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More Unintended Consequences of the DMCA
BrianWCarver writes "In the seven years since Congress enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), examples of the law's impact on legitimate consumers, scientists, and competitors continue to mount. A new report released today from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), 'Unintended Consequences: Seven Years Under the DMCA,' (pdf) collects reports of the misuses of the DMCA -- chilling free expression and scientific research, jeopardizing fair use, impeding competition and innovation, and interfering with other laws on the books. The report updates a previous version issued by EFF in 2003, which Slashdot also covered."
Fair Use Under Siege "Fair use" is a crucial element in American copyright law-the principle that the public is entitled, without having to ask permission, to use copyrighted works in ways that do not unduly interfere with the copyright owner's market for a work. Fair uses include personal, noncommercial uses, such as using a VCR to record a television program for later viewing. Fair use also includes activities undertaken for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research. Unfortunately, the DMCA throws out the baby of fair use with the bathwater of digital piracy. By employing technical protection measures to control access to and use of copyrighted works, and using the DMCA against anyone who tampers with those measures, copyright owners can unilaterally eliminate fair use, re-writing the copyright bargain developed by Congress and the courts over more than a century.
What bothers me is that things like this cause people to think that there is no such thing as fair use. I work as a teacher and I make a bunch of presentations for my classes. It's school policy that we can't use copyrighted images for any purposes -- even this clear cut case of non-comercial, educational use. This policy is just one of the many in place to eliminate even the possibility that someone may sue for any reason, no matter how in the right we may be. I'd use creative commons images anyway, but this is very frustrating.
-CGP
I thought I'd pop in a quick comment to beat the rush.. I've barely scanned through the document, but I've already noticed obvious and glaring errors.
For example, they cite the case of Adobe's claim that Nikon prevented them from decrypting their RAW format files. The facts as the EFF documents explains them, are just plain wrong. There was a brief outcry from some overwrought programmers at Adobe over this issue, but it turned out Nikon was always willing to license their proprietary code to developers like Adobe, even before this little dust-up. Nothing to see here, move along, it was just another testy outburst from a programmer who had too much coffee and didn't want to wait for his managers to finish negotiations with Nikon.
I'll go through the document in more detail, and I'm sure I'll find more deliberate misstatements of facts. The EFF always trumps up charges to inflate its case. Perhaps someday they will learn that this tactic undermines their efforts.
Why does the EFF not defend your Second Amendment rights? Because that's not part of what they do, AND it's already taken care of! There already is a large and very powerful organization known as the NRA. If you're having problems with your Second Amendment rights, call them, they'll be happy to help you with those. If you're having problems with other civil rights, call the ACLU. They'll help you with those problems. If you're hungry, call your local pizza place. They'll help you out in that case. What's wrong with not being everything to everyone, when it's already taken care of by a -more- specialized organization very competent to deal with that issue?
By the way, what is this about the ACLU being the "mouthpiece for the ultraleft"? The ACLU defends all comers whose civil rights have been violated. Granted, minorities' rights tend to be violated more frequently, whether that be gays, blacks, or those with non-mainstream political philosophies. This means that the ACLU will most often be defending those on the fringes-that's not out of their choice, it's because those are the people who will the most frequently need the defending. But the ACLU will defend (and has defended) the right of people to hold Bible studies in public parks at the same time they fight religious language in the Pledge of Allegiance. No contradiction here-the government must stay neutral on religious matters, neither cheerleading nor getting in the way for any particular religion or religion in general. Same for any other matters-one imagines if the government forced Rush Limbaugh off the air tomorrow, the ACLU would scream the first and the loudest, same as if it were Howard Stern. (What Limbaugh's feelings would be on that are another matter entirely.) Howard Stern's simply more likely to see it happen to him.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.