So what you're saying is that knee-jerk overreaction laws put in place by tech-illiterate politicians after being heavily lubricated by parties with a vested interest can sometimes not be that great?
Say it ain't so...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched a lawsuit claiming that a controversial anti-digital-piracy law in the US is unconstitutional. Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) – which became law 18 years ago – has long been controversial due to its heavy restrictions on what people are allowed …
The problem here is those ideas are great, as is my TAX THE CHURCH message, but we are but three small people in a big bribery-laden world. At least the EFF is on the case. They are on my donations list for sure. Good folks doing good work, even if you can't agree with it all. Nor should you. That's how life works.
I am so, so glad that someone coherent has finally stood up and said exactly what is wrong with DRM in general, and the DMCA in particular.
I made this point to the NZ parliament, almost ten years ago now, and it got translated into a clause that specifically excludes legal protection for measures that overstep their bounds:
for the avoidance of doubt, does not include a process, treatment, mechanism, device, or system to the extent that, in the normal course of operation, it only controls any access to a work for non-infringing purposes (for example, it does not include a process, treatment, mechanism, device, or system to the extent that it controls geographic market segmentation by preventing the playback in New Zealand of a non-infringing copy of a work)
... which is a legal formulation I'd like to commend to our American cousins.
Indeed! Was about to say the same thing!
I clicked the title, expecting to have to close the article without reading it, (to save myself from several pages of biased lobbyist trash), and was delighted to see that it was by someone different. And an interesting + good article. First time I've been able to read something about copyright on TheReg for ages.
There have been quite some articles on copyright that aren't written by Orlowski and that are very critical of the current state of copyright. It's just that Andrew usually gets dibs on some of those topics and then it gets all ruined (as an example, the FunnyJunk vs. Oatmeal one, where AO actually sides with the copyright infringers!)