Congress Must Make Clear Copyright Laws

WSJdpatton writes "WSJ's Walt Mossberg takes a look at what's wrong with the DMCA and DRM given the recent lawsuit brought against Google's YouTube by media giant Viacom — 'Under fair use, as most nonlawyers have understood it, you could quote this sentence in another publication without permission, though you'd need the permission of the newspaper to reprint the entire column or a large part of it. A two-minute portion of a 30-minute TV show seems like the same thing to me. But why should I have to guess about that? What consumers need is real clarity on the whole issue of what is or isn't permissible use of the digital content they have legally obtained. And that can come only from Congress. Congress is the real villain here, for having failed to pass a modern copyright law that protects average consumers, not just big content companies.'"

Comments

Your content, your rules?? Within limits

[davidwr]

My content, my rules. There are a LOT of things I can do with your content without your permission.

I can parody it.
I can use it in satire.
I can use it, with limits, for educational purposes.
In some cases I can make backups.
If I've purchased it on a media and never broken the seal, I can usually resell it under the doctrine of first sale. In some cases, such as a book, this applies even after I've read the book.
I can wait for the copyright to expire and do pretty much whatever I want with it.

I've left a few things off the list, researching copyright law is left as an exercise to the reader.