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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.
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...
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.