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."

Comments

Quantity versus Quality

[MrWa]

So, we have two apparently seperate but coordinated efforts to on one hand extend copyright protection (Bono vs. Eldred) and on the other prevent fair use of said copyrighted material (DMCA). The Supreme Court has deemed it a-ok for Congress to perpetually, if it wishes, extend copyright protection for all of eternity; preventing fairuse, on the other hand, may be something that SCOTUS would not allow. May.

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.

Re:Quantity versus Quality

[Alsee]

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.

I have a better idea - preform the decryption entirely mentally. It is a crime to decrypt, no matter how you do it. There is absolutely nothing about the law that has anything to do with computers. They just assumed that DRM will only be circumvented using a computer, and they assumed decryption tools were EXE's and hardware. Decryption tools are actually math and knowledge. Absolutely any program to decrypt can be "run" purely mentally by thinking through the lines of the program one by one. It may take a while and take a lot of effort, but it's always possible.

I'm not sure of the best way to get prosecuted for violating this law, but try not to let them know the decryption was done mentally until they actually drag you into court. I'd like to see them try to defend a law putting you in prison just for thinking certain thoughts. That's GOTTA be unconstitutional.

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raises the bar for literacy in the digital age?

[imsmith]

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.

Re:Not every cloud has a silver lining.

[John Biggabooty]

I don't see a silver lining coming from the courts or Congress, but from technology. The DMCA and CTEA remind me of the flurry of laws passed after the invention of the automobile to stifle it, and prop up the horse and buggy industry. They were futile. File trading, and other new technologies are making copyright law unenforceable, and irrelevant. Soon, copyright will be cast into the dustbin of history where it belongs.