The Bizarre Process Used For Approving Exemptions To the DMCA 69
harrymcc writes: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act imposes severe penalties on those who overcome copy-protection technologies. It allows for exemptions for a variety of purposes — but in a weird proviso, those exemptions must be re-approved by the Librarian of Congress every three years. Over at Fast Company, Glenn Fleishman takes a look at this broken system and why it's so bad for our rights as consumers. "The Librarian has opted to require one or more 'champions' or proponents of a carefully defined category, like "Audiovisual works – educational uses – colleges and universities," to file a brief. His office also opens the floor to rebuttals from opponents. Further, the Librarian sunsets every exemption every three years—something not required by the law, and which requires champions to arise again to launch a new defense. The office also doesn't propose its own examples of circumvention that should be permitted, even though the law permits it to do so."
Sunset provisions are good. (Score:5, Insightful)
If only the DMCA itself had one.
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How true. The scope that it covers with worded ambiguity is ridiculous, especially when dealing with companies that refuse to give consumers power to enjoy what they have spent money on, even when faced with companies abandoning some products entirely (except as a way to create lawsuits).
Re:Sunset provisions are good. (Score:4, Funny)
It's almost as if the industry wrote the law and is responsible for directing the government as to how to enforce it.
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Sunset provisions on the restrictions of rights are good, we should always err towards the side of greater liberty*. If an exception to a law like the DMCA is approved which increases citizens' liberty (jailbreaking phones, timeshifting media, etc) then that exception shouldn't have a sunset date. A restriction of citizens' rights on the other hand such as the DMCA itself should.
*Shouting fire in a theater, public health risks like measles or krokodil, can be reasonably argued as net reductions in liberty d
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To expand on your footnote, a good way to formalize your point is that your rights/liberty stops where another's starts. Shouting fire in a theatre is not covered under your right to free speech, as it impinges on the rights of others' safety and security. Therefore the maximum state of liberty is where you are permitted as many rights as possible without simultaneously reducing the rights of others. This is the ideal that all laws should tend towards (and this one obviously does not).
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And that's what "GPL is more free" is more free FOR.
BSD is the freedom to yell "Fire!" in a Theatre. GPL is the right to be free of lies.
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Shouting fire in a theatre is not covered under your right to free speech, as it impinges on the rights of others' safety and security.
It does no such thing. Now, panicking and trampling others in your haste to escape the "fire" does infringe others' rights, but that isn't directly caused by shouting "fire" and would not be justified even if the fire were real. The responsibility for that harm lies squarely with those who panic.
If someone fraudulently claims that there's a fire, and you take justifiable action based on a reasonable belief that they're telling you the truth, then they would be responsible for any harm that results from thei
CopyOnce Protection should be removed on Video (Score:3, Interesting)
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>> Microsoft will no longer distribute ... That means I will be forced to run a deprecated OS
Use Linux
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There's no exemption for products. If they don't renew the exemption, you have to stop doing the activity. The exemption process never was meant to work; it was just to make the law look slightly less Draconian (and various groups are pissed off that it somehow managed to produce as many exemptions as it has)
Usual assymetry (Score:2)
The Library of Congress being about preserving the cultural heritage of the US, it was an odd choice in the first place to give the Librarian of Congress a national regulatory function.
The real problem is the asymmetry: the costs of over-regulation are born by the public as a whole, but in very small increments. The notional costs of under-regulation will be born by obvious "aggrieved parties" with deep lobbying muscle. There's also the usual problem that assumes that the "stakeholders" in any copyright d
good principle! (Score:5, Interesting)
We should apply the same idea to Congress and the laws it passes: every law should have to be re-approved by every new Congress individually.
Re: good principle! (Score:1)
They'd just bundle it together like they already do.
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I have long held the idea that any law or amendment have some sort of measurable goal, and if that measurement shows no progress in the intended direction in the laws' number of years, that it be automatically rescinded without an extension passed through the same process.
By your logic, Congress would spend 99.9% or more of its time on renewing things that make sense.
I recommend that Congress set a measurable goal, which requires no additional time from Congress, other than that they be aware of the consequ
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Correct. It would limit the total number of laws to something normal humans can deal with and force Congress to prioritize.
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Naw, what would instead happen is that you'd get something like the debt-ceiling. You'd get a "Bill to re-pass every pre-existing bill" and it'd be waved through until you got obstructionists in office and they let all laws expire for a week or two with partisan bickering/amendments.
Can't see this helping.
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That's why I said: "every law should have to be re-approved by every new Congress individually". (And, yes, you'd need limits on the size of laws.)
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And every piece of legislation gets rewritten into a single bill.
They don't even bother reading them now - it would get that much worse.
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You really have trouble reading and thinking:
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Limitations on the size of laws? They'll just get more ambiguous, and the law will be even more determined by judicial decisions and precedents, things that are a lot harder to find than black-letter law. Moreover, Federal law will vary even more from Circuit to Circuit.
After all, a lot of verbiage is for the sake of precision. Make that expensive and precision will suffer.
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So seen as a ridiculous joke in 1516 - is life so much more simple now that it's no longer ridiculous?
While some simplification is a good idea I don't think we can dumb it down enough to get rid of the lawyers without risking som
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You really need to read more carefully. I didn't argue for the abolition of lawyers or laws. I made a statement about federal law and Congress. There are plenty of complex arrangements people need in their lives, but they don't need to be imposed at a centralized, federal level by Congress.
As for Thomas More, the fact that he was historically important and that his ideas were influential to some degree doesn't make them right. More's Utopia effectively describes a progressive ideal; to what degree it was sa
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With respect, the strings between husbands and wives so that they can find their way back when drunk is a pretty enormous fucking clue!
I tried being polite but you are not only a fucking idiot but one that wants to throw away what George Washington gave you.
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I tend to lose a lot of sympathy for people when, like in this case, someone responds to a reference they don't have personal experience of, by doing a two minute Google/Wikipedia search and then respond like they have actually studied it.
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I think its an interesting idea but as you say congress would be almost entirely bogged down in re-upping existing /good/ laws. Even if a vote to 're-approve the federal statute against murder' takes only 60 seconds to execute you still won't get much done in a congressional session.
What I think might be more interesting is to require every legislative act to have preamble like the Constitution does. It should be required to be written in plain language at a 4th grade reading level, stating the acts broad
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We should apply the same idea to Congress and the laws it passes: every law should have to be re-approved by every new Congress individually.
You seriously want this completely ineffectual Congress to have to do that? Not to mention the time this would take, but with the realities of today's Congress and the "my way or the highway" Tea Party supporters in it, no law would ever again pass if it had to do that. I guess if you're in favor of anarchy this is one way to do it. Keep in mind that the Patriot Act renewal was defeated by exactly one man, a junior senator in the majority party who was powerless to stop him despite many influential and s
Turn over, Benjamin Franklin (Score:4, Insightful)
The US library of Congress ensures that copyright holders have more rights than consumers. I think Benjamin Franklin would be horrified by this unfettered exercise in fascism.
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He'd probably also be horrified that poor whites, women, and blacks could vote. There's a reasonable argument to be made about the intentions of the founders, but keep things in check.
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Not just philosophy. Try history. He was a radical Quaker and didn't even bother to patent his own inventions when he had the chance. It just didn't sit well with his ideals.
Not all of the founding fathers were plantation owners content with the status quo either before or after the revolution.
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The correct word is feudalism.
Why doesn't 1201-a-1-A nullify itself? (Score:2, Funny)
I'm no lawyer but section 1201-a-1-A readS:
"No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. The prohibition contained in the preceding sentence shall take effect at the end of the 2-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this chapter. "
Personally I'm shocked nobody has ever tried to defend a DMCA decryption request on the grounds that the control does not 'effectively' control access to the work, because it is easily br
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Really? Are you also shocked to find out that you are a complete ignoramus and a total shit head, to boot?
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Read a little further. Section 1201-a-3-B states:
"a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work."
Once it is 'easily broken' the violation has already taken place, since effective is defined as in normal operation.
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Locks are similar. A door for a business normally open to the public is not open if locked, and it doesn't matter how good the lock is. Of course, you couldn't legally benefit from any wisdom in this post (measured by letters, not by ideas; concepts may settle in shipping) if I'd used ROT13.
Because 1201(a)(3)(b) *DEFINES* "effective" (Score:1)
I believe that issue came up way back in the (1999? 2000? 2001?) MPAA-vs-2600 trial. It was waved aside immediately. "Effective" doesn't mean what you think it means. See 1201(a)(3)(b) [cornell.edu].
IMHO the part that hasn't been discussed much, is the role of the "without the authority of the copyright owner" just one line higher up, in 1201(a)(2)(a). If you buy a DVD, do you have the authority of the copyright owner to bypass the DRM?
If you're authorized to bypass, descramble, etc then you are not "circumventing" t
Simple solution. (Score:3)
Just get the right librarian for the job.
Ook.
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Just get the right librarian for the job.
Ook.
What, you don't like our current one who unofficially goes by the moniker '343 Guilty Spark'?
Strat
Yikes (Score:2)
American corruption at it's finest. A make work project if I ever saw one. The USA will continue to decline until everyone is either a lawyer or contributing to a lawyer's lifestyle.
ohh man, this might be in a wrong thread (Score:1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Hate to link youtubelos here, /ignore , if You so wish
t;k