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."

Comments

You can't copyright irony!

[lmlloyd]

I think it is a riot how unanimously bloggers hate the DMCA, even though it is only by the virtue of the DMCA that putting something up on a web page is considered "publication" at all! I'm sure their are plenty of those nasty old media corporations who would be more than happy to live in a world without the DMCA, so that they could just blatantly rip-off anything they found on the web with no concern whatsoever for copyright law. But of course, we don't want to throw out the parts of the DMCA that benefit us do we? Hell, we don't even want to mention those! We just want to throw out the parts that are inconvenient, and pretend that is the whole of the law. Because law is such a simple thing (especially copyright law) that there is no way throwing out the part we hate would ever weaken the part that gets us our paycheck.