The real culture is hidden and if anyone is guilty of myopia, it the person who can only see and hear what our corporate media presents to them. You are being manipulated and controlled so that someone else can make a buck. Some real artists can still be heard, though. Check out Mountain Stage.

Personally, I was looking forward to suing SPAMers here in California. It sounded like a nice new occupation for all of us out-of-work IT staffers.

Since it took me more than a few minutes to find the part of the bill everyone's excited about, here's a pointer:

1. H.R. 2417 Summary and Status
2. Conference Report

In the Conference Report, the change to the definition of financial institution is in Title III, Subtitle E (Sec. 374), which begins on page 76 of the PDF. The explanatory statement for that Section begins on page 112 of the PDF.

The Section in question is really just a reference to another Section of United States Code. On top of that, the PDF of this report is not searchable (it's a scanned image). Do we have an award for Information Obfuscation in Government? Why can't we at least have these reports in hypertext, with live links to the referenced laws?

I pecked about on the US Congress's (web site and was unable to find a roll call of who voted for and against the bill (HR 2417). Maybe it's there somewhere, but then again, maybe the scoundrels did not want anyone to know who supported this bill's intrusive search powers.

Has anyone found a roll call anywhere?

I pecked about on the US Congress's (web site and was unable to find a roll call of who voted for and against the bill (HR 2417). Maybe it's there somewhere, but then again, maybe the scoundrels did not want anyone to know who supported this bill's intrusive search powers.

Has anyone found a roll call anywhere?

(1) Benjamin Franklin stated: `Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.'.

(2) The First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution were established to protect the civil rights and liberties of all Americans in perpetuity.

(3) Federal policies adopted since September 11, 2001, including provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act (Public Law 107-56) and related executive orders, regulations, and actions threaten fundamental rights and liberties, ...

It's called the "Library of Congress". You submit a copy of a work you want to register for copyright. They keep it. This is why "Libraries of Congress" is used as a facetious measure of amount of data on Slashdot.

...the term `unsolicited commercial electronic mail message' does not include an electronic mail message sent by or on behalf of one or more lawful owners of copyright, patent, publicity, or trademark rights to an unauthorized user of protected material notifying such user that the use is unauthorized and requesting that the use be terminated or that permission for such use be obtained from the rights holder or holders.

We need your help!

HR 2239 is a bill which requires all touch-screen voting machines to produce a paper receipt which the voter can read and verify, then drop in a lock box. The receipts in that lock box are used in a recount. This bill also mandates a recount in 0.5% of districts chosen at random to verify that the touch-screen voting machines are reporting the results accurately.

Sign the online petition to support the bill. Contact your representatives, educate them and demand they support the bill.

We also need legal help with injunctions against the machines, starting with the 37 Diebold states. The organizers of BlackBoxVoting.org have 65,000 documents to make the case.

They were using the reverse engineering clause in the DMCA u tard.

The only reverse engineering clause in the DMCA is this one, which specifically allows reverse engineering to produce an interoperable product:

(f) REVERSE ENGINEERING- (1) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.

Why they would ignore such a field, I can only speculate: perhaps there is too much of a stigma of "mind altering" to neuroscience (though I do recall Bush senior declaring the 1990's to be the decade of the brain). Or perhaps the present administration has a vested interest in keeping the populous away from mind improving developments. Or perhaps they just don't think it's necessary; after all, you don't have to be a genius to become president these days.

You might want to go back and look at that legislation again. Only about $21 billion is going to Iraq, and less than $1.2 billion to Afghanistan. The remainder is for the armed forces, Homeland Security, the State Department, and a few miscellaneous other groups.

there no need for diggin up bodies, dna tests and the like.
there is a simple way to solve this exact problem

I still own one share of SCO stock and am holding on to it for no other purpose than to help bring suit to them

You probably won't be able to sue SCO executives unless and until they cause you to lose at least twenty U.S. dollars (Amendment VII). What is SCOX worth again? Have you held SCOX stock since late 2000, the last time it was worth $20 per share more than it's worth now?

Finally this is our chance to make Congress liken spammers to cyber-terrorists, and for a reason politicians fear and know well enough to do something about it: "Now some of the spammers are even building a network of worm-ridden computers, possibly at the fingertips of a madman who is willing to do anything for money, and may only be waiting to turn them into Weapons of Mass Disruption, wreaking havoc to the Nation, the Internet, and e-mail as we know it..." (spooky, huh? ;-)) But honestly, if spammers do this to their opponents just to continue advertising, is there really any reason why they could not, or would not do it to *.gov, either for the sums an enemy of U.S. could possibly offer, or because that enemy hires a blackhat to hijack one of these DDoS zombie networks for its own purposes?
Outlaw spammers, put an end to spam. Sometimes it's as simple as that. (And it works: Haven't seen much fax spam for years...)
Just be "Mr. Concerned Citizen" for once and send articles like this to your congresscritter now. Let them know what spammers have already done "to your kids" (rather omit the "to your p...s" part even if you've ordered their pills and pumps) "and to your computers".

No other amendment so clearly, explicitly lays out the reasons for its own existence

The reasoning for the Constitution is laid out in the Federalist Papers. It is for authoritarian tendencies like yours that Alexander Hamilton penned Federalist No. 84 arguing against the Bill of Rights:

It has been several times truly remarked that bills of rights are, in their origin, stipulations between kings and their subjects, abridgements of prerogative in favor of privilege, reservations of rights not surrendered to the prince. ... It is evident, therefore, that, according to their primitive signification, they have no application to constitutions professedly founded upon the power of the people, and executed by their immediate representatives and servants. Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing; and as they retain every thing they have no need of particular reservations.
...
I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power. They might urge with a semblance of reason, that the Constitution ought not to be charged with the absurdity of providing against the abuse of an authority which was not given, and that the provision against restraining the liberty of the press afforded a clear implication, that a power to prescribe proper regulations concerning it was intended to be vested in the national government. This may serve as a specimen of the numerous handles which would be given to the doctrine of constructive powers, by the indulgence of an injudicious zeal for bills of rights.

Well, it's not 100%, certainly. Though given that providing a Mandatory Deposit copy if requested is a condition of Copyright Registration, I'd be surprised if a publisher were to refuse a request.

From the 2001 Annual Report, the Copyright Office had a budget of $40,896,000 in fiscal Year 2001, though I'm not clear on whether this includes funding for the storage of earlier MD items. Total LOC funding for 2001 was $572M, plus $119M in gifts.

With the volume of published material increasing exponentially with time, with the best will in the world it's just unfeasible to maintain a comprehensive collection anymore. What Mandatory Deposit gives is the ability, in an environment where the LOC has to make a judgement call, to rely on the availability of any item the LOC really wants (the initial penalty for refusal to supply is a 2500 fine, plus 250 per item refused).

Maybe not. But, I have an idea of how good it should be, and we're not there. Don't take offense if it seems to me that you have no idea how bad we have it from just a few short years ago.

Until you've seen the face of a person terrified at the idea of meeting any police, or a person shaking after getting a ticket, or a person afraid to talk to anyone in government, then you should talk.

I can guess by your lack of experience that you're without a permanent tan and haven't been pulled out of line by airport security for having one. Not through any fault of yours, as we are all birthed in our skin by chance. I would submit that freedom isn't a state of being, but a continuous struggle against those who hypocritically only value their own rights while disregarding yours. Freedom isn't very anything. It simply is or isn't happening. It can start or it can stop. The freedom to access a lawyer when your arrest has been categorized as a "terrorist action" has stopped.

We are free. We are very free. You can walk up to the White House and picket it. You can drive your truck with a rifle in the back. You can say what you want on the Internet. You can read the books you want.

Anyone can do any of the things you've mentioned and more. It is simply a matter of the consequences that becomes the deterence to those activities. Even expressing yourself on the internet can be a dangerous proposition. To keep this reply short and educational, I'll simply point you to a source you can learn from.

Even if another terrorist attack occurs, do you think they're going to take these liberties away? No. The government won't. In fact, they can't. Because people like myself speak up and let people like you know what is going on.

You're statement has a naivete that is almost charming. On the other hand, it is also a sad indictment of our public schools' failure to teach history in any meaningful manner. This failure is one the reasons why historical events repeat themselves in such tight, short cycles in the U.S., which is reflected so heavily in our foreign policies.

Our founding fathers knew what they were doing a hell of a lot better than you give them credit for.

I give them all the credit. Many of them are my heroes. Unfortunately, they are dead. The dead cannot defend their dreams. Its up to you and me to defend them at home, so that bad things don't happen to other people.

= 9J =

an excellent page on the law making process in the US

I don't know who came up with this one.

Well, according to this site, it takes about 2 tons of wood to make "942 100-page, hard-cover books" - now, the Library of Congress has "approximately 115 million items". We can assume that the items average out to about a 100-page hardcover book (how nifty, makes my job easier). So, 115,000,000 divided by 942 equals 122,080, which, mulitiplied by 2 tons of wood, equals 244,161 tons of wood. At 98 tons per gallon, assuming a one to one ratio of plant matter to wood, it takes .04% of the Library of Congress to make a gallon of fuel.

If you get 25 mpg, and you drive 12,500 miles a year, you use 500 gallons of gas a year, and so, you consume 20% of the Library of Congress a year.

Still here? OK then, if you drive from age 18 to age 75, that's 57 years of driving. Assuming (obviously grossly innaccurate here, given different fuel consumption at different times) that you drive that 25 mpg car 12,500 miles for all of those 57 years, you have consumed 11.44 Libraries of Congress. You animal. Have you no restraint?

To contact your critter, go here and search on your zip code.

Dr. Billington is an elected member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and has been decorated as Chevalier and again as a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters of France, as Commander of the National Order of the Southern Cross of Brazil, awarded the Order of Merit of Italy, and a Knight Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit by the Federal Republic of Germany. He has also been awarded the Gwanghwa Medal by the Republic of Korea, and the Chingiz Aitmatov Gold Medal by the Kyrgyz Republic.

Right - and that's the real kicker... if anything you'd think they'd make the modified equipment or the act of modifying it illegal. Instead they're going after the act of just TELLING someone about it. Hello? 1st amendment anyone?

I remember back in the BBS days when this was an big issue with repect to some extremely popular philez such as the anarchist's cookbook. I mean for the love of god, why should it be illegal to just TALK about how to make a weapon?

Now back to my nitroglycerin experiment, which is legal so long as I don't tell anyone how to do it...

As a matter of fact, he is a he.

The LOC pretty much exists for two reasons:

• Writing reports for Congress
• Letting PhD candidates research

For those of you interested, the bill is S.877

CAUCE (Coalition Against Unsolicited Email) opposes this bill.

The bill isn't "Can Spam" in terms of canning spam. It's "Can Spam" in terms of "You Can Spam. Sure. Go ahead." It's opt-out, not opt-in. Prepare to have your mailbox flooded. Legally.

Sec. 105 (a):

(4) PROHIBITION OF TRANSMISSION OF UNSOLICITED COMMERCIAL ELECTRONIC MAIL AFTER OBJECTION- If a recipient makes a request using a mechanism provided pursuant to paragraph (3) not to receive some or any unsolicited commercial electronic mail messages from such sender, then it is unlawful

(5) INCLUSION OF IDENTIFIER, OPT-OUT, AND PHYSICAL ADDRESS IN UNSOLICITED COMMERCIAL ELECTRONIC MAIL- It is unlawful for any person to initiate the transmission of any unsolicited commercial electronic mail message to a protected computer unless the message provides--

On the other hand, Sec. 105 (b) (1) (A) (i) and (ii) make it illegal to use address harvesters or dictionary attacks to send spam.

I'm also worried that Sec. 105 (e)'s restrictions on sexually explicit advertising will be struck down as unconstitutional, and may have adverse effects on the rest of the law.

After reading about this in the Washington Post, where they noted that only e-mail providers or government entities could bring suit, I decided to look up the actuall bill to see if I, as a private e-mail administrator, could bring an action against someone under this bill. The text in question, however, said only "A provider of Internet access service adversely affected" could bring action. So I wrote my Senators to find out if they meant this to be only those who provide actual ISP service, or if people like me who run private e-mail servers could bring complaints. Should be interesting to find out what they say.

Better still, a lawsuit based on the DMCA will force the court to examine the law itself. The defendants will face a US$500,000 fine and (more importantly) five years in the pokey. With the paper trail so clearly documented (server logs, et cetera), the best legal manuever would be to argue that the DMCA itself is invalid/unconstitutional. We win either way.

Someone get spamhaus on the phone, I think we've got something here.

Here is the homepage of Thomas, for future reference.

Here is the homepage of Thomas, for future reference.

"I am not a crook"

"I don't recall."

SunnComm would have no case. The bill clearly states in section 5(c) that:

`(c) CIRCUMVENTION FOR NONINFRINGING USES-
(1) Notwithstanding any other provision in this title, a person who lawfully obtains a copy or phonorecord of a work, or who lawfully receives a transmission of a work, may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to the work or protects a right of the copyright holder under this title if--
`(A) such act is necessary to make a noninfringing use of the work under this title; and
`(B) the copyright owner fails to make publicly available the necessary means to make such noninfringing use without additional cost or burden to such person.

No, at best, we'll rather have a law that means jail time at least for recidivist spammers.

They need some drastic illustration of the harm their "business" can do.
The proverbial one night with Bubba in Cell Block 3 should finally teach them to never ever try and sell penis enlargements again. Oh, and by the way, please webcast close-up video account of their experience to that lovely town of Spam Haven (somewhere in Florida IIRC).

Make your lawmakers make laws... Call your congresscritter now!

But Fritz DIDN'T give us this. Mr. Howard Coble, a Republican, sponsored the DMCA. And Sonny Bono, a Republican, enacted the (you'd never guess) Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.

For further demonstration, observe the sponsors and voting record of the DMCA:

(source)

Sponsor: Howard Coble - http://www.house.gov/coble/ - Republican

Co-sponsors:

• Howard L. Berman - http://www.house.gov/berman/ - Democrat
• John Conyers - http://www.house.gov/conyers/ - Democrat
• Barney Frank - http://www.house.gov/frank/ - Democrat
• Mary Bono - http://www.house.gov/bono/ - Republican
• Henry Hyde - http://www.house.gov/hyde/ - Republican
• Bill McCollum - http://www.issues2000.org/FL/Bill_McCollum.htm - Republican
• Bill Paxon - http://www.issues2000.org/NY/Bill_Paxon.htm - Republican
• Chip Pickering - http://www.house.gov/pickering/ - Republican
• Sonny Bono - (no official page, sorry - a google search will reveal that he was also a Republican) - Republican

(Please excuse the Issues2000 links - I wanted to use 100% official pages, but not all of the sponsors of the DMCA are still in their offices.)

So, that puts the "score" at Democrats: 3, Republicans: 7

When it comes to voting, the Senate was 99-0 in favor of it, which speaks badly for both parties, though I must still point out that the Republicans had the majority at the time, thus further proving that again, they are no less culpable, if not more. I regret I cannot tell you what the House had to say about this bill, but I'd be willing to bet that the percentages of Democrats and Republicans in favor of this bill is about equal in the House, too.

Once again this proves that you must think for yourself rather than just believing rumor or stereotype as fact.

A few comments. First, a state doesn't designate a library a Federal Depository; the federal government does (specifically, in most cases, Congress).

Second, related to the first comment, many university libraries are federal depositories, but they certainly aren't all state university libraries. For example, Harvard is a federal depository (in fact, both the College library and the Law School library are federal depositories).

Third, the "troll" is right. Federal depositories contain copies of all federal documents, not the entire contents of the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress keeps copies of all federal documents (for example, you can use the thomas service at loc.gov to look up congressional bills, among other things), but also keeps copies of a lot of non-government documents (for example, it has a full collection of the Harry Potter-related books). These non-governmental documents are not included in the federal depository program. If they were, well, your ASU library would have all of the LOC's Harry Potter books too.

When there is no evidence to support your ridiculous claims, you respond with insults. Classic.