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

Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't like the product then don't buy it.

Damn, there's a bunch of fucking complainers on this website.

Re:Duh

[p0tat03]

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.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any idea how many products are never going to be made because of that stupid law or how much more money you are paying for the limited number of products that are being sold? Then again maybe you another industry plant? I have to wonder about that now since it has come out the Media Defender is using plants on these sites to try to quell disent. They are paid to watch for negative posts and react as quickly as possibly with post designed to bury and weaken their efects.

Re:Duh

[cHALiTO]

If that was true, marketing would be completely pointless.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

if you produce a better product it will win out

Tell that to the guy who designed Betamax.

Re:Duh

[nine-times]

eventually created a market where you *must* buy the product

Well, "must" might be going a bit far. I mean, we could all just live without music or movies. Of course, we could also live without the internet, computers, electricity, running water, houses, and civilization in general. A person could technically survive living in the woods, gathering berries from the local plant life and things like that... I guess.

On the other hand, I think you're right that people won't always be given the choice of a "better product". There are situations where it is simply not in the best interest of a company to produce a better product, particularly when a single entity (or several colluding entities) control a market.

Re:Duh

[jedidiah]

Unfortunately, existence of the product will leave future artists open to copyright infringment suits in perpetuity as voodoo witch doctors hired by Hollywood resurrect Sonny Bono so he can extend the copyright term in perpetuity.

Your ability or interest in "buying" the "product" is relatively irrelevant.

Re:Duh

[ettlz]

Damn, there's a bunch of fucking complainers on this website.

Yeah, and a lot more complaining because they aren't fucking. Big deal.

Why are you here?

Re:Duh

[Tsiangkun]

No, we can't live without music and movies.

Those are cultural experiences.

As a human, living in an organized society, I'm
entitled to participate in my own culture.

Like you say, I could live in the woods, gathering
and the like. But I actually live in a society,
so lets, only take that scenario into account.

There is no right to own and sell culture.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you don't like the product then don't buy it."

The product was the DMCA, and yes, the buyers like it fine.

P.S., semi-offtopic: does Slashdot seem increasingly overrun by astroturfers lately? Every story I've read today is full of posts supporting corporate entitlement and government excess, and I think (or desperately hope) they don't reflect the views of most people here. What can be done to minimize this abuse when it's just as easy for them to game the moderation system as it is for legitimate users to use it?

Re:Duh

[Original Replica]

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.

Re:Duh

[nine-times]

Yeah, I meant to be pretty obvious in implying that living without culture is comparable to living without civilization, and claiming that we could do either was meant to be somewhat sarcastic.

Re:Duh

[B_un1t]

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. Good Point.

Re:Duh

[nurb432]

If you were serious, you truely dont understand the DMCA and what effects it has on legitimate business. It has little to do with 'piracy' ( though i hate to use that word ) but more about control of the smaller operations by the big players with the money.

Re:Duh

[Stormwatch]

"Better" may depend on your priorities. Betamax had better picture quality, VHS tapes had longer running time.

Re:Duh

[Jesselnz]

I agree completely. As the government gets even bigger and continues regulating our lives in more ways, living in seclusion is only going to get harder.

Re:Duh

[kklein]

Probably my favorite line in Burroughs' "A Thanksgiving Prayer" is:

Thanks for a country where
nobody's allowed to mind his
own business.

Re:Duh

[Divebus]

Betamax had better picture quality, VHS tapes had longer running time.

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.

Re:Duh

[speaker of the truth]

The growing online independent market says your claims are false.

Re:Duh

[Laserwulf]

In the real estate ads for San Juan County in Washington, one can buy an island for as little as $3.5m http://www.sanjuanislands.idxco.com/idx/2505/details.php?idxID=041&listingID=27136947 Anyone know what it would take legally to secede from the U.S.?

Re:Duh

[Grishnakh]

Anyone know what it would take legally to secede from the U.S.?

Probably nothing short of your own arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Re:Duh

[ahodgson]

Ask the South.

Re:Duh

[Reziac]

More to the point, Betamax said Thou Shalt Not License Our Tape Format For Porn, so the Porn industry said Fuck You and went with VHS. And whatever tech the porn industry picks, the whole world eventually follows.

Re:Duh

[Stefanwulf]

True, but as the dihedral angles tend ever more oblique, cornering off less and less volume, the number of vertices -- and therefore the number of corners -- grows larger.

Vertices = Edges - Faces - 2

Dihedral Angles:
Tetrahedron: 70.53
Cube: 90
Octahedron: 109.47
Dodecahedron: 116.57
Icosahedron: 138.19

(I'm assuming we're speaking of regular convex worlds, and that the overall volume of the world is not changing)

If we then define the size of your corner as the volume of the (generally irregular) polyhedron you get when you remove everything but the faces which meet at your vertex (the point of your corner), and then re-close the open faces by stringing new edges between the vertices which lost one or more connecting edges. I don't believe it really matters how you go about choosing to connect them, so long as you end up with a convex solid.

Now in order to reduce the volume cornered off by the faces intersecting at a single vertex, you must increase the angle at which they meet (the Dihedral Angle), which in the case of a regular convex polyhedron involves increasing the number of faces.

So to continue your metaphor, your particular corner may be smaller than back in the days of 6-sided dice, but that's only because the 20-sided world has so many more to choose from.

Who do they work for?

[jshriverWVU]

Thought the copyright office was to serve the people not an individual? Granted an author should get special treatment on something he has created, but at DMCA is about limiting fair use on "the people". So no, it's not effective imho.

Re:Who do they work for?

[AuMatar]

Why? Why should an author get special treatment? If I make a toaster, I have special treatment only over that toaster. If I sell it to someone else, I revoke all rights and privlidges to control what they do with their new toaster. There is no reason books, music, etc should be any different.

Re:Who do they work for?

[jshriverWVU]

I agree. My point was if you made the toaster, at least you and only you should have the right to make and sell those toasters. But once someone buys the toaster it is their property, if they want to take it apart, hit it with a hammer, or use it for spare parts then it's their option as a consumer.

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.

Re:Who do they work for?

[JoelKatz]

"Why? Why should an author get special treatment? If I make a toaster, I have special treatment only over that toaster. If I sell it to someone else, I revoke all rights and privlidges to control what they do with their new toaster. There is no reason books, music, etc should be any different."

They're really not any different. If I wanted to, before I sold you a toaster, I could first make you sign a contract stipulating that you won't open to toaster, or won't replicate the toaster's design, or pretty much any other limitation I wanted to impose.

The problem is, you might resell the toaster to someone else without telling them about this restrictive agreement. They might think they own the toaster free and clear when you don't actually have the right to sell them the toaster free and clear.

Copyright does not prohibit free and clear sales. If I want to sell you a book and include the right for you to write your own similar book or make copies of it, I can. And if you don't want to buy a book knowing that you have to agree not to make copies of it, you don't have to.

All copyright law does is protect innocent third parties. It prevents you from selling the book to someone, claiming they can do whatever they want with it, when you actually agreed not to copy it.

In other words, it simply sets the default agreement when I sell you a book differently from the default agreement when I sell you a toaster. But it doesn't make other arrangements impossible.

Arguing that there shouldn't be a copyright is simply arguing that there should be a different default agreement. There's never any answer to how you protect innocent third parties without copyright.

Re:Who do they work for?

[ShieldW0lf]

If the author gets no special treatment, what happens to the offices that are overseeing that special treatment? What happens to the officials who work at those offices?

They get canned, that's what happens. And they're going to act against that.

This is a great little interview, because it makes no effort to disguise the fact that these laws exist to provide weapons to be used against us all. It disarms any claim that the organization might put forth to be working for the common good, and that's a powerful thing.

Re:Who do they work for?

[QuantumG]

Yeah, it's worse than that.

Take something that isn't covered by copyright law.. say, the recipe to a cake, or whatever.

You give it to my friend after making him sign an NDA stating that he will return all copies to you after 30 days.

My friend gives it to me and I make a copy.

After 30 days, my friend gives the original back to you.

I start selling my copy. What recourse do you have?

If you can prove that my friend gave me the original to copy, you can sue my friend for any loss of revenue that you can prove you have suffered as a result of my competition.. but you can't stop me from selling copies.

That's what copyright stops.. the ability of third parties to make copies. And the result is not in the public interest.

Re:Who do they work for?

[Artifakt]

The Government (at least in the U. S. and E.U.) claims it has an actual mandate to encourage ownership. All sorts of agencies and laws exist, all supposedly justified by their increasing the percentage of the population that own their homes rather than rent, or or own their own business rather than working for someone else. If this mandate is valid, the tendencies built into many EULAs, copyright suits, and the like go against it. In this light, the DCMA and refusal to codify fair use restrictions are both regressive, in the exact same sense as a property tax break only for rental property owners, subsidized by a higher tax on single family homes, would be.

Re:Who do they work for?

[teh kurisu]

If you read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, there's a section that describes Goblin ownership law, and how it is different to conventional human ownership law. When a goblin creates something (usually metalwork, apparently), they retain ownership of that product and it is merely leased to the human who 'buys' it. Goblins tend to take offence to the human practice of selling on products that they believe to be rightfully theirs, and the practice of inheritance - when the human owner dies, goblins believe that the product should be returned to the creator and not passed on to another human.

Real life copyright law, of course, resembles goblin law fairly closely. I wonder if this was a deliberate dig at copyright by the author.

Re:Who do they work for?

[Don_dumb]

Real life copyright law, of course, resembles goblin law fairly closely. I wonder if this was a deliberate dig at copyright by the author.

Are you sure it wasn't praise? I don't know as I haven't read the HP books (or know much about JK's position)

Re:Who do they work for?

[teh kurisu]

No, it was written in a way that made it seem like a very alien concept. Whether or not it was a neutral position, a denouncement or just plain accident I'm not sure, but it certainly wasn't praise.

Re:Who do they work for?

[Maxo-Texas]

Actually,
If you are the person that originated the idea of a toaster, then the government protects you for 17 years. Most governments protect the first person to file the idea for at least a decade.

Out of touch with reality

[Anonymous Coward]

Demonstrates how appointed bureaucrats are out of touch with the people.

Re:Out of touch with reality

[morgan_greywolf]

Demonstrates how appointed bureaucrats are out of touch with the people. Out of touch with everything, more like it. The DMCA is not working just fine. It's made criminals out of people looking to do no more than use the content that they lawfully paid for with the device of their choosing that they also lawfully paid for.

DMCA takedown notices are being used as a harrasment tactic for otherwise lawful and free-speech protected Web sites by folks such as the Church of Scientology.

The DMCA has allowed printer manufacturers like Epson to lock out all competitors in the field of ink supplies.

And, it continues to be a tool used by the clueless morons over at the MAFIAA to strong arm computer illiterate grandmothers and small children.

What, exactly, constitutes 'working fine' in any of the above?

Re:Out of touch with reality

[compro01]

well, using your example, the DMCA is "working fine" for the Church of Scientology, Epson, and the MAFIAA.

Ohh wow

[Zelocka]

This is surprising how? The government lives to increase its power wealth and reach. DMCA was great as far as the copyright office is concerned. If anything they want more of it and a couple new government agencies to enforce it The only way the DMCA is going away is the supreme court or congress (super unlikely).

Re:Ohh wow

[mpapet]

I would argue that it works fine because the DMCA serves the media conglomerates to the detriment of all consumers.

Let's suspend the notion that there is an element of destruction in government for a few moments. It's a whole lot easier to have, at the bare minimum, a discussion about government and how it could possibly serve consumers.

Re:Ohh wow

[yoder]

"The government lives to increase its power wealth and reach."

No, certain people within government do this. Coincidentally, there are also certain people within large corporations and industries who do the same.

Re:Ohh wow

[EzInKy]

The only way the DMCA is going away is the supreme court or congress (super unlikely).


There is another way, which would be a Constitutional amendment along the lines of "Congress shall
pass no laws restricting the right of the people to freely share information." It would have to come
through the states calling for another Constitutional convention though.

Does he actually know what the Digital Millenium

[unity100]

Harrasment Act is ?

either not, or he is paid well. by whom, you know.

DMCA is indeed working fine!

[prxp]

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.

Re:DMCA is indeed working fine!

[nine-times]

The assertion is absolutely correct. DMCA is working fine. DMCA was designed to protect copyright, and it is protecting it.

Oh, well that's good news. I thought there was still a ton of copyrighted material floating around the Internet. Silly me. Because that was part of my objection to the whole thing, that not only did it limit the ability of people use use copyrighted material, but also that it didn't really do much to prevent copyright infringement.

Re:DMCA is indeed working fine!

[moderatorrater]

Yes, a lot of people think that you must have your head up your ass to make a comment like that, which is absolutely untrue. Coming the from head of a department that is dedicated to copyright holders, the DMCA is a very good law. From the perspective of certain senile, song writing Utah senators, it should be obvious that the DMCA is a step in the wrong direction, a bandaid at best and a laughing stock to those from the other side.

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:DMCA is indeed working fine!

[ivan256]

You're sort-of right.

There is a clear admission here that DRM is allowing copyright holders to "protect" themselves from things they should not be allowed to claim as rights in the first place. Thus the exceptions in the anti-circumvention clauses. But aren't the exceptions themselves proof that something is broken? Should we have to "crack" a technological security measure to do something that the government has admitted we have the right to do?

This is a paradox that presents it self frequently with government regulations and mandates. It is often desirable for one reason or another (note: I said desirable, not "right", or even "a good idea"). Unfortunately if you mandate something, generally you should do some regulation to balance out the market changes you've created. Similarly, if you add a regulation, you may have to add a mandate to balance out the market. An example could be something like buying insurance. It's desirable to mandate people purchase insurance. Once the mandate is in place, the prices skyrocket without a regulation to keep prices in check.

The same is true for the DMCA, and copyright regulations. 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. In other words, people who implement DRM should be mandated to guarantee the public's rights just as it uses the technology to enforce theirs. It isn't enough to simply allow cracking in those cases. They should be forced to do things like have the protections expire when the copyright expires, and provide clear, documented methods for fair-use.

Re:DMCA is indeed working fine!

[prxp]

You're absolutely right. I should've used "extend" instead of "protect".

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!

What's with the "linuxsucks" tag?

[padonak]

What does this tag have to do with anything?
Is this a new crapflooding technique?
It seems to appear on some of the previous articles too...

The True Legacy of the DMCA

[CodeBuster]

I think that's a really important part of our copyright owners' quiver of arrows to defend themselves.

Yes, and they have been using those arrows to shoot consumers and researchers full of holes. Look at how the DMCA has been used in practice since its inception: suing makers of compatible garage door openers, suing manufacturers of printer ink cartridge refills, suing university researchers, and basically causing substantial legal hassles for anyone that the copyright holder doesn't like (most of the cases are eventually thrown out). Meanwhile there are still 1-2 dollar DVDs available at flea markets, bazaars, and on street corners just about everywhere, downloads are still going full tilt, and legitimate customers are being harassed while the commercial pirates are not even inconvenienced. The bottom line is that we, as a society, have paid a high cost for this DMCA without achieving any noticeable progress towards the goals that it was designed to address. The DMCA clauses which make reverse engineering illegal under any circumstance which is not specifically granted an exemption for fair use need to be repealed. The burden should be upon the copyright holder to prove that the specific instance of reverse engineering is being used to infringe their copyright, not upon the reverse engineer to prove that whatever they are doing is not infringement.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[cliffski]

A very passionate, and one sided view of the current situation. This is to be expected, because generally, you never hear the other side of the coin. The general 'internet view' is that copyright is evil, that the DMCA is only ever used by evil corporations owned by villains, and that the consumer is some mere innocent victim of evil corporate greed.

But this is *not* the whole story.

I'm a content creator. I make small downloadable PC games. Nothing big time or fancy, but it *just* pays the bills. Like anyone who produces content that can be representated digitally, I often encounter people pirating the stuff I make. When you work long hours for a year to make a game, and take your own cash and hire artists and other contractors to provide work for you, all 'on spec' hoping to one day make the investment back, finally produce some original content, and release it for sale (with a demo, a very liberal end user licence, and no intrusive DRM), and then you find some people deliberately copying the game and distributing it for free, you are NOT a happy man. Some of these people go out of their way to constantly reupload the pirated stuff, despite polite requests, and numerous attempts to get it removed. They actually go *out of their way* to try and wreck your business.
Like everyone, I have to pay the bills. I'm not a big evil corporate entity. If my games sell well, I can afford a holiday, If they don't, I'm not going anywhere, and fingers crossed, I can still pay the rent. Quite a few small software devs are in a similar position.
So how does the DMCA help?
The DMCA means that if I find someone sharing illegal copies of stuff, there is a well-understood and documented procedure to get that stuff removed. I've issued a number of DMCA requests, and they have mostly been successful (Don't kid yourselves the piratebay give a rats ass about content providers). I'd wager the *vast* majority of people who complain about abuse of the DMCA have never actually seen what's involved in issuing a takedown. I have to provide my real address, phone number and email address, identify a *specific* file that breaches, AND state that I am claiming that it infringes, knowingly on threat of perjury if I am wrong. This generally has to have a proper signature and be sent by fax. No anonymous web forms here.

You do not issue a DMCA request as a small time author unless you are damned sure that there is a clear-cut case of copyright infringement. Without the DMCA, it would be harder for me to get pirated content removed, and harder for upload sites and ISPS to verify I am the legit copyright owner. The DMCA simplifies and organises this process.
Have some big companies abused the DMCA? you bet they have. Does the fact that in a few cases the law has been abused and stretched to do bad stuff invalidate the whole basis of it? No way. The DMCA is absolutely necessary. People who file misleading DMCA takedowns should be prosecuted for it. And people who knowingly breach the DMCA by distributing other peoples work without permission deserve to be prosecuted too.
I will get modded down and flamed to death here at slashdot for giving the other side of the story. Nobody ever sticks their head above the parapet and challenges the idea that the DMCA is bad, but I feel it needs to be said. Unless you are an anarchist / communist who believes copyright should be abolished, then you have to accept that we need a law that spells out the way in which copyright can be enforced. It's not perfect, no law is, but right now, the DMCA is that law, and it's better than nothing. Most reasonable people who find that they agree that 99% of DMCA takedowns are entirely justified. The media, especially at slashot and digg and boingboing focuses 100% on that tiny abusive majority.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[VGPowerlord]

The problem isn't that the DMCA itself is entirely bad, it's just that even the good parts are abused.

For instance, I run a website that deals entirely with user-created content. It used to be that companies or individuals (Bobby Prince comes to mind) would threaten to sue us. Now, they have to fill out a DMCA takedown form.

Of course, we've all heard about Viacom and Youtube.

The real problem is that the DRM provisions were also added by the DMCA. DRM is very much anti-consumer.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[Kelson]

I think you should have posted this in response to the "Has it Ever Worked? comment. Placing it here doesn't make sense, as you're talking about takedown notices and the parent comment was talking about the anti-circumvention clause.

Responding to "DMCA clause A is inherently bad and should be repealed" with "DMCA clause B is beneficial" is a non-sequitur at best.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[Chandon Seldon]

The DMCA is a reasonably complex law that does a number of things. Some of them are largely good, like the takedown notice process with its liability shield for hosting companies. Some sites miss-implement this takedown procedure, but the procedure itself isn't too flawed overall. Other parts - like the anti-archival / anti-research thing are not socially acceptable at all.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[FauxPasIII]

> I will get modded down and flamed to death here at slashdot for giving the other side of the story.

Nice job, there's now a smouldering crater where that straw man used to be. As far as I know, the conventional wisdom on Slashdot isn't that copyright should be abolished completely, or made unduly hard to enforce. Many of us are copyright holders.

Speaking only for myself, I object to the DMCA because it lacks concrete provisions protecting fair use; academic analysis, review, parody, copying for backup, time-shifting, transfer to other media. I submit that a copyright law which lacks those provisions is deleterious to the public interest far out of proportion to how much it might benefit copyright holders like yourself, and that it should be scrapped altogether until such time as a suitable law can be adopted.

We might even have an interesting debate on that point, i/e the relative value to society of strict copyright versus fair use. But to characterize the landscape of this issue as "Support the DMCA or support widespread, bald-faced piracy" is disingenuous.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[Hatta]

I had a look at your games, they look pretty interesting. But there's no unix version so they're useless to me. You'd probably sell more games if they were cross-platform.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[jedidiah]

IOW, are frightened by the idea of sending out a normal demand letter than any other citizen interested in protecting their interests against an adverse party is expected to do. You are so frightened by such a prospect that you think you need some over reaching draconian measure that tends to be abused in order to stifle fair use, reverse engineering and legitmate and useful university research.

Fortunately, your industry did fine fending for itself before the DMCA and game developers such as yourself.

You have more to fear from EA than some swapper kid.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[Darby]

I had a look at your games, they look pretty interesting. But there's no unix version so they're useless to me. You'd probably sell more games if they were cross-platform.

They don't even run under WINE, or at least not the one I tried a while ago.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[Spy der Mann]

You do not issue a DMCA request as a small time author unless you are damned sure that there is a clear-cut case of copyright infringement.

Or unless you're blatantly lying. Creation scientists have issued takedown notices to youtube to remove *public domain* videos about them. And they WERE removed. Protesters' accounts were cancelled.

DMCA simply means that whoever has the most money, wins.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[cliffski]

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.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[cliffski]

Indeed. I stupidly wrote my own engine, rather than using a pre-made cross-platform one, and I'm used to it now. The games do slowly get ported to the mac at least.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[Bogtha]

Unless you are an anarchist / communist who believes copyright should be abolished

It looks like you are using loaded language in a pejorative way, and inaccurately too.

If anything is "communist" in the copyright debate, it's the idea that the rest of society should have their freedom restricted in order to subsidise your game development. State-granted monopolies are not a normal feature of capitalism.

Most reasonable people who find that they agree that 99% of DMCA takedowns are entirely justified.

Which hasn't got anything to do with the parent comment or the subject of the article, which is the anti-circumvention part of the DMCA, not the takedown part of the DMCA.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[renehollan]

The DMCA clauses which make reverse engineering illegal under any circumstance which is not specifically granted an exemption for fair use need to be repealed. The burden should be upon the copyright holder to prove that the specific instance of reverse engineering is being used to infringe their copyright, not upon the reverse engineer to prove that whatever they are doing is not infringement.

There are two problems here: First, a judge comparing a claim of "infringement" against a defense of "fair use". All fair uses infringe on what the copyright holder might wish. So, let's re-word that considering that the lack of a fair use is what constitures legal infringement. A fair use, therefore, is a valid defense against a claim otherwise (i.e. infringement).

The second problem is whether a use is fair. The law, as written, makes all uses that are not explicitly established as fair, as infringing. This is wrong. The law can establish uses that are definitely fair, for example, though legal precedent where such uses are found to be fair by the courts, or are defined to be fair, by statute, and this makes a defense of such a use as fair easier. However, this does not mean that other uses are not fair.

A fair use is one that does not substantially diminish the copyright holder's ability to exploit their work for profit. Parody, criticism, archival of entire works, or small exceprts of larger works, have all been found to be fair uses. The legal bar may be higher to establish that a new use is fair than to simply establish that the use in question is one that is already recognized as fair (the classic example is the Betamax decision, which found that so long as a use does not break existing law, it does not matter if it facilitates illegal activity: copying copywritten videotapes is not criminal -- distributing the copies is). This is sensible, of course, since many things can be used to commit a crime: just about anything that can be thrown can be thrown at someone.

As far as anticirvumvention is concerned, what should matter is intent: is the intent to infringe (where a fair use can not be established), and has reasonable care been taken to not facilitate infringement? In many places, leaving one's car unlocked and unattended is illegal: it facilitates car theft, joyriding, and other nusances. The case for requiring firearms to be kept secure is even stronger.

All that should be necessary of a user of copywritten material, or a provider of circumvention tools, that they exercise a reasonable effort to protect the copyright holder's interests.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[cliffski]

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.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Unless you are an anarchist / communist who believes copyright should be abolished, then you have to accept that we need a law that spells out the way in which copyright can be enforced. You know, you were doing pretty well at supporting your position until you started the name calling. You even referred to hiring artists on spec yourself - they don't see a dime anytime you resell their work in your product, do they? Do you consider yourself an anarchist/communist then? I didn't think so.

Perhaps you should consider a way to work on spec yourself. Then you would never have to worry about those people who go "out of their way" to try and wreck your business.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[cliffski]

The artists choose to work on contract for other people for a fixed price, just like most people work for a fixed wage. If my next game tanks, and makes a loss, everyone who worked for me gets paid. In short they are taking no risk whatsoever, in working for me. This is their choice, and my choice. Theres a chance that not only do I make no money, but I actually have to spend my saving to pay them for work that was unprofitable. They have zero risk.
I am risking my own money to pay them, and to work without salary myself, because I believe in the project. This is capitalism. Some people prefer the security of a regular wage, some people prefer to speculate.
It sounds like for some reason you object to this. You seem to imply that it is morally wrong for me to profit from my own speculation on my business. What would you prefer? that we all work for the state, and there are no entrepreneurs? That is called communism. I'm not having a go at communism, if thats what you believe, go for it, but don't pretend you can be a capitalist, yet opposed to rewarding capital investment, because thats an illogical position.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[cliffski]

"it's the idea that the rest of society should have their freedom restricted in order to subsidise your game development. State-granted monopolies are not a normal feature of capitalism."

do you really SERIOUSLY believe this?

I do not expect ANYONE to subsidise me. I invest my OWN money in my games, I don't take a penny in government subsidy, and I pay every penny of tax I owe. I risk my own ass to make new content. I do not demand money from anyone who does not want the product, and want it enough to purchase it. If you don't want my products, then my company will fail, and I deserve to go out of business. If I make a product people like, I deserve to do well, and will stay in business. This is called capitalism. There is NO subsidy involved. If you want to whine about subsidies, try talking to farmers and oil and auto company lobbyists. To suggest that preventing people taking luxury good like PC games from their creators without payment is somehow an evil government subsidy is just nonsense.
What job do you do that is still viable if the consumer takes the product for free? laws are needed to ensure they do not do so. The only example I can think of is academia and state employees, which, ironically would make you a beneficiary of state subsidies.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[Billly Gates]

Linux users dont believe in paying for software so porting it would not be economical. sorry but the stats dont lie

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[cliffski]

hello anonymous coward. Why don't you download the explosion generator that I used for my early games that I made freely available to anyone with no license whatsoever:

http://www.geocities.com/starlinesinc/

or perhaps you want the entire source code to my first game, freely available for anyone to learn from:

http://gpwiki.org/index.php/Files:AsteroidMinerSourceCode.zip

Maybe you should do some basic research before you launch into a diatribe against someone for their views on copyright?

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[ScrewMaster]

But to characterize the landscape of this issue as "Support the DMCA or support widespread, bald-faced piracy" is disingenuous.

Right on the money. Interestingly, that is exactly the same kind of (ahem) "logic" that the big copyright holders and their legal beagles (RIAA/MPAA, etc.) have been using for decades. It's always an either/or 100% polarized proposition with them (and, for that matter, most politicians.) Give us what we want or the End of Days will be upon us! Remember Jack Valenti's impassioned pleas about the VCR? He repeatedly pronounced to anyone who would listen, "It will destroy the industry!" Sure, Jack, and after billions of dollars in videocassette sales that you and your kind somehow couldn't foresee, I gotta say ... it's a good thing you're dead. Not that your successors are any better in the slightest: same arrogant outlook, same lack of vision.

There's always a middle ground, and in fact, that's what copyright was supposed to be: a middle ground between the creative minds and the public domain (which was, ultimately, to be enriched by their efforts.) Copyright also wasn't supposed to be a concentrated form of politico-economic power, either: it was supposed to protect the creators, so that they could continue to create, not enrich the weasels that figured out how to cheat our best and brightest out of their rights. Consequently, I don't necessarily equate "content creator" with "rightsholder".

Most of the complaining about modern copyright you hear on Slashdot revolves around the fact that it isn't a middle ground anymore, is no longer a reasonable compromise. It's now a rightsholder's paradise ... and that's too bad.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

don't pretend you can be a capitalist, yet opposed to rewarding capital investment, because thats an illogical position. You are making a really huge logical error. You are implying that ANY business model employing capital investment is equally legitimate in a capitalist system. Like the CueCat.

You also make a very large error when you say that the people working on spec are not taking a risk. Do you pay them up front? Do they not have to invest in their own tools and facilities? They are just as much a "capitalist" as you are. Except for one small difference. They don't need copyright law to prop up their business model.

My point is that one does not need to be a communist nor an anarchist to believe that copyright is not a valid business model. That in fact, it is quite possible to be just as strong a believer in the capitalist system as anyone else and still think that copyright should be abolished.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[CodeBuster]

As an engineer I am primarily concerned with the anticircumvention part of the DMCA (section 1201) which states that the circumvention of "access mechanisms" is illegal, with only a few narrow statutory exemptions. The problem is that the narrow statutory exemptions which are too narrow to cover the wide range of technologies and scientific research which *could* be quashed under the DMCA because it is not automatically covered by an exemption, thus allowing copyright holders and their attorneys to use litigation or threat thereof against any new technology, no matter what it is designed to do, which might potentially be used to infringe their copyright. This is *tremendously* harmful to society in that our current economic growth and increased living standards have come about in no small part because of the explosion of new technologies which appeared after the Betamax decision. No doubt the entertainment cartel would love to outlaw the digital to analog converter, the magnetic storage device, and any number of other general use technologies which they deem to be "inconvenient" or a "nuisance" to their obsolete business models, but we engineers object to the notion that reverse engineering, a time honored tradition in our field, is illegal or wrong without any regard whatsoever for intent (as you said) which is essentially what the DMCA says. The DMCA was written by and for the entertainment industry and their lawyers and passed by lawmakers who did not appreciate the level of harm that was inherent in that one little anticircumvention clause. Why should the maker of general purpose DAC chips that are used in everything from automobiles to satellites have to deal with the entertainment lobby and their lawyers for a technology which has been widely and reliably used for decades over some "cop chip" bullcrap? They can take their Britney Spears craptastic "entertainment" and shove it up their collective asses for all I care, but I draw the line when they begin interfering with the development of fundamental new technologies that will be used in countless devices collectively worth trillions of dollars to "protect" a measly few billion dollars of entertainment revenue.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[cliffski]

yes i do pay them in advance. someone who works in an office often has to pay for their education, but they still get a regular wage. The difference between me and the contractors is they get paid regardless of the sales of the product and I do not. I thought this was obvious, having stated it before.
If I run a shop that sells food, I need criminal law to prop up my business model, else thugs will just smash my windows and take the food. I guess you object to that too? Most sane people think we need laws to enforce contracts between people who make stuff and people who buy it. Some people do not agree. They are, as I tire of saying, anarchists and communists.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[GaryPatterson]

Interesting post. I've often wondered how people can protect digital content without something like the DMCA. It's not an answer to just trust people, because time and again there are people who are just untrustworthy. There needs to be something with teeth and fairness. The DMCA seems to have the teeth, but I'm not sure the level of fairness is right for enough people (it is for you, which is a definite positive).

I was interested in your political sim game, but there's no Mac version and I don't use my Vista partition for games. It looks very nice though.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[GnarlyDoug]

I'm not the original poster, but I found this debate interesting so I'm adding my $.02 in.

It all boils down to whethor or not copyright is a natural or legal right. The framers of the Constitution felt it was not only NOT a natural right, but that it was in fact a violation of natural rights. I agree with them. However they felt it was a necessary evil for society, so they reluctantly included provisions for copyright into the Constitution, but not into the Bill of Rights section. I also agree with them on this.

The problem with copyright and why it cannot be a Natural Right is that it is proactively coercive against everyone else's natural rights. Here I am speaking of your right to use and own the contents of your own mind. To be able to use the contents of my own mind is about as basic as it gets. If I hear a song somewhere and I remember that song, then I cannot play it, hum it, recreate it, or do as I see fit with what has now become knowledge in my head. I did not enter into a contract or agreement to give up this right. I am forced by the power of guns to abide by it. (That is probably what the other poster meant by 'subsidy' though I disagree with his terminology.)

Because copyright actually allows the government to apply the threat of force against people to prevent them using their knowledge and information, it is very dangerous. It is an area of the Constitution that trumps the First Amendment and the Framers were very reluctant to include it. They finally did so for they felt it was a necessary evil, but they tried to keep it very limited in scope. It only applied to sheet music, maps, and a few other very specific things. It did NOT apply to derivitive works. I could make a play based on a book for example and that would not violate copyright. It was also for a very limited time.

Those restrictions have all been removed. Copyright now applies to almost everything and in virtual perpetuity. It has exploded well beyond the bounds of what is moral and right and it is becoming the sword to destroy freedom. This will only become worse over time becuase now that the cost to 'copy' information is now effectively zero then the only way to enforce copyright is with more stringent laws, more surveilence, and more powers. In effect it is becoming such that enforcing copyright as it exists and as it is being expanded to will require a police state.

Personally, I think that if copyright were limited in both scope and duration that it is better for society. I am also a content producer and I am currently writing a book, and it will be copyrighted. However copyright laws have gotten so out of hand that I no longer feel that anyone is morally bound to follow them. Copyright law has crossed the line from a necessary evil to a tool that will do great harm to our society and to our freedoms if it is not reigned in soon.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[cliffski]

Cheers, Democracy is on the mac, click the buy link to see links for both PC and Mac.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[domatic]

I'm a Linux user who has paid for games.

Shove it troll.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

yes i do pay them in advance. Completely? And again, that's not their only risk. Education of wage earners and such is pretty much a red herring. Your sub-contractors are not wage earners.

The difference between me and the contractors is they get paid regardless of the sales of the product and I do not. I thought this was obvious, having stated it before. You really seem to think that venture capitalism is the only "true" capitalism. What you do is venture capitalism - you take a higher risk in return for a theoretically unlimited potential return - you can theoretically sell your work product a infinite number of times. They take a lower risk in exchange for a limited return - they can only sell their work product once (just like a shop that sells food). But in both cases capital is risked for return.

They are, as I tire of saying, anarchists and communists. So stop saying it!
Look, I know it is hard for you to wrap your head around this concept. It is for most copyright believers who have never ever thought deeply about the business model. But you'll never get anywhere just repeating the same stuff. Come on, just humor me when I tell you that I am talking about pure capitalism and anarchists and communists have nothing whatsoever to do with it. Ok? Because if you can't get past that point, you are just arguing a red herring.

If I run a shop that sells food, I need criminal law to prop up my business model, else thugs will just smash my windows and take the food. I guess you object to that too? How about a car analogy while you are at it? The difference is very simple - if you don't pay your spec artists you don't get anything. You can't get anything, because they have it and you don't and they won't give it to you until they are paid. No laws are required to enforce that. So why don't you take a cue from them and do the same with your own work? Develop your games on spec for your customers. Once you get paid, they get the game and can do whatever they want with it and then it doesn't matter one bit what a million pirates do and you are no longer reliant on the double-edged sword of the DMCA or copyright law in general.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[Bogtha]

I do not expect ANYONE to subsidise me.

That's what copyright is. It's not a natural right. The state takes away the right to copy from everybody else in order to give you a monopoly, an incentive to create. That grant of exclusivity, at society's expense, is the subsidy. Your monopoly is paid for with the freedom of everybody else. Just because your benefit isn't paid by cheque it doesn't mean you aren't being subsidised.

If I make a product people like, I deserve to do well, and will stay in business. This is called capitalism.

To be more accurate: "If I make a product people like and the government protects me from competition, I will stay in business." This is not capitalism.

To suggest that preventing people taking luxury good like PC games from their creators without payment is somehow an evil government subsidy is just nonsense.

I never said the subsidy is evil. I'm merely pointing out that if anybody is the communist here, it's you. You seem to equate communism with being evil (hence your attempt to tar anti-copyright people with that brush), but not everybody thinks that way.

What job do you do that is still viable if the consumer takes the product for free?

I'm a web developer. I write code for a living, just like you.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[GaryPatterson]

Ah. I clicked the 'Demo' button and a .exe file started downloading, so I assumed (wrongly) that it was PC only. Well, the game looks interesting and the reviews look good and I'm feeling daring this morning, so I bought a copy to try out. Good luck with everything.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[cpt kangarooski]

Copyright also wasn't supposed to be a concentrated form of politico-economic power, either: it was supposed to protect the creators, so that they could continue to create, not enrich the weasels that figured out how to cheat our best and brightest out of their rights. Consequently, I don't necessarily equate "content creator" with "rightsholder".

Actually, US copyrights, and English copyright law before that, always provided for the alienability of copyrights. Thus, the exclusive rights conferred were meant to initially vest in the author, but otherwise to be held by anyone who had legitimately acquired them. You're right that 'author' and 'copyright holder' are two different things (though a single person can be both). But there's no reason for good copyright policy to especially protect authors. I agree that a lot of authors get into bad contracts, but no one compelled them to agree. It is insultingly paternalistic to insist on protecting authors from themselves. If a specific contract is unconscionable, then fine, but generally the only people who get to void almost any contract at will are children, and I don't like treating authors as though they were children.

Most of the complaining about modern copyright you hear on Slashdot revolves around the fact that it isn't a middle ground anymore, is no longer a reasonable compromise. It's now a rightsholder's paradise ... and that's too bad.

Why should it be a middle ground? Copyright should be crafted to maximize the public interest. I don't mind the public giving things to authors, but it should only be done where the public winds up receiving a greater benefit than it cost them. Respecting authors as equal parties in copyright is what got us into this mess!

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[cpt kangarooski]

However they felt it was a necessary evil for society, so they reluctantly included provisions for copyright into the Constitution

This isn't entirely accurate. The framers didn't think that copyright was necessary, just that it was potentially useful. But the main reason that it's in the federal Constitution is because most of the states had already had copyright laws, and they were different, and it was a mess. It's the same reason that the commerce clause was written, along with a number of other federal powers; the states were just no good at it. Had they been able to do a good job for the few years they were at it, we probably wouldn't have federal copyright law at all.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[bnenning]

I draw the line when they begin interfering with the development of fundamental new technologies that will be used in countless devices collectively worth trillions of dollars to "protect" a measly few billion dollars of entertainment revenue.

***Applause***

If these rent-seekers had their way, we'd never have heard of Steve Jobs or Woz because the equipment they hacked on would have been restricted to "licensed" "professionals". Larry Page and Sergey Brin would have been shut down or thrown in prison for massive unauthorized use of copyrighted materials. I'd honestly prefer just handing them eleventy billion dollars in taxpayer money. That would at least make the corporate welfare honest and efficient, and the rest of us could get back to inventing the future.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[ScrewMaster]

Sorry, I guess I gave the wrong impression. I'm not defending the DMCA: as a software engineer I'd be shooting myself in the foot to support it, given the effect it has had on my own neck of the woods. Maybe "middle ground" was the wrong phrase. How about "compromise", or at best "necessary evil"? I've read Jefferson's letters and other documents on copyright, and yes, it was very clear that he meant copyright to be, as I believe he put it, "a loan from the public domain." So you don't have any argument from me.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[ivan256]

Without the DMCA, it would be harder for me to get pirated content removed, and harder for upload sites and ISPS to verify I am the legit copyright owner. The DMCA simplifies and organises this process.
Have some big companies abused the DMCA? you bet they have. Does the fact that in a few cases the law has been abused and stretched to do bad stuff invalidate the whole basis of it? No way. The DMCA is absolutely necessary.

First of all, it should be possible to make it almost as easy for you to issue a takedown, while still preventing much of the fraud. For example, only allowing the takedowns for registered copyrighted material. Then you could do exactly what you do, include a copy of your registration certificate, and be perfectly happy. While at the same time people who are abusing the system will have a much higher barrier to entry.

Unfortunately, big media holdings companies (read: not you) oppose copyright registration and registration renewal because it prevents them from claiming rights over things that have already been created but which they didn't see value in at the time. But isn't the purpose of copyright supposed to be the encouragement of creation? Copyrights should be registered within 3 months of publication for a fee of about $10, and the registration should have to be renewed about every seven years. For each registration, the fee should increase exponentially. There wouldn't have to be limits on the number of times the registration could be renewed.

Second, you are defending just one part of a very bad law. The other parts are as bad or worse in terms of either abuse, or in granting copyright holders the ability to deny the public domain what it is legally entitled to, and to prevent societal progress. The reverse engineering clauses are just plain wrong. They deny people the basic human right to learn from the world around them. The criminalization of circumvention is wrong as long as copyright holders are allowed to prevent legal activities with their DRM along with copyright protection.

Your little tirade in your first paragraph is a significant exaggeration, as many of the people who earn a living with the internet, and many of the people who read this site and enjoy the GPL all rely on, and support copyright to some extent. People would be much less upset by the DMCA if it didn't make it difficult to do many of the legal and should-be-legal things that they want to do, like media shifting, streaming, and accessing out-of-print works. Additionally, the single aspect of the DMCA that you are advocating is also not the entire story.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[cpt kangarooski]

Well, I don't care for 'necessary evil' because copyright is not even necessary. While Jefferson was not one of the framers, he was influential, and you'll recall that he said:

Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body.

Nor do I care for 'compromise' because we should be uncompromising in pursuing whatever copyright laws provide the greatest public benefit, without any regard as to authors, with one exception: if providing some benefit to authors resulted in an even greater benefit to the public, so that there was a net public benefit (i.e. even after we account for the cost of providing that benefit to authors) then it should be done, not because it benefits authors, but because it benefits the public. Naturally, if there is no copyright that could yield a net public benefit, then we'd be best off without any. But I don't think that's presently true.

So, while it's a mouthful, I'd suggest that the copyright should be that which yields the greatest net public benefit. And at present, it is not doing so, and might even be yielding a net public detriment!

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[zegota]

What? The people who designed and built your buildings were paid. The people who designed many programming languages were paid researchers. The fact that you think putting a game coded by an independent designer up on the internet for free compares to someone "stealing" the idea of yet-another-FPS is mind boggling. It's the idea of "intellectual property" that confuses everyone. You aren't paying for the idea of a space sim. You're paying for the time it took to draw all the art, design the game, code the game, etc. If someone wanted to use his game for some sort of mod, or create a similar game after being inspired by it, I doubt the man would care that much -- the idea of the space sim is free, as long as you pay for all the time and work that went into creating the game.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[GnarlyDoug]

Perhaps necessary was too strong of a word. They thought it's benefits probably outweighed it's problems. However these between Jefferson and Madison clearly show they were very interested in copyright from a philosophical point of view. It wasn't just put into the Constitution to make the law standardized. They considered actually banning copyright and instead adding to the Bill of Rights the idea that such monopolies would be illegal.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[GaryPatterson]

Develop your games on spec for your customers. Once you get paid, they get the game and can do whatever they want with it and then it doesn't matter one bit what a million pirates do

Are you advocating that each customer gets to outline their game, and the developer will design and code it, along with all artwork, sounds, etc? I suppose people might pay $100,000 for a game, but I'm pretty sure they'd rather pay just $20. I can't afford to pay for a year's worth of coding, art and sound design just to play some bespoke FPS or car game.

If you're advocating that a group of customers design a game, then we're now into the world of design-by-committee, and the reason most independant game developers write games is to get their own designs out. Games would be a terrible group to design a game, and every gamer willing to put money in would think they've got a stake in the final design. It'd be a nightmare just to manage the expectations, let alone the process around it! In any project you've got to have a single, clear vision of the endpoint. Getting that vision signed off by 5,000 people is not possible.

Are you advocating that a single, high-level customer specs and pays for the game, then on-sells copies to the wider public? If so, that's the model most game companies use and it suffers from piracy. The developer just shifts the impacts of piracy to the publisher, which is nice for the dev, but not practical for independant developers who both write and publish their games.

I cannot see how your idea of coding games to a customer spec could possibly work in reality.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[blackest_k]

your signature seems to indicate you have a uk based company.

  so I am wondering how you get to use the DMCA an american law to issue take down notices, and secondly how the penalties for misuse of this law would apply to you. If you did make false claims would American courts or any other courts for that matter be able to throw the book at you?

Can you explain how the DMCA has any legal validity for any citizen of any other country?

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[Logic and Reason]

The claim that your business model depends on the DMCA does not justify that law; in other words, your business model is not our problem.

Furthermore, I don't think your business model depends on the DMCA at all: pirating your games would still be illegal without it. Yes, it might be a bit more difficult for you to go after infringers, but I think that's exactly what this discussion is about: it's become too easy to abuse copyright law using tools like the DMCA. And I haven't even mentioned the really problematic parts of the DMCA, like the reverse-engineering clause!

Not only is it possible to be anti-DMCA without being anti-copyright, but it's also possible to be anti-copyright without being "anarchist / communist." You need to lay off the false dilemmas, straw men, and ad hominem attacks.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I cannot see how your idea of coding games to a customer spec could possibly work in reality. Entertainment like games isn't a situation where each customer has hard requirements like inventory control, point of sale, industrial automation, accounting, etc types of systems do. The developer need only define the scope of the game and customers who want that, based on both the spec description and the developer's track record, can pony up.

In essence, that's no different from what he's doing now - rather than a paper spec, the spec is the implementation and customers decide if they want to pay for it.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[Think Right]

The following sentence recaps the entire problem with copyright law.

When you work long hours for a year to make a game, and take your own cash and hire artists and other contractors to provide work for you, all 'on spec' hoping to one day make the investment back, finally produce some original content, and release it for sale (with a demo, a very liberal end user licence, and no intrusive DRM), and then you find some people deliberately copying the game and distributing it for free, you are NOT a happy man.

Yes a very human way of thinking. While im not a psychologist theres enough evidence that this sentiment is very much how our mind is wired up WRONG. Our instinct tells us that this is indisputable evidence that we get screwed. There is however NO evidence that is the case. Out brain is just dislikes loosing gains we worked to archive so much that it blinds us to the right course of action.

So what your thinking here is money you already should have earned but lost because of that spread. Well are you sure, that money actually comes in? Id bet it doesent. See ts not that the people are dishonest or unreliable as general, most of who download the pirated version probably were not intending to pay in first place.

What is your goal? To make as much money as possible? You could equally think that the pirate mans you are worth buying. IT serves as a advertisement for you. And because its unlikely that it took any amount of money form your gains isn't sure as hell didn't hurt you either. Imagine a group of people who all play the coolest games, some of them might use pirates but all their friends might not. Or maybe its just signaling you you've overpriced your goods... now it might sound silly but if you actually price right you could gain more money.

This is the sort of thing we are missing today. Whats the goal of the law protect rich form poor? Well sure lets do that, we don't have much future that way tough.

Measuring this is hard, but rest assured its not a one way street. Besides the purpose of technology is to make life better, take pride in the fact that you made peoples lives better while you were at it. Not all of these people could have bought it.

But yes the biggest problem of copyright is the fact that it just gets nowadays it does not give fact. And yu can copyright anything today, even things that have existed for thousands of years.

And just so you know i live by copyrights too, but my biggest concern is that RUNNING of the whole model uses up more resources than it gives out. Its fine to get money out of your work but perpetual right is downright insane. And yes sometimes the copyright laws are downright stupid.

Like the nonbreakable drm, i mean if you record some drm media thats yours then the drm prevents you form copying your own copyright (this already exists and has for a long while). Yes its scheme for the hardware manufacturers to gang up with media players to say who can and who cant do what. isn't that against anti-monopoly laws

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[Bogtha]

Are you advocating that each customer gets to outline their game, and the developer will design and code it, along with all artwork, sounds, etc? I suppose people might pay $100,000 for a game, but I'm pretty sure they'd rather pay just $20. I can't afford to pay for a year's worth of coding, art and sound design just to play some bespoke FPS or car game.

No, he's advocating a business model based on making games for money. The business model cliffski and most game developers use is based on manufacturing copies of games for money.

Just because you are paid to create a game, it doesn't mean that you can only have one customer and that customer tells you what to do. There are other business models. Look at the Street Performer Protocol for instance. Create your game, release it into the public domain when you've made a profit.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[Joe Jay Bee]

Heh, sweet, small world... I bought that game a while back for Mac... nice game :)

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[cliffski]

"it's become too easy to abuse copyright law using tools like the DMCA"

But my whole point is that this is *NOT* easy. In fact, as I mentioned, to issue a DMCA request, you have to blatantly open yourself up to a direct count of perjury if you are misusing it (which is fine with me). Every DMCA request needs you to state, "under penalty of perjury that you have a good faith belief that the information you have provided is accurate". Its a huge red warning flag, right there to people who consider abusing the act, which makes it easy for those abusing it to be prosecuted.

Without the DMCA, I could send a vague legal sounding threatening letter to an ISP, and they would not be able to prosecute me if it turns out I made it up. with the DMCA, they just reply and say "please fill out a DMCA request", and there is no way I can avoid the perjury count in that case.
This is a good thing for everyone.

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[Logic and Reason]

You can NOT be held for perjury just for filing a bogus DMCA takedown notice. The other party would have to show that you KNEW it was bogus at the time you filed it, which is rather difficult. Would you care to point out some cases where someone has been convicted of perjury for a bogus DMCA takedown notice?

As for sending a "vague legal sounding threatening letter" to an ISP, the ISP would be free to ignore it until a court forces the takedown. Allowing the force of law to be wielded by members of the public without so much as the approval of a judge (which even the police require in the form of a warrant when searching private property) is just a bad idea.

And you haven't answered my other points yet, namely "your business model is not our problem," and "stop using logical fallacies."

Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA

[shutdown -p now]

Your failing business model should not be mine, or the society's, problem.

People Running System for large profits

[JamesRose]

Say system works fine.

News at 11.

Marketing Tagline for US Gov't:

[flaming error]

"The US Gov't. Defending international megacorporations from our citizens since 1787."

Re:Marketing Tagline for US Gov't:

[robkill]

Another tagline could be what I've been using as a signature all this time.

Its a lie

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Its a lie

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

It's just another case of the rule of the rich.

Hmm. The point of copyright is to promote science and useful arts (or whatever) by making them profitable. The benefit doesn't just extend to the publishers or the artists, but to the entire community. The copyright holders get their money (assuming people like their work), and the people get their culture. Certain measures, like the DMCA, which strengthen the copyright holder's grip on their work aren't necessarily bad for the people. While they can curtail certain fair use rights, they can also help slow piracy, thus providing more incentives for more investment in culture. Also, buy stimulating the industry, there are economic benefits which also help the entire population. It's a case of weighing up the advantages and disadvantages to the entire population. Perhaps we weren't making enough use of our fair-use rights as an entire population to make them worth keeping?

Re:Its a lie

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

This is the fundamental twisted knot economic flaw in the argument of copyright proponents. Think about what else we could do to "provide more incentives for more investment" in any 'X' whatsoever (not just culture). We could "curtail" farmers from growing "pirated" (completely irrelevant from an economic analysis perspective) copyrighted seed corn. That means one thing only: less corn to feed people, and higher prices for that corn. Of course, there would be "more" of an incentive to produce corn precisely because government interference curtailed the production of corn in the first place; created an artificial shortage of corn! Exactly the same thing happens with copyright.

Yes, but in the case of corn, the supply of corn from one vendor would be able to completely replace the supply of corn from the other. Because the competitor's corn is a viable alternative completely separate from your corn, we let the free market decide which is superior. In the case of piracy however, piracy relies on the very thing it competes with. It's a self-destructive trend, where it puts itself out of business. If the music/movie/software supply all dry up, what exactly are people going to share? Previously created artworks will only satisfy a culture for so long, since tastes and fashions change. I know that supply is next to infinite and that distribution is also down, but there's simply no room for R&D costs (which form most of the time/effort put into art). I'm sorry, but the free market simply doesn't work here.

Just as if corn could be duplicated as easy as any and all creative works could be duplicated, the price of corn would be near zero!

If you can stand your creative works to be as varied as your corn, then sure, the price would be near zero.

And no doubt how many people of dubious talent waste their lives "trying to make it" as artists? Government copyright subsidization only encourages more people to waste their lives creating near worthless "art"

You make the assumption that there is some universal, absolute measure of art's quality. Different people like different things, and it really isn't for you to say that any portion of the wide variety of different artworks that have been encouraged by copyright are "worthless" or not. And copyright doesn't actively discourage works: you can just release your art into the public domain, or one of the many copyleft licenses if you think you can live without copyright. All the talent that you could expect from a copyright-less world (plus much, much more) is out there, it just requires you to look for it.

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.

Re:It gets worse.

[BetaRelease]

It wouldn't surprise me if they made her head of the USPTO. :(

Re:It gets worse.

[Spy der Mann]

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

You couldn't be more right. When you burn a book, nobody can read it. But when you burn a DVD, EVERYBODY can! :D

Re:It gets worse.

[Jehosephat2k]

Which means that, for DMCA proponents, that DVD Burning=BAD and Book Burning=GOOD! Welcome to Amerika!

And In Other News...

[MightyMartian]

The fox declares that the henhouse is doing just fine.

Has It Ever Worked?

[MBCook]

I know the general opinion of the DMCA here on /. (and I tend to agree). That said, I have a question I wonder if anyone can answer. We hear lots about DMCA abuses (partly due to the standard thoughts on it). Can anyone point to one or more big cases where the DMCA helped and the person/people wronged would have been without recourse before the DMCA that aren't abuses?

Every time I hear about the DMCA it is being used to do something stupid or flat out illegal under the act (after all, just claim it as a reason for anything and many people will back off). Is anyone actually using it successfully and correctly where it provides a tangible benefit from before the act was enacted?

I think that is the litmus test of if it really was useful or good.

But as long as the RIAA/MPAA/whoever else get to "use" it to fix "problem" then it is "working."

Re:Has It Ever Worked?

[Chandon Seldon]

There is one giant benifit that the DMCA provides: It makes hosts not liable for user-caused copyright infringement as long as they respond to take-down notices. This is what makes sites like YouTube even legally possible.

My understanding is that two small changes would make the DMCA much less obnoxious:

1. Clear and enforcible penalties for fraudulent/inaccurate takedown notices.
2. The removal of the anti-research / anti-archival provisions.

Re:Has It Ever Worked?

[NewWorldDan]

And if you RTFA, the woman want's to change the one part that does work: the safe harbor/takedown provision. Grrr.

Re:Has It Ever Worked?

[Darkforge]

Can anyone point to one or more big cases where the DMCA helped and the person/people wronged would have been without recourse before the DMCA that aren't abuses?

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. /. posted a story about this working earlier this week: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/13/2028206.

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.

Re:Has It Ever Worked?

[ScrewMaster]

Add:

3. Anti-reverse-engineering.
4. Anti-decryption.

Re:Has It Ever Worked?

[C0rinthian]

Laws do not physically stop people from killing other people. So making murder illegal and assigning consequences is a waste of time, correct?

Re:Has It Ever Worked?

[Chandon Seldon]

That was my #2 above.

Re:Has It Ever Worked?

[ScrewMaster]

Gotcha. It really is amazing how much trouble that law has caused.

Re:Has It Ever Worked?

[cpt kangarooski]

It makes hosts not liable for user-caused copyright infringement as long as they respond to take-down notices. This is what makes sites like YouTube even legally possible.

Well, it clarifies it, at any rate. Prior to the 512 safe harbor, some ISPs had been held liable for what their users did, and some ISPs had not been. The unpredictability was bad enough that they lobbied hard for clear protection. You could have YouTube without the DMCA (and indeed, if a (b)-(d) type of ISP fails to register, they are not protected!) but it would be a lot riskier.

Re:Has It Ever Worked?

[Artifakt]

Basically, every case where there is an infringement, and the copyright holder uses the part of the DMCA that spells out how to do a take-down notice, gets a tangible benefit from having a clear path to resolve their problem, and content hosters at least arguably benefit from that clarity too. Some businesses and individuals only resort to take-down notices where they actually own the rights to content, and even where they also think they are losing significant money by the infringement. It's generally not that those businesses or individuals had no recourse before the law, but they have a more clearly defined recourse.
        The problems seem to be twofold. First, the no-reverse-engineering clauses of the DMCA don't really add much to the protection it gives legitimate parties, and they block many legitimate actions. They should either be dropped, or restricted heavily by a big list of fair use exceptions that need to be formally encoded into written law. Alternately, 30 or so more general cases of presumptive violation of the 9th amendment should be brought before the supreme court and used to re-establish it as a valid basis for restricting all such laws as the DMCA. I really can't see SCOTUS agreeing to hear anything of the sort in this era, so the closest to a just solution we are likely to get if we want to keep this part at all is probably a big formal list of fair use rights under a new law. There will still be technical injustices possible, but a decent fair use law will make them rare enough to be sure the law is doing more good than harm, overall. Groups such as the EFF could probably do enough to get new fair use exemptions added if they come up, that it's at least unlikely another Dmitry Sklyarov case would happen once we get the basic fair uses properly protected.
        Second, the take-down portions are sometimes being abused by entities who don't actually have a case. The law provides for some very stiff penalties for such actions, but that part doesn't seem to be getting proper enforcement. It should either get enforced as written, or we should get rid of those parts too, if we're not going to apply them fairly. Personally, I'd rather see them kept, but with the proper protections - i.e. when a legal entity doesn't actually own content and they make a false claim, I'd like to see a fine big enough to hurt, or them being told they can't use the simple procedure anymore and must go get a court order first.

Re:Has It Ever Worked?

[NoOneInParticular]

No, making murder illegal is not a waste of time. What is a wast of time is to make circumvention technology such as knives illegal.

Re:Has It Ever Worked?

[Chandon Seldon]

Fraudulent takedown notices are perjury. I'd say that carries a pretty clear and enforceable penalty.

Who's going to prosecute this? How long is it going to take to get a clear ruling? How much will that cost? How can you prove that a notice was fraudulent rather than just some sort of mistake?

When I say "clear and enforceable", I mean something on the order of "either the ISP or user targeted by an inaccurate take down notice can file a complaint - unless the notice sender can demonstrate standing to send the contested takedown notice, they owe the challenger $500". This is how the law against junk faxes works, false take down notices seem at least as worthy of sanction.

I agree with them...

[tgatliff]

Seeing as the US federal government was bought and paid for by large US business, I would agree that they have no problems with it. Meaning, the core issue we are facing is not what they think, but rather the current situation we are in. The Feds decision to lower the funds rate today backs this up even more... Help the market fat cats, and leave it to the basic consumer to pay more for everything...

Quoting the body of the article

[Enlarged to Show Tex]

the head of the US Copyright Office considers the DCMA to be an important tool for copyright owners

I didn't realize that the Defense Contract Management Agency dealt with copyrights. Obviously, the US government is even more screwed up than I originally thought...

Re:Quoting the body of the article

[IHC Navistar]

Are you saying that there is something that actually manages Defense contracts?

Come on, you can't have it both ways!

[Creamsickle]

What do you want copyright industry, DRM or DMCA? Right now, we the consumers live in the worst of both worlds, and the RIAA and their cronies aren't getting what they want either. The system is obviously broken. DRM has been an unmitigated failure, there isn't a single DRM system that can't be bypassed, and customers hate it. But because of the DMCA anti-circumvention people are not able to publicly challenge crappy DRM by making tools for Joe Blow to break them.

So we have the worst of all possible worlds, the makers of DRM fool around pretending that their broken DRM still works and spread fear that if a publisher releases anything without their DRM it will be instantly stolen. But their DRM is already broken!

It's turned a simple clean purchase into a complicated 'license' where the user is getting totally screwed over.

It's caused a massive loss of sales. All the sales they could have had if they hadn't gone the DRM route are lost. It's going to take them a long time to recover.

It's led to fake claims, a person making a DMCA takedown claim does not need to show any evidence that they are the copyright owner and because the DMCA claim is made to a third party, there is no interest in that third party ensuring the claim has even the basics of legitimacy.

Dumb shit has been slotted in as copyright clauses, like the UK's no parallel imports, so I can't import Vista from the US (not that I have any desire to mess with that monster), even though it's a quarter the price, because it's been made an offence under a copyright statute! Now everyone if claiming copyright to block imports of their products from cheaper markets and UK consumer is getting screwed over paying inflated prices.

Re:Come on, you can't have it both ways!

[nuzak]

What do you mean you can't have it both ways? They are getting it both ways. And to turn to a different metaphor, so are we.

> the UK's no parallel imports, so I can't import Vista from the US

Laws like this, and measures like DVD Region Coding a flagrant violation of WTO rules against artificial trade barriers and market segmentation. Not that the rules were ever intended to protect us. I laugh to even think that was ever the intent.

Re:Come on, you can't have it both ways!

[Hatta]

Um, you have to have it both ways. DRM and the DMCA go hand in hand. The DMCA prohibits circumvention of copyright protection measures. DRM is those* copyright protection measures. Without DRM the DMCA is nothing at all. DRM is technically impossible to do securely, so without legal measures (the DMCA) DRM is nothing at all.

*I can't figure out how to make subject and verb agree in that sentence

Who do they work for?-The individual.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Thought the copyright office was to serve the people not an individual"

There is no "The People". Society is made up of individuals and for society to work like our founders intended. An agreement was made up amongst those individuals that had the skill, talent, and time to create. The beneficiaries were to be those that didn't have, time, talent, or skill. Make note that the individual has to prosper before "The People" can prosper. Serving "The People" without serving the individuals first is backwards and defeating behavior.

Re:Who do they work for?-The individual.

[jbengt]

"There is no "The People" "

Tell that to the Constitution

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:Unintended Consequences

[Spy der Mann]

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.

Yes, but that's the only way the govt's gonna buy it. If the EFF says these consequences were intended, they could be sued for libel, or whatever it's called. It's one of those things we all know are true, but nobody can legally say they are, like that the CIA killed Kennedy and such.

Re:Unintended Consequences

[Jane Q. Public]

I agree, that was my opinion as well.

Prime Example

[whisper_jeff]

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...

Re:Prime Example

[Jane Q. Public]

I like your analogy, but unfortunately your facts are not quite straight. At least in a warfare context, arrows are generally more useful for defense than they are for offense. The main reason is that they can easily be fired from cover, which is not usually a useful offensive tactic. That is why castles had merlons, crenels, and slits in the walls: to give cover but still allow firing of arrows. Firing arrows from OUTSIDE the castle, as offense, was much less effective. Defensive use of the longbow was also the reason personal armor became obsolete.

Re:Prime Example

[FauxPasIII]

You obviously don't play Civilization

Re:Prime Example

[jedidiah]

> The main reason is that they can easily be fired from cover, which is not usually a useful offensive tactic.

This is remarkably silly.

If they can be fired easily from cover then they can also effectively used in a mass formation.

Some armies (calvary) were even rather fond of firing them at a full gallop.

I like that... comparing the DCMA to an arrow in a Mongol's quiver.

Also, bows are not just limited to battles like Agincourt.

Re:Prime Example

[Jane Q. Public]

I get your point, but I was referring to relative effectiveness. In the hands of most soldiers, a bow is relatively more effective fired from cover than when fired from horseback. You had stated that it was basically an offensive weapon, which is simply not true.

However, having stated all that, I will agree with you that it is a rather silly argument. :o)

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.)

Normally I think the headlines are inflammatory...

[zenyu]

I this case just the opposite, also mentioned in the article she dislikes the only good parts of that heinous law, the exemption that allows Google search, MySpace, YouTube and most of the internet to exist. Initially she only liked the anti-first-amendment clauses of the DMCA, but she "came around" on the part that allows her to decide whether it's legal to watch a DVD.

FYI She still opposes DVD watching and she is a self-proclaimed Luddite and doesn't own a computer.

That someone who doesn't own a computer has been put in charge of regulating the high tech sector of the second largest economy in the world frightens me to the same level that the horse lawyer put in charge of terrorist and emergency response did after the Katrina fuckup.

Where do they find these people? Is it the same type of process by which they find jurors who have never seen or heard any news for years for high profile cases? Ms. Peters, have you even read a book? No. Have you ever seen a computer? No. Have you ever visited a library? No. Do you know what a library is? My papa said it's a den of reds! Yes quite correct, now the next question, do you know what a Television is? No. Are you sure? Yes. Ms. Peters, you're HIRED! But I'm just here on a field trip.. Never mind that, you are now in charge of the technology sector of our economy. Make sure you listen to this guy from the RIAA and this other guy from the MPAA, don't worry they will tell you exactly what to do. Yes, Sir Chaney, Sir! Whatever you say, Sir!

Incorrect

[Jane Q. Public]

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.

Re:Incorrect

[prxp]

Yeah, I'll give you that, I should've used "extend" instead of "protect". I stand by the rest.

Re:stupid slashdot 'editors'

[krbvroc1]

Register, as in putting money into the corporate cash registers, is a more appropriate in describing the current balance of power within the copyright system.

DMCA Protects the Little Guy

[sakusha]

Yes, the DMCA works great, some people may object when it is used en masse by large corporations, but it is the most effective tool for the little guy. Content creators have always had trouble protecting their rights without expensive, protracted lawsuits. But I've regained control of my own copyrighted materials, quickly and simply, merely by filing a DMCA notice. I've helped other "little guys" do the same.
Copyright works for content creators, and the DMCA covers my back. I like the DMCA.

Re:DMCA Protects the Little Guy

[Jane Q. Public]

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.

Re:DMCA Protects the Little Guy

[Jane Q. Public]

What I was getting at is: okay, the DMCA has protected you a little bit... but at what cost to the rest of us? I think the majority opinion is that the cost has been too high.

Re:DMCA Protects the Little Guy

[betterunixthanunix]

Really? Because I can think of plenty of copyrighted material from the 80s that was produced by little guys (who eventually became big players, but still): the GNU project. In fact, all GPL'ed apps are protected by copyrights, and had the same level of protection before the DMCA was ratified. And don't claim that GPL'ed code isn't worth "as much as" some other copyrighted material; here is a list of companies that make a LOT of money from sales or support of GPL'ed code:

• Red Hat
• Canonical
• Sun
• Microsoft
• Novell
• IBM

And there are MANY more. In fact, all of the companies on the list got to where they are (with the exception of Canonical, they are all valued in the billions of dollars) without the DMCA. As an example, Red Hat is worth ~$4bn and has only ever marketed GPL'ed code, and was started by some guy in his basement. You can claim music is different, but it really isn't: there is probably more demand for software than there is for music, especially since so much software is involved in the production and playback of music.

No offense, but if you actually NEED to use the DMCA in order to make money on your content, then maybe you should spend more time trying to improve the content itself, or take a second look at how you are using the content to make money. You are right, copyrights protect content creators, but the DMCA hurts content consumers.

Re:DMCA Protects the Little Guy

[sakusha]

You're missing the point. Sure copyrighted material had the same protections before the DMCA. But it was difficult to enforce those rights. Now it's easy. And it's easy to defend against a false DMCA action, it's all part of the process as defined in the DMCA itself. Sure a Red Hat or an IBM has a platoon of lawyers ready to protect its rights, but I don't.

Re:DMCA Protects the Little Guy

[betterunixthanunix]

I wouldn't say that it is easy to defend your rights now, considering the extraordinary amount of material currently available on P2P networks. Neither the RIAA's army of lawyers nor the DMCA have been effectively at preventing P2P filesharing. Notice that none of the RIAA's artists are in the poor house as a result, and notice that the RIAA is still turning profits -- record profits -- even while P2P usage was growing.

You can't really argue that Red Hat got to where it is because of an army of lawyers; the company started with no lawyers. Red Hat became big and gain that platoon of lawyers because they were producing higher quality software than their competitors, and because they had and continue to have a more flexible business model. I know amateur musicians who, while not millionaires, are making a decent amount of money on their music, through concerts, t-shirts, etc. More creative ways to make money on content are simply more effective than a slew of laws that people either aren't aware of, or are aware of but simply ignore.

Re:DMCA Protects the Little Guy

[hcjiv]

Your examples touting GPL'd code are really bad and have no real relevance to the copyright argument.

Red Hat makes its money selling support largely to corporations. I don't think Atlantic Records gets very many calls on how to play its latest CD's.

Sun sells hardware... lots and lots of it.

Microsoft?! I think they sell a little bit of software that is not GPL'd.

Novell?! Again, they didn't get big selling GPL'd software.

IBM!?! They have their own chip fab for crying out loud! You honestly want to imply they grew to their current success selling GPL'd software or that selling that software is actually a significant portion of their revenue!?

I think it is naive to think that someone shouldn't need to protect their copyright in order to make money on their content.

Most of the companies you listed jealously guard their IP.

Re:DMCA Protects the Little Guy

[betterunixthanunix]

1. Red Hat is not all about support, they continue to sell licenses for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
2. The GPL is based on copyrights. So is the BSD license. So were all software license up to the 1980s.
3. Microsoft does distribute a "services for UNIX" pack, that is mostly GPL'ed code. I didn't say it is their entire revenue model, but it is an important part of some of their large enterprise sales.
4. Novell is now a Linux distributor.
5. Sun wouldn't be relevant if it wasn't for their software, which is increasingly GPL'ed.
6. IBM's mainframe business is now centered around Linux, and I wouldn't hesitate to say that their mainframe division remains one of their most important sources of revenue. Especially now that they don't manufacture PCs, and the smallest systems they sell are servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

7. Yes, some of these companies jealously guard their IP. But IBM, Red Hat, and Sun certainly don't; in fact, they formed an IP alliance, and have made promises not to sue anyone over IP violations. I would hardly argue that these companies need to employ DMCA-style copyright abuse in order to make money, considering that they are still among the largest players in the computer industry and they aren't going to leave any time soon. In fact, my point all along has been that copyrights should be enforced, just not in the way that the authors of the DMCA clearly envisioned. The DMCA is an example of copyrights applied in a completely backward direction. The goal of copyrights are to encourage authors (including musicians and programmers) to produce new works, not to have people sue each other left and right because they were unable to figure out another way to bring in revenue from their work.

   Really, why do people think that copyrights are meant to bring in money for authors? Copyrights are just meant as a way to encourage progress, which is why we have a fair use doctrine. The DMCA began a process of demolishing fair use; after all, how can I possibly do a remix of a song if I am legally barred from decrypting it? This is a backwards step, and moves us towards a society based on one person or group of people controlling another. My argument isn't against copyrights as a whole, it is against the DMCA and the mentality that surrounds it; a selfish mentality, where no one may help their neighbor, have control over content that they purchase, or make any level of fair use copies.

Re:DMCA Protects the Little Guy

[sakusha]

It's not always about the money. When my whole website was pirated, a DMCA letter got it pulled down. Sometimes it's about control. Nobody's going to copy and pirate my website through P2P, but there are occasionally scammers who want to clone your site to divert your hits to their site, etc. It would be hard to prove damages from cloning a non-profit website like mine, so the DMCA is about the only remedy.

Re:DMCA Protects the Little Guy

[hcjiv]

How does RedHat sell licenses if all their software is freely available? Because the customers want to have someone to call if things go wrong... AKA support. This is especially true of corporations.

Don't you think the GPL folks would be quick to invoke their copyright protections if, for example, Microsoft took a bunch of GPL code, added their own functionality and sold it without releasing the source?

Microsoft's "services for UNIX" pack qualifies for "here is a list of companies that make a LOT of money from sales or support of GPL'ed code" material?! Are you serious? I suspect sales of "services for UNIX" accounts for a teensie percentage of Microsoft's sales.

I know Novell is now a linux distributor, but how much money do they make from sales of linux alone? Does it really qualify as a "LOT"?

Solaris has been pretty great but most of SUN's revenue is from their hardware. Can you even purchase Solaris by itself anymore or is it just freely available ie no direct revenue.

IBM makes some of their money off of mainframes. Do they sell just linux? How much revenue do sales of linux alone bring in for them? Also you do realize they also make microprocessors of all sorts as well as other chips and they have one of the largest chip fabs in the world? They are not all about just selling computers.

IBM certainly does guard its IP. I have worked with them directly and NDA's had to be in place. Maybe they formed an alliance along some portion of their large business but not across the entire company.

How come I can only see RedHat's knowledgebase if I have purchased RHEL? If I purchased RHEL and slurped their knowledgebase and posted it on an open server somewhere, what do you think they would do? RedHat certainly guards their IP as well.

And SUN like IBM manufactures hardware and they do indeed guard that information. Just because they happen to make available some of their software as GPL'd does NOT mean that they do not have IP that is guarded.

In short, I understand what you are saying, that you believe DMCA is not only superfluous but also hindering to the consumer. But your examples were poorly chosen other than the fact that they were indeed guarding their IP before DMCA existed. These companies do employ an array of things from patents to copyrights to trademarks to trade secrets to protect their IP and I don't believe that they would eschew DMCA if it were applicable. As far as I know they may have already made use of DMCA.

You are right. Copyrights do encourage progress BY making it lucrative to create new works. Fair Use does allow derivative works but one of the factors in determining whether Fair Use applies is the effect on the market... AKA money for the authors.

About fair use, this link has a pretty good summary: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-a.html

Here is the link

[GnarlyDoug]

Here is the link.

Of course that is what they wanted.

[Jane Q. Public]

Of course that is what they wanted! Do you think it is coincidence that industry implemented DRM and lobbied for the DMCA at the same time? Don't be silly! Once they had DMCA, they could implement draconian DRM, and they thought the market would have to follow.

They did not want one OR the other, they wanted both, because they thought they could force people to continue following their outdated business model. Hint: Some industry old-timers actually thought they deserved to continue making outrageous profits, just because they had been for so many years prior.

However, they should have listened to a few smart people who told them, even then, that this plan would not work in the long run.

Now, will somebody please get it through their heads that IT DID NOT WORK on audio, and the writing is on the wall: it is doomed to fail with video, too! But they have kept trying...

That is an old link. Here is the new one.

[Jane Q. Public]

That page was written in 2002. Here is a link to the updated report:

http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/unintended_consequences.php

Unforseen Consequence

[tehcrazybob]

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.

Re:Unforseen Consequence

[Anita Coney]

I wouldn't call this consequence unforeseen. I think the purpose of the anti-circumvention clause is not to protect copyrights, but to protect business models.

It's the DMCA that keeps you from taking songs from iTunes and using them on non-Apple portable players. That forces you to follow Apple's vertical business model.

Selling multiple copies of the same DVD is a part of the movie industry's business model. If you can back up your discs, you'd only buy one.

Others have attempted to use the DMCA to force you to buy a certain manufacturer of printer ink or garage door openers.

If anyone has ever checked out the Pirate Bay they'd learn that the DMCA has not made any dent in the actual protection of copyrights.

Re:Unforseen Consequence

[RespekMyAthorati]

It's important to remember where the "anti-circumvention" clause came from.

Back in the late 90's, there were a lot of companies selling devices that allowed anyone to watch satellite or cable TV without paying. These devices (like the "Motubu III") simulated a genuine smart card and were sold in the tens of thousands. This was killing the satellite business until the DMCA outlawed them. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_piracy and http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3078496 .

Of course, as with all sloppily written laws, unscrupulous types soon found ways to abuse the law to the consumers' detriment.

Re:Normally I think the headlines are inflammatory

[chazzf]

Sir, you overlook the fact that not one horse was reported drowned in Hurricane Katrina!

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.

It's correct, the word meaning has changed.

[Erris]

As someone else points out register is right.

If that was the only word from US law with a tortured meaning, we would all be in better shape. The purpose of new speak, as Orwell understood it is to make sure no one would ever understand the language of the Enlightenment and documents like the US bill of rights. Simple words like "cruel and unusual", "limited duration", "shall not be infringed", "speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury" and "make no law abridging the freedom of speech" are widely missunderstood even when they are remembered.

Re:Unforseen Posts.

[Anita Coney]

"Coincidently bypassing anti-circumvention devices does make it easier for some* to violate copyright."

Incorrect. it'd be easier without having to bypass. However, creating an artificial barrier with anti-circumvention is only a short term solution for protecting copyrights. Which means it's not really a solution at all.

"And it's the policy I signed with Farmer's insurance that's "forcing" me to follow their business model. Darn I wished there was no contract law making me."

Wow, that's not even remotely analogous. The protection of Apple's business model has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with contract law. A better analogy would be General Motors forcing you to only use General Motors parts. Or a refrigerator manufacturer forcing you to only use particular brands of foods. Merely because the government enacted a law which allows such a practice.

"It's also a part of COPY-right."

Actually no. We used to have a fair use right to copy software, but due to encryption we no longer do. Thus, the the encryption is given more protection than the actual copyrighted material. It's the same with a music CD. We in the US have a fair use right to make non-commercial mix tapes for friends and family. But if the CD is encrypted, that right disappears. Once again, it's not protecting the copyrighted music, it's the encryption that it given higher protection.

"And yet no one seems to have a problem with buying cheap printers or cellphones. How odd."

I don't even understand how that's even relevant. Are you saying that the government should be in the business of protecting business models that would never survive without protection? I long for the good old days when Conservatives wanted the government out of the way, not interfering with our daily lives.

"The thing with the decay of a society isn't the "I'm in it for myself". Nor is it the "I'm doing it for others". It's the imbalance between the two were the former ultimately subsumes the later.

Once again, pure nonsense. My point, which you failed to refute, is that the DMCA does not protect copyrights. it protects business models. The overwhelming success of P2P and bittorrent proves that. And furthermore, if anything is causing the decay of our society it's governments locking up of thoughts and ideas... not the use of those thoughts and ideas.

Of course it's Fine

[PacketScan]

Everything is Fine with your High on Meth.
But seriously does this person live in a cave or under a rock to see that the DMCA is being abuse when ever people see fit.
Another Bush crony.. what can you expect.

Re:Unforseen Posts.

[swillden]

It's also a part of COPY-right.

So is Fair Use. And copyright expiration. And a whole raft of other sensible exceptions built into copyright law, none of which are permitted by DRM technologies.

I'd have no problem with DRM technology that accurately implements copyright law, but none of it does. It implements the restrictions in the law, plus whatever other random restrictions the author chooses to add. Effectively, the anti-circumvention law permits the programmer creating the DRM tools to write the law, and that's wrong.

Copyright holders who want to extend the law should have to do it the traditional way: buying congressmen.

Oh Sure.....

[IHC Navistar]

Oh sure, the DMCA works just fine.

So did the Ford Pinto.

Awww....

[RockoTDF]

I thought it was gonna say "Worthless" and not "Working"...damn you RSS feed for cutting off letters!

Re:Out of touch with Lawyers

[morgan_greywolf]

1) You are legally entitled to 'media shift' and 'time shift'. This has been decided by the courts, with the former drawing a precedent from the latter. No matter what this lawyer says, he's full of shit.

Why should the consumer be allowed to buy the cheap razors and decline the blades?*/quote

You're asking the wrong question. The question you should be asking is why should the razor manufacturer be allowed to create a virtual monopoly on razor blades by abusing the patent and copyright systems?

In other news...

[Digital Vomit]

In other news, it's time to rid ourselves of the US Register of Copyrights...

Small fix for ya ...

[tiananmen tank man]

That's what copyright stops.. the ability of third parties to make copies. And the result is not in the public's short term interest.

Re:Unforseen Posts.

[swillden]

One the only relevent complaint is the Fair Use issue*

Not true. What about backups? What about library reproductions? What about transfer of ownership (some DRM tools disallow this)? What about time and format shifting (not explicitly allowed by law, but certainly well within the realm of what a reasonable law should allow, and previously effectively permitted for non-commercial use)?

Oh, and you can't blithely ignore expiration, just because it hasn't happened yet. The fact is that DRM enables perpetual copyright, not to mention any other random restriction that DRM authors choose to implement. One rather sad example is electronic books that disallow the use of screen readers for the blind.

If you were faced with rampent piracy of something you were producing and people were flagrently flaunting the law. What would you do?

Oh, I imagine I'd kick and scratch to try to preserve my business model. I'd like to think that I'd be high-minded enough to accept that the world has changed, and that I have to find another way of doing business, but I probably wouldn't. Human nature.

However, the opinions of copyright holders are irrelevant, and we need to keep that in mind. To understand this, you really need a deeper understanding of the history and purpose of copyright. It isn't, and never was, intended to benefit creators, but society. And if you go back to the original writings on the topic, it wasn't even so much intended to encourage creation, because it was understood that creation would happen regardless. The primary purpose of copyright is to fund distribution, because publication used to be expensive and it was understood that creators built upon the ideas of one another, that publication begets creation.

The world has changed, however, and publication is cheaper than it ever has been. In fact, publication is now basically free. Not only that, in many ways creation is cheaper than it has ever been, and because of the massive scale of the audience can be reached, less revenue per reader/watcher/listener is required to keep a creator fed, clothed and housed. This all means that in a correctly-functioning system, congress should right now be scaling back the scope and duration of copyright in order to maintain the balance between public expense and public benefit.

Note that there are people out there who understand the new world, and are profiting from it. They still use copyright, but they use it only to quash large-scale piracy, and they not only permit but embrace sharing. Musicians like Jonathan Coulton are finding they can make a very decent living by performing and selling songs from their web site, with no DRM at all. Baen books has vastly increased its sales, and its authors incomes, by not only selling non-DRM'd copies on-line, but by giving a way a large selection of novels, complete and unabridged, for FREE. Moviemakers have always made most of their money from public performances, and have less need to worry about the changes.

The net taketh away, but the net also giveth, though perhaps not as much. For example, Musicians in the new reality probably won't become millionaires. Rather, they'll go back to doing what they have since time immemorial, performing for a living. As a friend of mine pointed out, taking away their ability to kill themselves with Ferraris and heroin may be a good thing for the creation of music.

The issue you point out is real, but the solution you favor is 180 degrees opposed to the public interest. As Eric Flint (author), pointed out:

The future can't be foretold. But, whatever happens, so long as writers are essential to the process of producing fiction -- along with editors, publishers, proofreaders (if you think a computer can proofread, you're nuts) and all the other people whose work is needed for it -- they will get paid. Because they have, as a class if not as indi

Notice and takedown is NOT the problem here.

[plasmacutter]

The problem is section 1201, anticircumvention.

It's redundant as far as actual piracy is concerned.

It merely serves as a hook on which to hang lawsuits, lawsuits which are used to maintain a complete regulatory stranglehold on technology, which since 1998 has pretty much stagnated save very cautious pioneering by only the world's largest corporations.

Heck even the new versions of vcr's dont have permanent archivable media like their analogue counterparts.

Section 1201 could be abolished and 99.999% of slashdot, as well as the eff, would be satisfied. You would also not lose this important tool of which you speak.

Register of Copyrights Speaks Out

[GRiddick]

Hello Slashdot, This is my first post through your network. From what I read, it may not be all that popular, but I can tell you from "direct experience" (I wonder how many of your readers can say that?) that what I say is the market reality, not simply my opinion. Thanks for bringing this "debate" to the members of the Slashdot community. These DMCA issues are extremely relevant, and vitally important, in today's world. I know Ms. Peters and I think she is an excellent Register of Copyrights. I also know the former Register. Ms. Peters is both intelligent, analytical, and fair-minded. She won't be swayed by the massive truckloads of anti-copyright advocates, lawyers, and PR agents employed by companies like Google, and others, these days. She understands the importance of property rights, both physical and intellectual, to this country. Whether she has a computer at home or not is none of any of our business. Since when do we have the right to impart our values on others? This is a matter of law ... it's all that pure and simple. If you don't like the law, then invite one of your congressmen/women to join you at Google for a free gourmet lunch, and see if they'll try to change it for you. The market is solving the anti-circumvention "debate" on its own, but why copyright infringers believe they have a vote is simply beyond me. I wonder what they (the infringers) would say if we told them they couldn't put up a fence around their back yard or pool? And how can Google help to organize all of the world's information, including the infringers' (whether we want them to or not) with those security systems in place in all their houses? There is no real need to change the DMCA here. Our problem is enforcement, and ethical industry leadership, not Constitutional rights or the law. Ms. Peters makes an excellent point about the "safe harbor" provisions of that same law (the DMCA), however. It was NEVER meant to give known pirates a safe harbor to sail their infringement vessels into. I have never seen a clause so incorrectly interpreted (purposely I might add) by so many, with such market power, in my entire career. And I've been at this game since the mid 70s. Google, and other major search engine players in this country, and in others, intentionally, and routinely, misuse, and misrepresent the "safe harbor provisions" of the DMCA. In short, they break the law. I know. I was in the middle of a huge copyright infringement lawsuit when the DMCA first became law in 1998. It was NOT designed to encourage copyright infringement, to give unscrupulous web site publishers and distributors a place to hide, or to place the burden of policing violations on those who cannot control the distribution networks. Statements to the contrary are NONSENSE! The law was never intended to give a large publicly funded company, such as Google, an escape from liability for obvious copyright infringement activity. They are not analogous to the telephone company. They deliver proprietary content, and sell advertisements, every single time they infringe. Google's attorneys have simply used the technical confusion to mislead those in our "judicial" society that decide such things - the court appointed mediators, arbitrators, judges, and juries ... let alone uninformed politicians. Back in my IBM days, we called it the spreading of the "FUD factor" ... Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. We are fortunate to have a strong woman, such as Ms. Peters, at the helm up here in Washington. If only her judicial counterparts would use a little "common sense", we'd all have a better, and safer, Internet to browse, surf, and search. Please let me hear from you if you disagree and have real "facts" to back up your claims. It's a pleasure to join your network. George P. Riddick, III Chairman/CEO Imageline, Inc. griddick@imageline2.com

Balanced Laws

[thomas.galvin]

Copyright holders have the legal right to restrict how their content is used, reproduced, etc. They have laws preventing the infringement of these rights.

Individuals also have rights, such as the right to time shift or media shift content that they have purchased. Why do individuals not have laws preventing the infringement of these rights? E.g., why does the law prevent circumvention of copy protection, rather than preventing copy protection itself?

Re:The True Legacy of debate.

[cpt kangarooski]

disagree, and I disagree with Jefferson for the simple reason that neither Jefferson nor you can ignore the realities of life. The only evil would be ignoring that, and forcing everyone to follow an idealistic model of the world that doesn't fit.

Don't confuse 'necessary' with 'it's a good idea.' The world won't end if we didn't have copyright; creation and publication would not cease. So it's not necessary to have copyright, but given the great public benefits that can be had by having copyright, it's sensible to have it. Speed limits are similar in this regard. So are zoning laws.

Well I get the impression that you wish there was some kind of seperation between policy and authors benefit.

The ideal world would be that in which there was the most possible creation and publication of works, and yet no copyright. But this is unrealistic. We should try to approach it (by seeing how to get the most creation and publication for the least amount of copyright) but that's the best we can do.

some form of copyright will always be needed

No, it's not needed. It's just a good idea.