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How Will The DMCA Be Implemented?
bl968 writes "Wired has an excellent article entitled "Fear of a Pay-Per-Use World" on the upcoming Librarian of Congress decision on granting exceptions to the DMCA anti circumvention provisions. The DMCA, which was enacted in 1998, bans the circumvision of technical protection measures like encryption systems and other methods designed to prevent access to copyrighted works. When the DMCA was passed it contained, a delay to the date the anti-circumvention provisions take effect. This delay is about up and your comments are needed"
It's always been illegal for me to borrow tapes/cds from friends and libraries and record them, but it is easy to do, so everyone does...
What a lot of the DMCA does is provide for a technical implementation for existing laws.
Forgetting for a moment the fair use issues, which can probably be resolved, this would seem to be quite fair.
Except that it isn't. This is really more about power than anything, about the freedom to live relatively freely, to misquote Sabrina (Teenage Witch), 'Every Law Shall Have a Loophole'.
The DMCA is giving dictatorial control over certain aspects of life to corporations (cough, spit, wash yer mouth out with soap) who really don't have the maturity/morality/whatever not to abuse it.
In a way it is quite amusing, anyone can have shares, companies exist to profit the shareholders and are willing to go to pretty much any lengths to do so. We are becoming our own goalers.
For instance, a DVD sold in Japan will not play on a DVD player sold in the United States because of technical protection measures employed by the motion picture industry.
How does this work the other way, I thought that regional encoding was illegal in NZ, but since then a scary source sez it ain't.
This goes way beyond fair use I'd have thought.
(been interupted so many times writing this I'm not sure what I was thinking though, it was way better than what I said though!! :)
~ppppppppö
Looking at the text of title 17, section 1201...
Subsection (c)(1) reads Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title. so the "fair use" defense is unaffected by this measure.
As for DeCSS I'm guessing the defense lawyers are hammering real hard on subsection (f) which explicitly permits reverse engineering any access control AND distributing the means to do so so long as it is solely for the purpose of allowing interoperability. Of course the corporate weasels didnt like this so they are claiming DeCSS in "purely a piracy tool." IANAL but from reading the actual letter of the law it seems that all it should take to defend against the suit is claiming "I made this code to allow interoperability between the firmware code on commercial DVD drives and the linux OS since nobody else had made a driver for it." - that fulfills the requirement in (f)(2) that it is for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability and also of (f)(3) where the information gained may be made available to others ... solely for the purpose of enabling interoperability
In the absence of the MPAA being able to prove that any of the coders intended DeCSS for piracy or actively used it for such (and since "fair use" remains intact their lawyers should be able to argue that the presence of decrypted movie fragments in old temp files on their disks is simply evidence they played them, not that they copied them) whilst the MPAA may throw more and more money and lawyers at this they should eventually lose.
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
I had a
I regret to inform any new Slashdot readers that the comments period at the Library of Congress has been well expired. They had public hearings regarding those comments in May, and even the post-hearing-comment-rebuttal-comment window has passed.
All that's left to do now is wait. Virtually all the scheduled opportunities for public comment (read: your rare chance to not be ignored) have passed, as most slashdot readers probably know.
What this thread should provide an opportunity for Slashdot readers to do, is organize and take action should the LOC rule in Big Copyright's favor. We have until October 28th to prepare, and once the ruling comes down, anyone interested in the enrichment of the public domain and the rights to fair use of copyrighted material needs to be ready to stage an information campaign the likes of which has never been seen.
Prepare fliers and protests. Get ordinary people's attention focused on why this abuse of the limited copyright monopoly harms them. I'm trying to compile an HTML archive of important documents and arguments that can inform people about their relationship to copyright and it's place in society. Burn stuff like this to CD and distribute it near theaters, video rental shops, Kinko's, or other areas where people are likely to be in a receptive mood regarding their rights as individuals. If you're interested in knowing the URL when my compilation is done, send me an email with 'dmca' in the subject line.
Make the argument heard, because if the LOC rules to delete fair use and copyright expiration, we have the hardest argument yet to make to change what will be the status quo.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.