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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.)'"
The assertion is absolutely correct. DMCA is working fine.
DMCA was designed to protect copyright, and it is protecting it.
The question we should be asking ourselves is whether or not copyright (the way it is righ now) is protecting public interest.
Granted an author should get special treatment on something he has created
These days, authors usually don't retain the copyrights on their works. Their publishers get them.
I don't know if this is true of bookwriting, but it is true of music. Also, chemical/scientific patents of any form are usually held by a large corporation that provided funding, rather than the scientist/engineer who created it. The same goes for most non-open-source software. Also, the wealthy production companies wind up owning the copyrights on movies....not the actors, musicians, painters, stuntmen, scriptwriters etc.
So....in general...the talent doesn't own the work, but rather the investor owns the work. Hence, it is the investor that gets special treatment (which seems to amount to control over the private property (hardware) of millions of consumers across the globe) So these laws do not protect the workers so much as the large businesses that pay them.
It's just another case of the rule of the rich.
As long as I've been following these stories, it all comes down to people not really selling you anything anymore but a very restrictive right to rent something.
If that was true, marketing would be completely pointless.
"Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad." -- Terry Pratchett
Prime example of why the copyright laws are borked - arrows aren't used for defense. They're used for offense. If that's the sort of analogy being thought up by those in power, if gives you an idea of their mindset...
Incorrect in at least two respects:
First, the DMCA was designed not to protect copyrights, but to extend them... far beyond what was allowed by law before.
Second, it is not "working fine". I think most people agree that it has done a shitty job of "protecting" anything except Corporate interest in a defunct business model. Further, it has hurt the market, consumers, and industry in general. If you want to know how, see the "unintended consequences" report on the eff.org website.
Copyrights were established to encourage the arts and sciences, in order to further the public interest in these fields. Those are the words that were used when the laws were first established. Copyrights were allowed for a limited time, so that people would have an incentive to create original works. After that, the public gets them. But the main interest has always been that of the public! The problem was that the public could not just take what others created, because then individuals would have no reason to do the creating. Copyrights were a compromise.
Today, certain copyright laws exist in the interest of not the public, but of private interests who want to preserve those rights and profit from them forever. That is NOT in the interest of the public, and was NEVER the idea behind copyright or patent law. Until now.
The DMCA and similar laws passed since were always bad ideas. I would say that they have outlived their usefulness, but I think it is obvious now that they were never really "useful" to society in the first place.
It's important in cases like these to differentiate between the DMCA's take-down/"safe harbor" rules and the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision.
The take-down rules probably ARE a reasonable balance between copyright holders and ordinary joes; certainly that's YouTube's position. Under the DMCA take-down rules, YouTube can't be sued for hosting illegal material, but rather the copyright holder (e.g. Viacom) has to send take-down letters specifying exact material to be removed. Users get notified that their material is taken down, and are allowed to send counterclaims to defend themselves.
It's not at all clear what would have happened in that case without the DMCA; the DMCA came into existence partly to make it clear/formal what should happen when people violate copyright online. In a material sense, I don't think YouTube could exist unless the DMCA existed, in the sense that I don't think they'd have big investors (e.g. Google) willing to risk their money without the DMCA's safe harbor provisions. (Without the DMCA, YouTube could argue in court that they ought to be treated as a safe harbor, but they'd be on considerably shakier grounds.)
The anti-circumvention provision is the one that totally sucks. That's the provision that says that you aren't allowed to develop and distribute tools to circumvent DRM. (It's also the one that impacts researchers the most.) The point of that provision is simply to discourage people from developing and distributing DRM cracks. Since it's supposed to act as a disincentive, you wouldn't expect to find a big public "example" of it working; you'd expect fewer cracks to be developed and for those cracks to be criminally penalized when they are made available.
When I moderate, I only use "-1, Overrated". That way, I never get meta-moderated!
The problem with the circumvention clause, at least to me, is that it disallows an activity which seems to me as though it should be perfectly legitimate.
I want to buy a DVD, take it home, and rip it to my hard drive, then store the DVD itself in my closet. Then I want to stream it to the media center connected to my TV. That is to say, I want to give them money and then use the video in my own home. I don't want to share it with friends, I don't want to sell it, and I don't want to waste my bandwidth sharing it with the world. I just want to watch it without having to deal with the physical disk.
Alternately, I could buy a movie download. But then I would still want to use my own media player, not whatever software they thought I should use, so I would still have to circumvent.
However, thanks to the anti-circumvention clause, I might as well skip the money-to-them part and just pirate my movies. I'm breaking the law either way.
Computers need to explode more often.
A person could technically survive living in the woods, gathering berries from the local plant life and things like that... I guess.
Unfortunately even that option is not possible. In what woods would this neo-primative live? I sure hope it's property that he owns, and has a fund setup to pay property taxes in perpetuity. I hope he doesn't ever what to have children, because the state would take them away. I hope never encounters the police, as they may well assume that he is some kind of homeless squatter and haul him away, perhaps after tasering him for resisting arrest. I hope the local county doesn't pass any ordinances on minimum house size, or lawn maintainence. One of the most annoying problems that the modern America has is that they don't know how to leave people alone, even on their own property or concerning their own property.
Living in or even beside society requires a steady stream of money, and that usually means a job, and that increasingly requires a mobile phone, and quasi-fashionable clothes, and transportation. Consumerism isn't entirely optional, and the more you have to deal with society, the less optional it is.
We are all just people.