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Protect Your Fair-Use Rights
jrguthrie writes "There is a great site for helping two bills through the legislative process, protectfairuse.org. The site makes it simple to E-Mail and/or snail-mail your Representatives and Senators. The bills are designed to close the gaping holes in the DMCA that allow the RIAA and MPAA to use the DMCA as a government bail-out. Please check it out and post your thoughts."
Sites like this are an excellent idea. Most of use don't want to hunt the web for addresses only to get the wrong ones. I promise to follow through on this.
:) For now the DMCA needs to be substantially flushed and rewritten (no one's going to repeal it).
I'm interested in the "bail-out" comment -- do many agree with that? Maybe I misunderstand. If blocking piracy is thought a bail-out, I disagree, it's just enforcement of existing copyright law. If killing fair use is a bail-out, I don't see how that could be true because the money involved must be small. Killing fair use make the product less attractive, reducing sales; yet some people might buy extra copies (one on CD, the other MPEG or something), increasing sales; won't these two tend to cancel out?
Ideally (for me anyway) we would kill piracy and preserve fair use, and that's the message I will communicate to my representative. The DMCA's flaw in this regard is its clumsy attempt to preserve fair use. According to the statute's own language it does not alter fair use, but of course in practice it does, and perhaps also free speech. Whether piracy and fair use can be simultaneously addressed, well that's a whole 'nuther problem discussed at length elsewhere here.
I don't want to go off on a rant here, but saying the DMCA is a switch in legal viewpoint is like saying Christianity is about the idea that it isn't nice to nail people to trees.
I agree, 100% - but the point can be stated a lot stronger. The switch wasn't just in viewpoint. It was a paradigm shift in the entire model of copyright, from one of incentive to control.
Up until 1998, even the most conservative, pro-copyright summation of what copyright was all about came down to one question: when the currency is rights in one's work, how much do we have to pay artists to make them create their works and contribute to the public domain?
That's the incentive model, which arguably dated back to the Statute of Anne. And it lasted until the DMCA - the Statute of Valenti.
With the DMCA and the Copyright Term Extension Act (Mickey Mouse Protection Act), it became about control. The content people - MPAA, RIAA, and the other Horsemen of the Infocolypse conjured up the fallacy that an endless linear curve characterized the relationship between incentives and production.
They hijacked the incentive model to produce - for example - the myth that if 50 years' incentive produced x works, 70 years would produce x + y works, and 100 years would produce x + y + z works, and so on. By that logic, only an infinity of years would maximize the amount artists create. Which of course, is crap, because what you're really saying is that it is only in a regime where you have the least access to expression that you will have the most access to expression.
I'll pause while we all think about that one.
Now, that's an argument about extension, but the same applies to control of use under the DMCA. Anti-circumvention is the same thing. If copyright owners can make you buy two copies, (say, one and a backup) when you would normally buy one, then they sell more, and have more incentive to create. Or so the theory would go.
The DMCA increased control about as much as pro-IP lobbyists thought they could before anyone noticed.
Give authors the right to prevent critical reviews, for example, and you are increasing control. Because you're increasing control, you should have an incremental increase in the number of works in the public domain (or at least, the Area Formerly Known As the Public Domain).
Strikes a balance? Yeah - I guess - between taking advantage of public apathy and provoking total public outrage. Guess they struck a balance there. But balance or not, at the end of the day, the DMCA is a control-oriented creature, whereas copyight and fair use doctrines are incentive-oriented creatures.
Sorry about that. So who are these protectfairuse.org people anyway?