Slashdot Mirror
Rep. Boucher Outlines 'Fair Use' Fight
A reader writes "AtNewYork.com is reporting: U.S. Congressman Rick Boucher, moving to strengthen "fair use" provisions under federal copyright law, said he is introducing a bill that would essentially restrict the record industry from selling copy-protected CDs."
http://www.house.gov/boucher/ is his web site
and Ninthnet@mail.house.gov is his email address.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
I don't think any new laws are going to fix any of the problems. Look at what's going on with Microsoft lately... Slashdot published a story about the meeting scheduled between the Phoenix Linux Users Group and the Maricopa County CIO to talk about the purchasing guidelines and potential for Open Source, but it looks like Maricopa County won't be "disbarring" Microsoft as a supplier, despite the clear legality of doing so after Microsoft's lost legal battles on the "monopoly" front.
After about two hours (8:30AM to 10:30AM) I left the meeting with a much better feeling about my local County government - at least in the IT/IS groups.
Linden Thatcher, the CIO for Maricopa County, struck me as quite literate in the issues that were raised.
About 5% of the County IT/IS budget goes to Microsoft products, a vast majority of those being the 12,000 desktops they support. According to the statements Mr. Thatcher made, most of their "server-side" applications run on a mix of HP-UX and System V, with some apps running on Websphere.
There are currently a couple of internal projects running Linux/Apache to provide document publishing.
Mr. Thatcher has read "Ender's Game," and met Orson Scott Card (thank goodness we've got SOMEONE in the hierarchy who is not only literate, but READS!)
The Phoenix Linux Users Group people who showed up were very polite, and there was only one person in the crowd who seemed to be almost violently "anti-Microsoft."
Good meeting. But I still don't have any hopes that new laws are going to fix any of these problems.
Specialization is for insects. - R.A.H.
A great resource for finding donors is www.opensecrets.org. You can find out who gave the most money to Sen. Hollings over the past 5 years (surprise - Disney is 16th!), or which members of Congress received the most from the tv/movies/music industries (Howard Berman, D-CA is number one), and lots of other goodies like this. It's an amazing collection of information.
I've always viewed it like this: when you get media, there is a "basic" license intrinsically and inseparably tied to that media. The basic license grants you certain rights, including but not necessarily limited to:
The official view of the courts is that if the transaction has the quality of a sale, then it isn't licensing at all (they've also pretty much said that everything that's happened in any consumer store thusfar has had the quality of a sale). Thus, if it "feels" like a sale, then you have, if nothing else, the right of resale, lending, and space shifting (these rights have all been ruled on).
The courts have not specifically ruled on any of the other rights *I* feel you have (that I know of), but (so far as I know) a pertinent case hasn't come up. It would seem pretty silly that you didn't intrinsically have the right to listen to a CD you've bought, though. And I'm also pretty sure that copying for archival purposes is protected by copyright law as well. So, 2 of my 4 are official, one is common sense, and, well, look # 4 up.
In any case, by the doctorine of first sale, the RIAA can't restrict by legal means the used CD market. Nothing has been said about technological means, though, and it sounds like Rep. Boucher wants to restrict the use of technology to limit such things.
Interesting note, but the doctorine of first sale stems from a case where a book publisher included a "EULA" in the front of their books, forbidding their sale on the secondary market. The court ruled that the interest of the publisher in that particular copy of a protected work ended after they sold it the first time, and that they couldn't limit what happened to it afterwards. So, by some stretch, there is precident for EULA's not having legal force.
It was not a "damn fine compromise" with anyone. Tipper Gore, like Al's fromer running mate Joe Lieberman, is an aggresive campaigner for censorship and has been since the early eighties. Her campaign against musicians mirrored the classic bluestocking campaigns against movies in the twenties and thirties, and comics in the fifties, hoping to obtain more censorship through sdaring the industry than could possibly be obtained through legal means.