Internet Archive Gets DMCA Exemption

Paul Hickman writes "The Internet Archive has successfully lobbied for a DMCA exemption for the Software Archive. The IA keeps out-of-date programs, games and other random craziness for future programmers to savor. At the rapid pace of software development, this makes sure that we can create a history for us to remember and wonder at the programming of early games."

Comments

Now all that we need is

[zappepcs]

a personal DMCA exemption for every US Citizen.... sigh

Re:Now all that we need is

[bwthomas]

how can a first post be modded as redundant?

hmm... how indeed.

Re:Can they ignore takedown orders?

[Anonymous Coward]

The key phrase there is "on a commercial scale". There is no fair use on a commercial scale, its just using someone else's work to gain profit, and should be criminal. Fair use is certainly not the same thing as abolishing copyrights.

Re:Can they ignore takedown orders?

[Hatta]

Sure there is. Sampling for instance. There's a big difference between a short sample creatively integrated into a new song(fair) and selling bootlegs in chinatown(unfair).

Starting to change my mind

[Anonymous Coward]

I really am, on copyrights and the "me, me, me" mindset. I say let those folks crap be lost to the ages, gone. People who want the "don't you dare touch my stuff!" form of rights-go right ahead! I hope it gets lost in time, never to be seen again. Data of any kind that is open format, licensed to use, will survive. All those "artists" and closed off DRM content? fine! let it go away! Softare, games? Who cares really? Let it go, ignore it, ridicule it, make fun of it! I say go about using and creating open content, that is the only content that is guaranteed to at least have a chance to survive. the rest-as soon as company x goes out of business or some new format comes out and people lose interest..buh bye!

In the past, cultures that didn't care, didn't leave readable records-we don't know-or *care*- much about them. They are gone, as they should be. Whereas cultures that wrote things down in an intelligent way, using the best tech of the time, had their culture and language and works survive and they are still important today. Evolution not only goes to survival of the fittest, but survival of the most robust and open, because their knowledge base expanded rapidly, which lead to them being important, which lead them to being viable down through time.

Let the jerks go to all the trouble to create something, then make it a bear to stay viable or readable, their loss! Let them lock it up, charge huge fees for every peek at it or use, let them stay walled off, keep it buried in their vaults, throw away the key, bury it, obfuscate it, make it just so hard to use that..no one in the future will care! Let their own hubris be their legacy, their paranoid delusions of grandeur that their stuff is so valuable that humans will make the effort to try and decipher their weirdly coded and encumbered "works", when reality will be that the stuff that is easy to get to and easy to read and use and enjoy will stick around much better.

Re:Starting to change my mind

[axlash]

But that's the point. People who use DRM care less about how important their work will be in the future, and more about how much money they can make today. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this - we all make decisions which are skewed towards our short and long term interests.

Re:All 6 exemptions

[freeweed]

6. Sound recordings, and audiovisual works associated with those sound recordings, distributed in compact disc format and protected by technological protection measures that control access to lawfully purchased works and create or exploit security flaws or vulnerabilities that compromise the security of personal computers, when circumvention is accomplished solely for the purpose of good faith testing, investigating, or correcting such security flaws or vulnerabilities.

Would have been much shorter if they just typed "checking out and/or removing Sony's rootkit".

Yeah, but ...

[AlHunt]

"$50,000 in pro bono lawyer time". WTF is wrong with government when it takes this kind of leverage to get anything done? How would the average person ever hope to get any consideration at all?

And let's not forget - this "exemption" is courtesy of the very same people who created the need for an exemption - congress.

Stop voting for incumbent politicians and DMCA-type garbage will stop happening in the first place.

Re:Can they ignore takedown orders?

[HTH NE1]

But please explain under what conditions unlimited sharing should be considered fair use.

Unlimited distribution of a fair-use use of a work, such as a parody, should not automatically convert a fair use into an unfair one. In fact, many parodies have outlived the work they parody (Don Quixote, a famous parody of the now obscure Amadis de Gaula).

I'd argue political commentary or protest, such as incitement to pirate Steamboat Willie, when the object of protest is the very copyright extensions made on its behalf, should also be considered fair use, though I doubt the law (let alone Disney) would agree.

Jumping the ocean, though "the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole" is one of the measures of fair use, it does not proscribe the use of a work in its entirety from enjoying a fair use defense (e.g. use of entire Barbie dolls in a parody (Mattel Inc. v. Walking Mountain Productions) and the recording of entire television shows for timeshifted personal private viewing (Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, granted that "personal private" limitation undermines, not underlines the original point)).

I'd also argue that I should have unfettered right to reproduce and distribute any and all commercials ever made (and Giganews should carry alt.binaries.multimedia.commercials in its feed so that I can) as by their nature every viewing public or private benefits them, for which each viewing costs them nothing (when they normally have to pay huge sums to get air time). Promotional materials should not be protected by copyright. And certainly materials whose lifetime is substantially shorter than the copyright term protecting them should not be granted effectively indefinite protection!

And the same for any unpaid incidental appearance of a product in another work, or any use for which a work has become traditional, such as the singing of "Happy Birthday" in a restaurant or in an audiovisual work of fiction. Holiday songs created to become sung every time that holiday comes along should not enjoy protection from the very behavior they sought to engender.

(BTW, I should let you know that I often go out on tangents when discussing such things, or respond in part to others who are not the parent message, such as and especially the original article or its summary. I try to allow context to properly attach my meaning and the subject of my address. Please don't get upset that I may not be talking your points.)

BTW, Ob:IANAL.