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Is The Eldred Decision Bad For The DMCA?
clonebarkins writes "Law.com is running an article by Evan P. Schultz suggesting that the Eldred decision (/. story) could mean bad news for our favorite four-letter law: the DMCA."
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Besides, if it was really that big a deal or threat, would we have just heard about it now? The thing's dated January!
On the other hand, maybe the article writer is the first person to actually read the thing (see previous mention of length).
Spelling, grammar, punctuation? We need something that checks logic.
Ginsburg said that the sonny bono copyright act doesn't change the face of copyright in the law, but merely extend the term, it was fine.
This guy is taking that and making it into a case that the court thinks that the DMCA isn't fine.
I think he's reading in a lot and its too much of a stretch to reach that conclusion.
-molo (IANAL)
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Now, will someone please use something that would be banned by the DMCA for a legitimate, meaningful, publicly supported task and dare someone to sue under the DMCA. Make a teaching DVD for kids that shows how wonderful the Supreme Court is using copyrighted works and DeCSS. Until this gets to SCOTUS it is law of the land...Congress and their corporate sponsors are effectively locking away years and years of our culture through legal and technological methods. At the very least let's break the law which prevents even attempting to break the technological protection.
The comment about the untechnical users being deprived off fair use by technological means makes me think that "literacy" has been given a new legal power:
If you are unable to understand and comprehend the work, that is you are illiterate to the communication means utilized to create the work, you are not entitled to fair use rights. Fair use in this context seems to have nothing to do with the presentation or distribution of the work to the audience, only the means of production - a distinction not present in a written work, which combines production and presentation, but starkly clear in computer software.
It seems to be saying that since I don't have fair use rights to timeshift a movie on opening day, to store a live performance by calling in the artist to play at 4 am, or to experience a baseball game with out a ticket, I also don't have the right to acquire the work of another person which will give me by proxy the technical expertise that I don't have, namely the literacy required to exercise my fair use rights over technologically protected works.
Sounds a lot like polling tests in the South that kept the illiterate from voting in elections.
The author of this article is looking hard for a silver lining in the cloud of the Eldred decision, and thinks he has found it in Justice Ginsburg's wording. I don't see it. This court is very pro business, and has given it's Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur to perpetual copyright through repeated extention. If the question on the DMCA comes before them, they will recieve many friend of the court letters from the likes of the MPAA, and RIAA that will convince them to uphold it. Citing precedent, future Supreme Courts won't give us back anything the DMCA and CTEA have taken from us, and neither will Congress. They are puppets on the strings of their corporate special interest masters. Here is link to what I wrote when the Eldred decision came out. Though I was very emotional at the time, and said some inflammatory things, I stand by my words.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
What Ginsburg said in Eldred is most certainly nice and fluffy, but it's dicta, and thus not binding precedent. That's the bottom line. Eldred does not stand for the proposition that the first amendment guarantees fair use. Of course, such dicta can be cited persuasively in the future, but it's most certainly not binding on the next court to hear a DMCA challenge, even though the SCOTUS said it.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.