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."

Comments

Not fair use

[Henry V .009]

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.

Re:Not fair use

[Dachannien]

What a lot of slashdotters want to defend is not just the explicitly-outlined concept of "fair use", but the Supreme Court-outlined concept of time-shifting and space-shifting for private use which also falls under the "fair use" provision.

I'd also like to point out the following quote (Majority opinion in Sony Corp. of Am. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984)):

"The Court of Appeals' holding that respondents are entitled to enjoin the distribution of VTR's, to collect royalties on the sale of such equipment, or to obtain other relief, if affirmed, would enlarge the scope of respondents' statutory monopolies to encompass control over an article of commerce that is not the subject of copyright protection. Such an expansion of the copyright privilege is beyond the limits of the grants authorized by Congress."

It appears to me that the DMCA goes against already-established legal precedent in terms of Constitutional interpretation. It's a shame that we even need new legislation to protect these rights, but it's going to have to be grassroots efforts like this which end up making things change for the better.

(Insert standard IANAL disclaimer here)

good, & "government bail-out"?

[MacAndrew]

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.

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. :) For now the DMCA needs to be substantially flushed and rewritten (no one's going to repeal it).

Damn the "Fair Uses"

[DarkVein]

Fair use is soemthing else. The DMCA enshrines digital media that abolishes all unregulated use. The MPAA/RIAA want to do this because the technology allows it. What they want to do is impossible to do with traditional media.

The entire picture is distorted by the prevalence of this "us vs them" battle. These laws dictate proper use of any creative work. The DMCA itself dictates the proper use of any digital distribution, creative or not. The RIAA/MPAA make up a very, very, small portion of the subject being regulated.

Lessig's presentation. (mirror)

On the "Us Vs Them" front, the RIAA/MPAA want to monopolize the American source of Culture. This is a very lucrative proposition. The RIAA/MPAA demonstrate a flagrant irresponsibility as steward of the culture they currently control, and they want to own more. They do this by bleeding off the Unregulated areas of Copyright. The goal is to abolish The Commons, so that you must buy your heritage from Universal Music Group, et al.