Copyright Office Suggests Changes To Induce Act

An anonymous reader writes "The US Copyright Office has proposed a new version of the Induce act. Under this new version it is apparently more difficult to bring charges against a company for inducement. Stories on the subject can be found at DRMBlog.com and at News.com."

Comments

Still is too vague

[Manip]

Scenario: If I had a CD and I lend it to my friend Fred. Now Fred wants to listen to this CD but based on this new copyright law couldn't I be inducing him to commit break copyright law because I have given him the digital media which makes it easier to copy?

Did anyone else notice how this law can be used to restrict information because you can induce someone to commit copyright infringement without providing links or files. I mean if I tell someone how to make a crack for a game by providing only locations and hex changes, I could be inducing them to break copyright couldn't I?

Artists are NOT suffering

[flinxmeister]

http://bmi.com/news/200408/20040818a.asp

"The performing rights organization generated royalties of more than $573 million for its songwriters, composers and music publishers. Royalties increased by $40 million or 7.5% from the previous year.

BMI President and CEO Frances W. Preston said both the revenues and royalty distributions were the largest in the company's history."

Sooner or later this 800 pound gorilla is going to trample their manufactured crisis.

Re:Artists are NOT suffering

[black mariah]

BMI claims to represent over 300,000 artists. Let's do some math.

$573,000,000 / 300,000 = $1910 per year

Dialog box loophole?

[patbob]

The draft of the act says:

".. causes the user of the technology to infringe copyrighted works without the user making a specific, informed decision, for each copyrighted work at issue, about whether to engage in such infringement; "

Doesn't this mean that all the file sharing programs have to do, is to pop up a dialog box for each file that is can't verify the user has the rights to download? Wouldn't that give the user a specific, informed decision about every file and also remove the program from inducing infringement by the terms of this draft?