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Alan Cox Attacks the European DMCA

Posted by chrisd on from the alan-cox-is-xoc-nala-spelled-backwards dept.

forged writes "The Register already reported Alan Cox's involvement against the proposed European Union Copyright Directive before. Today, Alan Cox has issued a wake up call to the Linux community amid concerns that the pending EUCD could stymie open source development. "The directive, which was approved last year, extends European copyright legislation so that it is even more restrictive than America's controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)."" If you haven't joined the EFF (or the equivalent in your country) , now might be a good time.

3 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Cox downplayed the risk to Free Software by Telex4 · · Score: 5, Informative
    I attended the mini-conference, and The Register is actually a little off in suggesting that he talked about the threats of the EUCD to Free Software development. His central concerns, shared by Martin Keegan, the director of the Campaign for Digital Rights (http://uk.eurorights.org for those in the UK who want an EFF), were that the EUCD could create a new dark age, where digital rights management could see large amounts of information simply disappearing when the format becomes too old, and that minorities such as disabled people would suffer the most because it would not be profitable for companies to produce software to decode the DRM into a format suitable for them.

    I wrote an article summarising the issues discussed at the talk if anyone's interested here.

  2. Article is WRONG on DMCA exemption for blind by Seth+Finkelstein · · Score: 5, Informative
    The article says:

    The DMCA grants limited permission to circumvent copyright protection in order to make braille copies of eBooks for use by the blind, for example, but the EUCD makes such exceptions optional for member states, so they need not be implemented.
    This is WRONG. There is no such permission in the DMCA. The writer has apparently confused it with a copyright limitation:
    Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement of copyright for an authorized entity to reproduce or to distribute copies or phonorecords of a previously published, nondramatic literary work if such copies or phonorecords are reproduced or distributed in specialized formats exclusively for use by blind or other persons with disabilities.
    Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I do, how ever, know the DMCA very well, since I've been worried for many years about being sued under the DMCA for my anticensorware work

    Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

  3. The UK Campaign for Digital Rights by An+Audience+of+One · · Score: 5, Informative
    The conference that Alan Cox spoke at yesterday was organised by the Campaign for Digital Rights - we are trying to do something about this, and other similar laws. Anyone in the UK, or Europe in general, who wants to help fight this, should consider at least signing up to our mailing list.

    http://uk.eurorights.org/

    We have about 6 months before the EUCD becomes law in this country to try and mitigate it as miuch as possible, and try and stop all the massive loopholes that the media industry is going to exploit in it. Any help we can get is alway appreciated!