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posted by cmn32480 on Friday July 22 2016, @01:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the currently-we-have-no-digital-rights dept.

From the EFF press release:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the U.S. government today on behalf of technology creators and researchers to overturn onerous provisions of copyright law that violate the First Amendment.
...
Ostensibly enacted to fight music and movie piracy, Section 1201 has long served to restrict people's ability to access, use, and even speak out about copyrighted materials—including the software that is increasingly embedded in everyday things. The law imposes a legal cloud over our rights to tinker with or repair the devices we own, to convert videos so that they can play on multiple platforms, remix a video, or conduct independent security research that would reveal dangerous security flaws in our computers, cars, and medical devices. It criminalizes the creation of tools to let people access and use those materials.

Copyright law is supposed to exist in harmony with the First Amendment. But the prospect of costly legal battles or criminal prosecution stymies creators, academics, inventors, and researchers. In the complaint filed today in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C., EFF argues that this violates their First Amendment right to freedom of expression.

Section 1201 of the US Copyright act restricts the Circumvention of Technological Measures: more commonly known as Digital Restrictions Management.

I have always hated how DRM allows copyright holders to restrict what I do with my personal property: while being backed by the force of law.


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Thexalon on Friday July 22 2016, @02:44PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Friday July 22 2016, @02:44PM (#378540)

    WTF is the difference between a "rights holder" and old world royalty?

    1. Less inbreeding.

    2. There's always the option of doing without copyright-encumbered stuff: You can use public domain material, Creative Commons-licensed works, make up your own stuff, and so forth.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Pino P on Friday July 22 2016, @03:57PM

    by Pino P (4721) on Friday July 22 2016, @03:57PM (#378585) Journal

    There's always the option of doing without copyright-encumbered stuff: You can use public domain material, Creative Commons-licensed works, make up your own stuff, and so forth.

    Not always. Consider the following edge cases:

    • You "make up your own stuff", but a "rights holder" accuses you of copyright or patent infringement because your work or invention is too similar to a work or invention owned by the "rights holder". This happens often with software patents and occasionally with music [wikipedia.org].
    • A government requires use of proprietary software published by a particular "rights holder" to prepare and file official forms, such as your individual or business income tax return or comments to regulation, and allows no paper alternative. This happened recently to Free Software Foundation [fsf.org].
    • You want to publish your free software or free cultural works, but most of your audience is behind a closed platform whose "rights holder" prohibits use of copyleft. This happened when Atari tried to use a copylefted engine to port its old game to Wii [slashdot.org].
    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday July 23 2016, @07:38AM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday July 23 2016, @07:38AM (#378954) Journal

      Software patents don't belong here as they are patents, not copyright, a wholly different beast. In particular, with copyright, having created it without knowledge of the existing stuff is in principle a good defence; the problem is "only" that it is very hard to prove. While with patents, having created it yourself without knowledge of the existing stuff is not a good defence; you can violate a patent without knowing that the patent or the patented technology exists.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Saturday July 23 2016, @11:08AM

        by Pino P (4721) on Saturday July 23 2016, @11:08AM (#379008) Journal

        Software patents don't belong here

        Hence the mention of an analogous copyright situation in the same point.

        You "make up your own stuff", but a "rights holder" accuses you of copyright [...] infringement because your work or invention is too similar to a work [...] owned by the "rights holder". This happens [...] occasionally with music [as in Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music].

        with copyright, having created it without knowledge of the existing stuff is in principle a good defence; the problem is "only" that it is very hard to prove.

        In theory, copyright infringement requires both access and similarity. But in practice, if you end up sued, and you don't have the backing of a large corporation (such as a record label's affiliated music publisher) for your legal defense, what's the difference between something being illegal* and something whose legality is "very hard to prove"? A defense of lack of access to a work owned by the "rights holder" could end up impossible to prove if it has been played on commercial radio. What can a composer do to shield himself from being bankrupted by a case of accidental copying?

        * Here meaning giving rise to either criminal or civil liability. If you wish to reserve "illegal" for criminal law and have a better one- or two-word term for this broader concept, let me know.