Comments On The DMCA Published

vectro writes, "Well, the copyright office has published all the comments they've received. It looks like all the comments are pro-consumer, with the exception of those from media companies: Time/Warner (movies), Sony Computer (interestingly, comments focus on Playstation rather than movies or music), and the MPAA." These are in .pdf format, so you'll need Acrobat Reader.

Comments

DMCA Can Be Turned Against Itself

[MeowChow]

We all know that The MPAA has used the DMCA to structure the CSS licensing system in a way which effectively controls both DVD publishers and DVD player manufacturers. I believe that if the MPAA wins their current legal battle over DeCSS, they will set a precedent with a side-effect that is antithetical to everything the MPAA is fighting for.

Consider what would happen if an open-source encryption/decryption algorithm was created (like CSS, the strength of the algorithm is not important), with a license that explicitly forbade both commercial and governmental use. Now any warez/mp3/movie pirate could encrypt their warez and post them for the public consumption with complete impunity. No law enforcement agency or company could bring any action against this pirate, because in order to do so, they would have to prove that they performed an act of piracy in the first place, which would entail infringing upon the terms of the license of the encryption algorithm.

Perhaps the government has legal methods to work around this.. perhaps they are even built into the DMCA. Nevertheless, this sort of "restricted license" encryption, if employed by pirates, would make it more difficult for any company to protect their copyrights online.

Lets do it! :)

So what's next?

[Tassach]

I find it unsuprising that the big media companies (AOL/TW & Sony) are the only respondents who support DCMA. Of course their arguments are specious at best.

Some of my favorite lies and FUD:

"I am aware of no works or classes of works that have, because of the implementation of technical protection measures, become unavailable to persons who desire to be lawful users"

David Carson, General Counsel for Time Warner

Gee Dave, how about a person who owns a Linux-based PC with a DVD-ROM drive (but not a set-top DVD player) who wants to legally purchase a DVD movie and watch it on his (legally purchased) computer hardware? What about an American who buys an obsure Japanese-language Anime DVD, but can't watch it on his legally-purchased DVD player because of the regional encoding? What about the person who hooks up his new DVD player thru his VCR, because his TV only has a 75-ohm input, and can't watch any movies because of the Macrovision feature? These are all perfectly legitimate scenerios where a law-abiding consumer would be forced to defeat "technical protection measures" (in violation of the DCMA) in order to use a legally-purchased product.

"Time Warner is also vitally interested in the healthy maintenance of the 'fair use doctrine'."

I'm sure you do, so long as it is Time Warner who is making fair use of someone else's intellectual property. They just have a problem if someone else wants to make fair use of their IP. Sorry, Davey; you can't have it both ways.

I really, really hope that some Federal judge out there has the stones to strike the DCMA down; or at least issue an injunction to keep it from being enforced till it makes it up to the Supreme Court. Even though the current Court has a pretty lousy track record in upholding civil liberties, at least they pretend to give a crap about the Constitution; which is more than I can say about Congress & the President.
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'