This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 10 Mar 2008, by Danny Thorne.
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09 Apr 12
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Digital content has exploded in the past ten years. DVD players are the most popular consumer electronics device of all time; CDs and MP3s have completely replaced analog formats; the internet offers unprecedented amounts of content to anyone with access to a computer.
All of this is good news for the consumer. But there is a dark side to the growing availability of digital content. Even as the amount of available digital content is increasing, our rights to use that content are being stripped away. And these changes are occurring with very little input from the citizens who will be most affected.
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- You buy a CD but can't take it to the gym. The Audio Home Recording Act legalized our right to copy music for personal use -- for example, making a tape of a CD to use in a Walkman. But new copyright legislation makes it a crime to extract music from copy-protected CDs.
- You pay for cable but you aren't allowed to use your VCR. In the Betamax case, the Supreme Court ruled that making a copy of a TV show was a legal, non-infringing use of broadcast content. But new HDTV standards will make it illegal to copy a digital broadcast without the permission of the TV station.
- You buy a DVD but you can't watch it the way you want to. It seems obvious that users should have the ability to fast-forward and rewind movies as they see fit. But new copyright laws threaten that right: it is a crime to sell a DVD player that would allow a consumer to fast-forward through the ads at the beginning of a DVD!
- You own an electronic book, but you can't lend it to your son at college. Your right to lend a physical book is protected by the "first sale doctrine." This law states that purchasers of copyrighted works such as music or books have the right to dispose of the works in any way that they wish: they can sell them, loan them, rent them, or give them away. But new copyright laws criminalize all of those activities for digital content such as electronic books.
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How did this happen? The answer is that recent changes to copyright laws have given increased power to the content industries at the expense of ordinary citizens. For most of the past 200 years, Congress and the courts maintained a careful balance between the rights of creators and the rights of citizens. Creators were given the sole right to profit from their works, but in exchange, citizens were given some degree of flexibility to use content that they owned. But over the past few years, that balance has shifted dramatically. The content industry now has unprecedented power in their ability to control the use of digital content, and consumers are left with almost no rights at all.
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- Copyright laws can be used to stifle innovation by preventing reverse engineering -- the act of looking inside a product to see how it works. If today's copyright laws were in place two decades ago, it is unlikely that the personal computer industry would exist as we know it, since the development of IBM-compatible computers depended on reverse engineering.
- Copyright laws are being used to prevent competition by forbidding interoperability -- the ability of software written by one company to work with software written by another company. If programming interfaces or protocols are protected by copyright, then competitors can no longer build compatible products.
- Copyright laws are creating obstacles for libraries. Libraries depend on the ability to archive and loan content, but thei
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We believe that recent changes to copyright law have gone too far by depriving citizens of rights that they had for almost two centuries. Our goal is simply to restore the balance of copyright law so that artists and creators can prosper while citizens have reasonable flexibility to use content in fair and legal ways.
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- The right to "time-shift" media (recording a TV show and watching it later).
- The right to "space-shift" media (copying a CD to a portable MP3 player).
- The right to make backup copies of your media.
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10 Mar 08
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- You buy a CD but can't take it to the gym. The Audio Home Recording Act legalized our right to copy music for personal use -- for example, making a tape of a CD to use in a Walkman. But new copyright legislation makes it a crime to extract music from copy-protected CDs.
- You pay for cable but you aren't allowed to use your VCR. In the Betamax case, the Supreme Court ruled that making a copy of a TV show was a legal, non-infringing use of broadcast content. But new HDTV standards will make it illegal to copy a digital broadcast without the permission of the TV station.
- You buy a DVD but you can't watch it the way you want to. It seems obvious that users should have the ability to fast-forward and rewind movies as they see fit. But new copyright laws threaten that right: it is a crime to sell a DVD player that would allow a consumer to fast-forward through the ads at the beginning of a DVD!
- You own an electronic book, but you can't lend it to your son at college. Your right to lend a physical book is protected by the "first sale doctrine." This law states that purchasers of copyrighted works such as music or books have the right to dispose of the works in any way that they wish: they can sell them, loan them, rent them, or give them away. But new copyright laws criminalize all of those activities for digital content such as electronic books.
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