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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.