Fair Use is Not a Constitutional Right

jmichaelg writes: "Ed Stroligo at overclockers.com has written an article on the fair-use provision of the 1976 copyright law. He goes into some depth on the difference between a constitutional right vs. a legal right as well as covers the Betamax, Napster and Rio cases. It's a well thought out article and definitely worth the read."

Comments

CSS != Copy protection

[leereyno]

This article says that DeCSS somehow gets around the copy protection embedded into DVD's. As I'm sure most of you know, this isn't technically true. The purpose of CSS is not copy protection but content control. CSS allows movie studios to decide when, where, and by whom the DVD is viewed. Lets say you're in Europe and you'd like to watch a DVD that has just been released in the states. Under the ordinary laws of commerce if you've got the money to buy that DVD then you get to watch it. Not so with CSS. Now movie studios have the ability to pick and choose which titles get released in which region at which price. Lets say there is a title that the powers that be in your country have banned because they don't like it. CSS gives the MPAA the perfect means by which to implement and support this oppression by foreign governments. None of this is right or just. The idea behind copyright is to give producers of works certain rights and protections to encourage the creation of art and knowledge. Unfortunately with things like the DMCA and CSS, non-producers such as the MPAA are perverting the concept of copyright. Where traditionally copyright has been used to define when, where, and by whom a particular work is COPIED, it is now being used to control where, when and by whom a particular work is viewed, read, seen, or otherwise utilized.

Imagine if there was CSS for books and in order to read a particular book you had to live in the right country, be of the correct race or social group, and pay a surcharge to the book cartel every time you wanted to read it. As it stands now books are independent entities. Once a publisher prints a book and sells it, that publisher has no control over what is done with that book other than a legal right to control whether it or portions of it are copied or used in other works. You can read this book, then give it to your friend to read. The publisher can't come have you and your friend arrested because he hadn't paid for the "right" to read that book. You can smuggle books that are unpopular with an oppressive regime into that country and the words will still be legible.

The problem with CSS is not that it is a copy protection scheme, but that it is a scheme to control who uses the DVD, which has nothing to do with copy protection or copyright.

If I remember right a group of video pirates were busted here not too long ago for copying DVD's. What I heard about that case is that they were copying the entire DVD bit-for-bit whether it employed CSS or not. The copied DVD's were still encoded using CSS. So what possible use is it as a copy control scheme? None of course, but its very useful for controlling which people get to watch the DVD.

Another group that is trying to pervert copyright into content control is the "church" of scientology. They employ copyright and trade secret law in order to try and prevent anyone from knowing the truth about their "religion." The truth is that scientology is nothing more than a highly successful scam that robs people of their money, enslaves many in the "Sea Org," and destroys families by forcing those in the cult to "disconnect" from relatives who are critical. Their abuse of the legal system is legendary. Their policy of filing suits for harassment value alone is such that I'm amazed their lawyers havent' been disbarred by now. The organization's sole purpose is to sucker people out of their money that is then passed "uplines" to the likes of David Miscavige. Their use of front groups and interlocking corporations to facilitate the laundering of this money would make John Gotti weep. If you want to find out more about this kriminal kult take a trip to www.xenu.net Be sure to pass this on to your friends too. The more people know the truth about this criminal organization, the fewer potential victims the cult will have to feed upon.

Lee

Re:I don't care

[abe ferlman]

a bunch of snot-nosed brats not wanting to pay for other people's labor is beyond pathetic.

And your belief that "snot-nosed brats" are the only ones with a stake in the consequences of the ownership of ideas is laughable. The patenting/copyrighting of DNA threatens to create a much more insidious era of subjection, and what good is freedom of expression if all the obvious ideas and ideas you'd like to use as building blocks for your own new ideas are owned by immortal corporations?

If you can't see the perils inherent in this system, you are extremely short sighted.