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Coble-Berman Bill Would Restrict Fair Use
Amazing Quantum Man writes "News.com is reporting on the new Berman-Coble copyright bill. This bill is a two-edged sword. It would make life easier for webcasters, but it would restrict fair use. Interestingly, according to the article, Berman allegedly opposes the bill that has his name on it as a sponsor! I don't think it's on Thomas yet, but Politech has a copy of the bill (2.1M PDF)." The report which the memorandum attached to the bill refers to is online. Congress is making an effort to reconcile traditional copyright law with the realities of digital copying; there's no telling whether the end product will be something tolerable or not.
A lot of people in congress don't understand the needs of today's technical inclined people. They should bring in as many tech people as they can, or simply ask slashdot when they attempt to make laws that will affect the digital world.
Understanding the legal ramifications and understanding what's actually going on are two completely different things..
According to the draft bill, such Webcasting "is not an infringement of copyright"--if temporary copies are made only to facilitate music distribution and if the copies are stored only for a time that's necessary for the broadcast.
The problem w/ the legal system is they leave too many areas for interpretation. What if I think that "necessary time" is long enough to make sure that no one gets cut off, which could be longer than the actual broadcast. Also, what if something goes wrong and your buffer copy doesn't get deleted automatically. Are you now liable for software failure? I doubt anyone would want to sit there and watch the cache to ensure that every single buffer copy is appropriately deleted.
The law needs to start using definite time frames. If they would quit using generalized times, and start using something physical, such as a day/month/year, they could have a lot more pull in lawsuits.
My other sig is an import.
This bill is very broad. It limits too much and is unenforcable. What are they going to arrest me and my friend for our Jerry Springer video collection? Also if I claim all of my emails as copyright protected and they are forwarded on, doesn't that break the law in the bill? Hell forwarding /. on to friends would infringe on rights according to this.
Who was it that said that the greatest danger to law enforcement was unenforceable laws?
This is the case here. Congress (and all the people who are paying for them) are trying to change the reality of a society that's very rapidbly becoming a 'free information' country. They're trying to put limits on something that is changing the world very rapidly and in a very chaotic manner. You can call it 'destructive' if you want to, since it's certainly destroying organizations and businesses that survive by controlling information, but it's jsut change.
The problem with trying to control this change is that you can't legislate fish into flying or birds into swimming. Just look at Prohibition if you need an example. A small subsection of the country's population tried to legislate away people's rights to get drunk and wasted. They had good intentions. Alcoholism is certainly a problem and destroys many, many lives. By making a law that was disliked and unenforceable, however, the country opened itself up to the ravages of organized crime more than ever before.
Look at the 'War on Drugs'. Hard drugs (and even some 'soft' drugs) ruin lives and kill people. That doesn't change the fact that people want to get high or stoned. You think that columbian drug lords would have vast fortunes with which to buy submarines and advanced IT installations if the American government hadn't created a situation in which it was more profitable to do dusiness in an illegal manner than legally?
Information is in the same boat. Companys claim billions and billions of dollars of 'lost sales' (cough *bullshit* cough) on music, software, game, and video piracy. People want to use the stuff in a 'fair use' way. Even moreso, they want to pirate it and not pay for it. All the government is going to do by creating a law that makes it more difficult to legally share information is make more people into criminals who weren't before.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Right now, you have the following situation: ... An artists, copyright
Artist A created song B which is a probable hit.
He then sell all rights for that song
to some syndicate C for a fixed sum.
Then for all that A1 A2
on songs will be at C and they will care not of fair use or other stuff or...
Imagine situation, when by law they cannot sell more than 50% of their rights on song.
It means that they have direct decisions on how their material will be used. It will be much fairer to them and society.
You hit a key term here, but slightly off. It should be 'disruptive' instead of 'destructive' and then you not only get right to the truth, but you enlist years of sociological research behind legislation like this and other recording-industry abominations are bad.
/. and the geek community in general is that Internet, file sharing, and the like are bad for some current business models, but in the long run good for society. We point to examples like VCRs, for instance. The problem has been one of convincing the mainstream non-geek population that this is true.
The common opinion on
Enter the term, "disruptive."
There is a sizable body of mainstream economic literature (sorry, no URLs handy, ran across this in dead-tree pre-URL days) that focuses on "disruptive technologies" - how they are bad for some businesses and business models, but good for society as a whole. This is non-geek literature.
Our problem is to cast the free and open nature of the Internet as a mainstream distruptive technology as important to society as the telephone, automobile, airplane, etc. Take a look at the international nature of Linux (or *BSD) and tell me that the Internet hasn't done something immensely valuable for mankind. Letter-writing and co-operative journals are old, so is travel, but this is international collaboration of an unprecedented scale by common people. Not only do we take it for granted, we're about to throw it away in exchange for an outmoded and defective business model. (I know, there are no words about shutting down the Internet, but the sum chilling effect of DRM effectively does so by turning it into radio/television.)
This needs to become a mainstream issue, not a geek one.
(IMHO, the most socially disruptive technology of recent history has been the sanitary napkin.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
IMHO, the secondary damage of the War On Drugs far outweight the damage of the drugs, themselves. By trying to interdict drugs, we turn them into a high-dollar business. Also IMHO, it becomes self-defeating, because the more successful you are at interdiction, the more the cost rises, the better-financed the drug supply chain become.
I heard on NPR that in the 1968 election, Nixon promised to reduce crime. After getting elected, he had to produce. Some of his advisors told him that all of the more traditional law enforcement techniques had been proven not to work. (by experience) His best shot was drug treatment, to reduce demand, and therefore crimes of financing. He went along with it, it worked, and crime actually did go down measurably. In the 1972 election crime was no longer a big issue, so he dismantled the apparatus, and the approach has never been taken seriously again.
Kind of like the way Clinton/Greenspan actually did achieve a "soft landing" of the economy right before the dot-com boom. But now the concept appears to be forgotten, and I have no doubt that whenever recovery comes, it will be back into the usual boom/bust cycles.
Back to topic, filesharing is an interesting comparison to drugs because it is a widespread crime. Perhaps it should be better compared to Prohibition, one of the stupider ideas the US ever came up with, and clearly the STUPIDEST thing ever put into the US Constitution.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.