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Submission from Pierre Lamy received on July 27, 2001 1:42 PM via e-mail
Subject: feedback
Hi,
I would submit that as little legislation and law be applied to digital
IP and copyright interests. I have several reasons, but the strongest
are:
The DMCA allowed FBI in the US to arrest a russian programmer visiting the US. He published software as an employee of a Russian company which allowed the removal of encryption on Abobe e-books. The story is currently in the news.
The DMCA in the US has solely served the interests of large corporations, and has not in any way benefited the average citizen.
The industry is self-policing, and sufficient laws are in place to take care of gross violators.
Previous attempts to limit personal copies of data and music by levying a tax on recordable media do not take into account personal copying which is guaranteed by law (for backups as an example). A for-instance:
DVD's can be bought sooner than VHS tapes in many cases (or are more available). If I want to watch the movie at my cottage, I can bring my DVD player, but if the player is quite expensive or fragile, I may rather wish to watch it on VHS. I am within my rights to copy my dvd to vhs, but no mechanism is provided by the content provider to affect the data transfer. By downloading a tool called DeCSS, I can strip out the encryption, and copy the dvd to vhs for later viewing.
There are several instances where personal copies are allowed, even encouraged and the above is but one example. By outlawing tools such as DeCSS in the US, the government has restricted the rights of the consumer to serve the media giants' interests.
Also, the digital world spans not only North America, but several nations with few or no laws concerning the internet and digital content (and some like China ignore international convention). Laws such as the DMCA are unenforcible outside a "digital police state" like the UAE or Saudi Arabia where all content passes through state service providers. Unenforcable laws are worse than no laws, and they lower the respect for remaining laws and become the laughingstock of a nation - Canada has one of the highest rates of software piracy even with strict laws in place.
And that's my rant.
Have a great weekend!
Pierre Lamy
(e-mail address removed)
- Date modified:
