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Boucher Introduces New Bill

Posted by michael on from the free-publicity dept.

brandido writes "The Register is reporting that Rep. Rick Boucher unveiled his attempt at returning some rights to consumers. According to the Register: "As we reported yesterday, some of the biggest names in IT names were on hand to support a legislation from Rep. Rick Boucher unveiled this morning. Boucher vowed to strike out the repressive portions of the DMCA, and 'directs the Federal Trade Commission to undertake a rulemaking to assure adequate notice to the public of any lack of functionality which may attend the purchase of copy protected CDs.'" Details of the bill can be found in PDF format , as can a summary and Boucher's Statement (taken from The Reg story)." Oddly, this bill focuses on notification that you're buying copy-restricted music disks instead of CDs (which is useful, but hardly major), and only contains a few vague amendments to the DMCA itself. Neither of these is worth paying much attention to: Congress is about to wrap up and go home for the year, and will start afresh in January with a clean slate. Perhaps in January some bright Congressperson will introduce a bill which actually takes strong steps toward repealing the DMCA.

4 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Great... by 403Forbidden · · Score: 3, Funny

    and only contains a few vague amendments to the DMCA itself.

    JUST what we need, more vagueness in the DMCA... First felt tip markers, what will be made illegal now, cheese poofs? Cartman will be mad.

  2. damn by mrpuffypants · · Score: 2, Funny

    i wish I could "wrap up and go home for the year" in early October

  3. Re:El Presidente? by Sri+Lumpa · · Score: 2, Funny

    "Except for the fact that Schwarzennaegar isn't an American citizen by birth, which is required by the constituition for a person to run for and be elected President."

    You obviously haven't seen "Demolition Man"

    --
    "The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
  4. I can see it now by dacarr · · Score: 2, Funny
    The "copy-protected" logo, in the tradition of catering to stupid^H^H^H^H^H^H the less adept of consumers, will have to be something recognizeable. I would suggest having a silhouette of a pair of rabbits, one atop the other, with the traditional circle-and-slash combo over it, with text captioning underneath that indicates the disk (theoretically) cannot be copied.

    The only problem I see is with dense customers asking, "why would rabbits want to copy compact discs?"

    --
    This sig no verb.