Slashdot Mirror
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."
The term "fair use" is often misapplied on slashdot. Fair use applies to quotations of works for certain purposes.
The rights that the DMCA takes away are different. The DMCA enshrines into law any control mechanism placed into a digital work. That control mechanism might limit playback in different places around the world. It might limit the number of times a work can be viewed. It might limit viewings to only one machine. If an author of a book requested that a person had to stand on his head while reading that author's intellectual 'property,' (legally purchesed at a book store) he would be laughed at. Moreover the author would have no legal means to enforce the request. On the other hand, if that author creates some equivalent digital requirement (protection) for his work, the DMCA is there to enforce it.
The DMCA was a massive switch in legal viewpoint. Pre-DMCA, an author had limited rights over his work. Mainly he controlled when and who could copy it. Post-DMCA, the term 'intellectual property' has been taken literally, and digital copyright holders are treated as owners of their information--whether or not they have sold you a copy. This is a massive sea-change, and one that is not at all beneficial to society.