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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.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Saturday July 23 2016, @11:08AM
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.