ARCHIVED — Jim Borynec
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COPYRIGHT REFORM PROCESS
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Submission from Jim Borynec received on September 13, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: Copyright changes
Hi,
I wanted to make a few suggestions to the people that are thinking about changing the law.
1) Copyright law creates a government granted monopoly on information. Before you decide to make the monopoly more powerful, please determine if it is in the *public* interest. It clearly is in the interest of the monopoly holders, but that is not the issue. It is my expectation that you will not find a compelling case to extend the monopoly.
2) Information "protection" mechanisms don't work very well. (examine the death of copy protection for floppy disk computer games to see why). Protecting these mechanisms with the law will mean that customers can't protect themselves against "broken" protection schemes. Furthermore, because protection schemes aren't typically time limited or use limited, they break fair use and even extend the granted monopoly indefinately (rather than the incredible 50 year (or longer!) timelimit now granted.
3) there is a lot of useful discussion on these topics on the net. I suggest that you check out http://www.flora.org/dmca/ for some discussions. Check out the links on that page for even more useful discussion. I would attach the entire discussion to my proposal but that would be rude and maybe even a breach of copyright :-) Still, please consider that I've attached the entire flora discussion to my submission. That way, you should at least look at it.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to submit my opinions.
j.b.
Jim Borynec
(Address removed)
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