Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act of 2004
There's been a lot of noise today about some pending legislation that wants to sting the digital pirates of the world by making it a crime to simply "induce" piracy. Even worse, this legislation may just slide past Congress without any significant exploration of the consequences. It moved me enough to write to a Senator:
Dear Senator Hatch:
I urge you to withdraw your support of the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act of 2004. By making it a crime to "induce" any infringement of copyright law this legislation will stifle future innovation and further erode our fair use rights.
This act would criminalize many existing devices that have legitimate, non-infringing uses. Plus, it will have the added consequence of limiting technological innovation since developers will have to work with copyright holders to ensure future devices do not have unacceptable infringing uses.
Not every temptation is a crime. Not every citizen is a criminal.
Sincerely,
[The Mollusk]
Read on: Lessig | Gillmor | Miller
EDIT: Boing Boing points us all to the EFF and their thoughts on what the future may hold if this legislation goes through. Creepy.
3 Comments:
As I understand it, fair use is more of a priviledge bestowed upon us by the copyrightholders than it is an explicit legal right. Part of that may have originated in the fact that the degree of control that media companies are now trying to implement was previously impossible or too expensive to implement.
Old systems (analog recordings for example) had controls that were a natural part of the technology. A copy of a copy was a degraded version because that is the nature of the technology. When DAT recording came a long, manufacturers replicated that "control" in their equipment by forcing that degradation in digital recordings.
We are seeing similar controls being built into our media now. But the question is are those controls really necessary? Do they come at tremendous cost to innovation, culture and creativity? And as consumers, should we simply accept them or should we object with our money and our votes?
[DISCLAIMER: this is all based on humble opinion, a flawed memory and gross generalizations. Swallow at own risk.]
"We will treat code-based environmental disasters—like Y2K, like the loss of privacy, like the censorship of filters, like the disappearance of an intellectual commons—as if they were produced by Gods, not by man. We will watch as important aspects of privacy and free speech are erased by the emerging architecture of the panopticon, and we will speak, like modern Jeffersons, about nature making it so—forgetting that here, we are nature. We will in many domains of our social life come to see the Net as the product of something alien—something we cannot direct because we cannot direct anything. Something instead that we must accept, as it invades and transforms our lives."-Lessig: Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
This one's new:
"The problem is that 'fair use' isn't on the statute books. It arose from case law, and specifically the Sony vs. Betamax case in 1984 in which the entertainment industry failed to prevent the video recorder being sold."
Post a Comment
<< Home