Three Years Under the DMCA

willybur writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation just released a report (pdf) today detailing the last three years under the DMCA. It describes how the DMCA has been used to unfairly attempt to prosecute all of the various parties over the years, and gives yet another argument of why the DMCA needs to be struck down. It's worth a read." Slashdot has covered most of the incidents listed, but this is nice summary to hand someone who hasn't been following these issues.

Comments

Re:Not in the states.

[iCEBaLM]

Pretty much. Can you name a country with an economy like ours? I bet you can't. That's because we don't allow our government to interfere with the markets.

Except for the Lumber, Steel markets among others...

-- iCEBaLM

Re:Three years, and still no Supreme Court decisio

[ackthpt]

Techies do care, however, the media companies (particularly those who claim to have been so hurt under copying) spend scads of money to keep people down. I wonder how long before we see law firms listed on the NYSE, as they've done a booming business under this tyranny. And, yes, the common man on the street doesn't know and doesn't care about it until the police knock on the door because the kids are running a file sharing service or have written some really clever decrypting software and have it on their website.

To some degree the common man is more worried about employment, terrorism, war in the Middle East. When the press (which is largely owned by companies just happy as hell with the DMCA) tells the common man it's a bad thing, then he'll care. Don't see that happening, do you?

Not Unintended

[Veteran]

When a geek reads the PDF it makes sense to us - from our innocent emotionally herbivorous geek point of view - to say that these consequences were unintended bugs, and that the DMCA obviously needs to be fixed to remedy these accidental side effects.

However, that would be a misreading or our opponents actions and motivations.

• The law was not passed accidentally; it was a deliberate and intentional action.
  
  
• The effects of the law are not unintended; it was specifically designed by the industry groups who asked for its existence to curtail exactly the fair use activities - and stifle exactly the scientific research and free speech activities which it has done. An example of an unintended consequence would be if the DMCA wound up some how curtailing the use of electric cow milking machines; the cases sited in the paper were all directly on target and intentional
  
  
• The law was not passed as an oversight. For example: it was not tacked on to an appropriations bill where the majority of the legislators were unaware of its existence. The law was passed by both houses of congress after due processing by those houses and at the recommendation of committees charged with studying its consequences. It was signed into law by the President of the United States who acted upon the recommendation of his staff.
  
  
• The law is not the act of stupidity; there is no indication that any of the people involved in the passage of this law are mentally deficient; most of them are lawyers and possess a law degree - which is recognized as the equivalent in educational achievement of a Ph.D.. Nor is there any evidence that the people involved with the passage of this law had a temporary lapse of their mental faculties; there is no indication - such as misspelled words etc. that this law was written by people under the influence of intoxication.
  
  
• The law is malicious; it makes a federal felony out of actions which have always been held as innocent, legal and which the courts have always upheld as fair.
  

The DMCA is a deliberate, intentional, malicious, act by our government on the behalf of an industry group which seeks to improperly control the actions of the public at large and to unjustly profit at the expense of that public. The act does not need fixing it needs to be repealed - and an investigation into possible bribery of the public officials who foisted it upon us needs to be launched. This is the only way in which pernicious laws of this type can be prevented in the future.

The rule "Never attribute to malice that which may be explained by stupidity" does not apply here; the DMCA is not an act of stupidity but one of deliberate malice. Everyone in the world needs to learn the skill of being able to spot the difference between a malicious action and a stupid one .

Re:Jurisdiction of the DCMA laws?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Fortunately, the DMCA means Jack S outside of the US.

Unfortunately, it looks as though other major players -- the EU, for example -- are lining up to pass similarly ill-thought-out and draconian legislation just as soon as they can.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

oh the irony.

[Restil]

I'm sure that everyone notices the subtle irony of releasing this report using a proprietary format from a company that has abused the DMCA.

*sigh*

-Restil

Are You Sure?

[Rayonic]

Great point, definitely deserving of a (+5 Insightful). But, are you sure that all of the DMCA's consequences are intentional? We've been under the general impression that those responsible for it's passage (RIAA, MPAA, etc) have not a whit of technical knowledge, despite all of their PH.Ds and MBAs. I've sure all of us have met supposedly well-educated individuals without even a basic grasp of any technical issues. Remember when the MPAA tried to outlaw the VCR, and then it became one of their biggest moneymakers? That wasn't that long ago, and those dumb fsckheads are still the ones in charge.

Of course, whatever the reasoning, I'm sure they're peeing their pants with joy about the full implications of the new law they bought.

6 years under the DMCA.... Predictions

[ralphus]

you will no longer be able to find an ad-blocking proxy server to use, they will be illegal black box circumention devices designed to alter the display of a copyrighted work.

you will not be able to legally alter the way an application you own interacts with things other than the way the manufacturer intended. Wanna change the user-agent your browser reports??? Want to block the ability of a program you own from phoning home and tracking you? Even Quake 3 does this if you don't block it.

Reverse engineering will also include using a sniffer to look at the network traffic that is leaving your machine and deciding what you do and do not want to allow to go out to the internet.

blocking cookies will be illegal.

anonymous proxies, remailers, news posters or any technology that grants the user relative or absolute anonynmity will be illegal, they allow the widespread and fast and unaccountable distribution of illegal information such as what the latest bug in a copyrighted work is that the manufacturer doesn't want you to know about (circumventing the DMCA).

freenet will be illegal.

Encryption will be for criminals.

Freedom and copyright/IP are mutually exclusive concepts as pure ideals. There is a sliding scale with freedom on one side and copyright/Intellectual Property on the other. Pragmatically we'd be foolish to think of having absolute freedom, the scale is sliding strongly towards complete copyright/IP & enforcement and there is tremendous power pushing it in that direction. Who's to stop them? A few geeks who can see what's going on. Unfortunately I think the geeks get caught up in these issues applying only to the Internet, or only to technology issues. These same issues apply to nearly everything with the world today and all tie together.

Think about it, figure it out and educate as many as you can and get as polically active as you can be.

Technology has started a new revolution just as the printing press did when invented. Centralized control of information was shattered then. Now it's being shattered again. There is going to be quite a struggle and the powerstructures are facing the biggest threats ever. They are counting on ignorance of the masses to win. I'm afraid they will and that terrible things will result.

DO SOMETHING.