Slashdot Mirror
Today's Helping Of The DMCA
El pointed us to this nice DMCA story in UpsideToday. Time Warner says that it needs "effective protection, both technological and legal, against unauthorized uses of copyrighted works," showing that even AOL-TW agrees that the DMCA is intended to restrain personal use of copyrighted works rather than copying. For anyone around Stanford University, note that a protest is being organized for May 18 and 19.
Paragraph 229:
Protests against the DMCA are to be considered strictly in violation of the DMCA
Most citizens are unaware how the DMCA affects them, or will affect their lives even if "pay-per-use" becomes standard.
Furthermore, the hearings will probably be a love-feast of the media business types. So, if we mere users wish to get our point across and educate the public, we need to do it in a way that not only gets the public's attention but also informs them of the real issues. It's the DMCA that's bad, not necessarily all of copyright law, and whether or not you believe in free software.
Another thing, it's really sad reading this thread right after reading the thread of the development of BSD and how academics at that time were more interested in the truth, and software that worked, instead of just the money and power.
As an example of our failure in one instance of getting our point across, please see yesterday's triumphant "beacon of light" message from the attorney who won the CyberPatrol case--it was decided under the DMCA too.
There is already a body of law that prohibits "unauthorized use" of copyrighted materials in all domains: Copyright law.
Rather than allow our rights to be bled by further legislation, TW/AOL has a right to help the federal government enforce the laws that already exist. To do anything more, particularly in the form of the DMCA, unconstitutionally inhibits fair use of copyrighted materials in favor of stronger rights for copyright holders.
If TW/AOL wants to protect themselves against "unauthorized use" they should either increase their contribution to the federal government so they can afford to pursue their valid claims (do they have any?) of copyright violation by loosening their accounting standards to indicate a higher taxable income (a simple numbers manipulation), or they should make their product in a manner that does not encourage the market to ignore their copyright and create a grey market for their copyrighted goods (less expensive, copy-prohibitive media such as cave walls, or not selling it).
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
Here comes another DMCA-bashing session. So, here comes another obligatory Typical Slashdot Response Parody poll from the Poll Mastah...
What would you post in response to this article?
Poll Mastah
-cwk.
That being said, it's a real pity that the story on the 2600 freedom-to-link case didn't make it to the front page. The only reason given was that it was a long, long article that not everybody might want to read. So what? People should still know about it. It provides some dynamite anti-DMCA arguments that I hadn't even known about. Check it out.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
The US Constitution grants Congress the power to grant copyrights for a limited time. If they keep upping the ante each time the deadline draws near, that is not "limited", because TW will never lose the copyrights of their characters to the public domain. Congress has overstepped its authority.
So, if TW invokes the DMCA to protect its characters, it's using an unconstitutional law to protect an unconstitutional franchise.
Normally, a copyright holder dies sometime, and their copyright fades. Not so for corporations like Time-Warner. Our legal system has been made into a twisted mockery of justice, in which immortal corporations are above the law.
The whole legal fiction of corporations being "persons" stems back to the 1886 Supreme Court decision in County of Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad, in which the Court cited the "equal protection" clause of the fourteenth amendment. Equal. That means that the entire reason corporations are allowed to have rights as distinct entities is because all people have equal protection under the law.
This is a complete crock. Do the actions of corporations ever kill people? You betcha! So when was the last time you saw a corporation sentenced to death?
And, no, monopoly breakups don't count. Those are to keep the other corporations happy, and any benefit to real people is incidental.
Why do we as a society constantly reward and look up to these faceless legal machines which are designed to grow larger and make money at any cost?
The corporation may be an efficient way to run the economy, but it's a sick joke to even think of them as "persons". We need a system of laws that recognizes that corporations are a group of people, working together, and not some entity in and of itself.
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
From TWX:
"a fair use defense might allow a user to quote a passage from a book but it does not follow that the user is allowed to break into a bookstore and steal a book."
The "technological protection" clauses of the DMCA are not an inadvertent extension of copywrite holders' rights by a naïve Congress, the limitation of fair use is entirely intentional. The argument that a digital work is fundamentally different from a pre-digital work was swallowed hook, line and sinker. The statement quoted above is absurd hyperbole; in a more accurate analogy, loaning a copy of Orifice2K to a friend is likened not to loaning a book but to loaning the press-plates for the book. The previously sufficient technical protection inherent in the expense of building a letterpress allowed for fair use to function without undue anxiety on the part of copywrite holders.
Congress is only too well aware of the technical issues, thanks to their friends in the content industries. Their eyes were wide open and their ears filled with the sound of the bell on the till.
Fair use is a dead letter, as intended. Arguments to restore it will fall on deaf ears. It remains to make clear that, in consequence, the very basis of copywrite, its ostensible role in supporting productive endeavor and the common weal, is subverted. Is this line persuasive? I doubt it. The DMCA effectively creates the conditions for a lively black market, essentially ensuring piracy. And this may be the key to its undoing. We may thus look on software piracy as a moral imperative.
In the immortal words of Wat Tyler (the punkers, not the 14th C. revolutionary):
Copywrite is for tools.
illegitimii non ingravare
(1) Prohibition. When alcohol was banned, people still produced, transported, and consumed it. "But it was the law!" The amendment was withdrawn by a subsequent amendment. Work through proper channels? Write your representatives? Convince legislators through proper means? Didn't happen. And the people were REWARDED for their disregard of an unjust law.
(2) Segregation laws. Blacks must yield their seat on busses to whites. Rosa Parks refused. "But it was the law!" Should she have complied? I think not. Her refusal spawned the great civil rights movement. Work through proper channels? Write your representatives? Convince legislators through proper means? Didn't happen. And the people were REWARDED for their disregard of an unjust law.
(3) The 55 MPH speed limit. The Federal Gov't, which is not supposed to be involved in making local state law (10th amendment) effectively extorted states into mandating 55MPH by refusing them federal highway dollars if they refused to comply and legislate 55. The law was widely ignored by the public. "But it's the law!" The threat was finally ruled UNCONSTITUTIONAL and highway funds were ordered maintained regardless of local state speed limits. The result? Most states hiked local speed limits imediately. (And BTW, no increase in traffic fatalities appeared unkile what the naysayers predicted). Work through proper channels? Write your representatives? Convince legislators through proper means? Didn't happen. And the people were REWARDED for their disregard of an unjust law.
Am I making my point here?
Right now it's the internet turning IP law on its ear, just as the press removed literacy from the sole realm of high society. IP law cannot survive in a world of instantaneous global communication with each and every one of us granted equal power to publish anything. The dinosaurs will roar loudly, but they're already sinking into the tar pit.
Will the fall of IP law hurt a lot of people? Certainly. Recorded music put a lot of musicians out of business. Automatic pinsetters put a lot of people out of work. Computers and robots put a lot of factory workers out of work. Refrigeration put the ice deliverers out or work. The automobile hurt sales of horses. Airplanes depressed the commuter ship industry. The film camera hurt portrait artists. Cellular phones hurt the operators of coin operated phones. Something must be hurt or killed so that something new can live and grow. The fall of IP law will usher in a new wave of "information brokers" and "knowledge dealers". Knowledge will cease being for the wealthy or the "authoirized" and will become an omnipotent commodity upon which a new and better society will be built upon.
I for one am looking forward to the future.
No comment. ;-)
As a small bit of historical background, DMCA was enacted in 1998, but there have been legislative proposals to deal with technological circumvention measures since about 1995, IIRC. Many Law Professors were concerned about those proposals from the beginning, fought them, fought DMCA, before ever enacted.
Obviously, the fight was not successful, but the outgrowth of that early work still influences the legal debate today. See, for example, this paper by Professor Pamela Samuelson at Berkeley, published virtually right after DMCA became law, still frequently cited.