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.)'"

Comments

It gets worse.

[khasim]

From TFA:

"It does bring attention to certain activities that maybe aren't so great," said the self-proclaimed "Luddite," who confessed she doesn't even have a computer at home. "In hindsight, maybe that's not such a bad thing."

And this person is in charge of copyrights?

You know, there's a HUGE difference between a book and a DVD.

Unintended Consequences

[Jane Q. Public]

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.

Re:stupid slashdot 'editors'

[Guanix]

"Registrar" would make more sense, but check out this provision of the copyright code (17 U.S.C. 701):

All administrative functions and duties under this title, except as otherwise specified, are the responsibility of the Register of Copyrights as director of the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress. The Register of Copyrights, together with the subordinate officers and employees of the Copyright Office, shall be appointed by the Librarian of Congress, and shall act under the Librarian's general direction and supervision.

So it seems that the copyright act itself refers to her as the Register of Copyrights. The Oxford English Dictionary contains this use as "register, n. 2":

a. The keeper of a register; a REGISTRAR. (In common use c 1580-1800.)

Re:DMCA is indeed working fine!

[betterunixthanunix]

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.

Re:Normally I think the headlines are inflammatory

[langelgjm]

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.

Re:DMCA is indeed working fine!

[RAMMS EIN]

``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!