Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Three Years Under the DMCA

Posted by michael on from the prohibition-lasted-fourteen-years dept.

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.

3 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not in the states. by iCEBaLM · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  2. Re:Three years, and still no Supreme Court decisio by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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?

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
  3. Not Unintended by Veteran · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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 .