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US Register of Copyrights Says DMCA Is 'Working Fine'
Linnen writes "CNET News.com writer Anne Broache reports that the head of the US Copyright Office considers the DCMA to be an important tool for copyright owners. '"I'm not ready to dump the anticircumvention," [Register of Copyrights Marybeth Peters] said in response to a question from an audience member who suggested as much. "I think that's a really important part of our copyright owners' quiver of arrows to defend themselves." The law also requires that the Copyright Office meets periodically to decide whether it's necessary to specify narrow exemptions to the so-called anticircumvention rules. (Last year, the government decided it's lawful to unlock a cell phone's firmware for the purpose of switching carriers and to crack copy protection on audiovisual works to test for security flaws or vulnerabilities.)'"
Allowing unfair products to exist in this way encourages producers to make more of the same - eventually created a market where you *must* buy the product, for all choices suffer from the same problem.
And this person is in charge of copyrights?
You know, there's a HUGE difference between a book and a DVD.
If you want a partial list of how the DMCA has been abused, and other damages it has done even when it was not being abused, visit eff.org and find their report "DMCA: Unintended Consequences". Everybody should visit the site regularly, anyway.
I might disagree with the EFF in one respect, though: I do not believe that ALL the negative (from a consumer point of view) consequences were unintended. On the contrary, I think that industry lobbied Congress to put some of those provisions in there, with full knowledge of what it would do.
The DMCA does not protect copyrights, it simply expanded their scope to include things like copy restriction technologies. In fact, protecting copyrights with a law makes no sense anyway: copyrights are established by the law, and should be protected by the courts, as they were for decades before the DMCA was signed into law.
Palm trees and 8
But DMCA notices are also the most abused aspect of DMCA law, by the little guys. It is TOO easy to send unsupported "takedown notices" against innocent parties, and penalties for doing so fraudulently has seemed to be lax or missing altogether.
It is great that it has helped you some, but the current situation with DMCA takedown notices is "guilty until proven innocent", which is downright unAmerican.
Here is the link.
That page was written in 2002. Here is a link to the updated report:
http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/unintended_consequences.php
don't get me wrong, using the DMCA to complain about people making backup copies, format shifting, using a song as a backing track in a youtube video, posting sheet music transcriptions you made yourself, re-printing song lyrics etc etc, is all totally and utterly mental, and I have no sympathy for companies that try to enforce that shit. In fact, they probably annoy me more than the average slashdotter, because as well as being evil and stupid, that sort of stuff paints all copyright holders to be assholes, and weakens the argument for a reasonable enforcement of copyright.
The DMCA is not perfect, and it's abused. It also does some good stuff, and nobody mentions that.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
all US laws amount to that. But the DMCA means that if you knowingly do this, you are basically in a clear cut case of perjury and can have the book thrown at you. That's a good thing. The DMCA specifically reads the riot act to people who issue false claims.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
What's even scarier is that she's been serving in this position since 1994. That's over thirteen years of copyright policy advice to Congress (part of the office's job description) from a person who doesn't own a computer.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
"Better" may depend on your priorities. Betamax had better picture quality, VHS tapes had longer running time.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Wellll.... sort of. Even in Beta III mode, the SuperBeta (4.5 hours on an L-750) was much better than VHS-HQ in SLP mode (9 hours on a T-180) so that theory holds true. The only thing that beat SuperBeta resolution was S-VHS but that only ran for 2 hours on expensive tape; better quality but less than half the recording time. Ah, tradeoffs. The Beta ED in turn beat S-VHS hands down but only amounted to a technology demonstration. Very few were sold.
Right around the sunset of Betamax, Sony created a large cassette shell for the professional spinoff, BetaCam SP. It contained three times the tape length of the standard Beta tape shell which would have allowed 4.5 hours at Beta I, 9 hours at Beta II and 13.5 hours at Beta III if it had ever hit the consumer market (using L-750 thickness tape). They could have done that much sooner and saved the whole lot.
Most of the stuff on
``If you prevent people from bypassing technical limitations which protect copyright, you should have a corresponding mandate preventing copyright holders from using the technical limitation to claim other rights that they wouldn't normally have.''
I don't know the exact text of the DMCA, but the EUCD does the exact opposite. At least, the Dutch implementation of it explicitly states that bypassing the technical measures, _by itself_ is a criminal offense. It also states that members of the public have certain rights, _unless_ the technical measures are in the way of those. In that case, the technical measures take precedence, because it is a criminal offense to circumvent them.
Now, I have always argued that there is no need whatsoever to make circumventing "technical measures to protect copyright" illegal. It is already illegal to infringe on copyright. So if you circumvent the measures and do things that you normally aren't allowed to do, you're breaking the law. If you circumvent the measures to do things you are normally allowed to do, that shouldn't be illegal. In fact, it should rather be illegal for the technical measures to get in the way of you doing what you are normally allowed to do.
The only conclusion I can draw from this is that the EUCD (and, I guess, the DMCA) was never intended to protect copyright. What it does is grant companies a way to further extend their power at the expense of customers, that is, the public. Simply slap some DRM on your product and you can limit your users' rights and extend your own power indefinitely. And the great thing is, since circumventing the DRM is a _criminal_ offense, the government has to do the enforcing for you. Meaning that the public gets to foot the bill of enforcing a law that restricts the freedom of the very same public. A greater victory for corporate government there never was!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.