Useful DMCA exemptions
p2pnet.net News:- The US Register of Copyrights has just issued some useful exemptions to the DMCA – as she has limited power to do.
More – much more – is here and here. AP has a good explanation of all of this.
The first exemption is quite interesting for Canada:
1. Audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university’s film or media studies department, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom by media studies or film professors.
That would appear to correspond with what US law is in the non-digital context by reason of their general fair use doctrine.
This is the kind of thing that CMEC and the educators should be striving for in Canada – namely clarification or provision – but only where really necessary – of activities to be treated as examples of fair dealing in Canada. This is something achievable – especially when the USA treats is educators so much better than does Canada.
Instead, our educators have passively accepted the disaster of C-32 and are now going too far to the other extreme with their proposal for a sweeping special exception for educational use of the internet, which manages to be both unnecessary in some respects and excessively vague and overreaching in others. This has managed to alienate a lot of diverse interests and will no doubt distract from what are likely to be the real battles in the next bill, including staving off DMCA North. It could also badly distract from the more reasonable and achievable goals that the educators should be pursuing.
Another interesting one is this:
6. Sound recordings, and audiovisual works associated with those sound recordings, distributed in compact disc format and protected by technological protection measures that control access to lawfully purchased works and create or exploit security flaws or vulnerabilities that compromise the security of personal computers, when circumvention is accomplished solely for the purpose of good faith testing, investigating, or correcting such security flaws or vulnerabilities.
Did anyone say “SONY Rootkit?”
Howard Knopf – Excess Copyright
[Knopf is an Ottawa-based copyright lawyer who's been lead counsel on legal challenges both at the Copyright Board and in the Courts against the excesses of the music industry establishment. He's regularly quoted in the mainstream media and acted against CRIA in the file sharing litigation, and continues to act against the CPCC, in which CRIA is still a major stakeholder, on the levy front.]
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November 24th, 2006 at 12:08 pm
“1. Audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university’s film or media studies department, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom by media studies or film professors.”
“educational library”: are not all libraries educational?
“film or media studies department”: Surely all university departments use media to study. Surely some universities will renema their history department to “history media studies department”.
“making compilations of portions”: A portion of a video is the video minus the fbi warning? A technicality to be exploited.
“by media studies”: What’s that?
“film professors”: someone has not cought on that films are already an obsolete media, no longer used in universities? Anyway, soon or already there is will be no such thing as a “film professor” at any university.
As usual, more “fair use” confusion added. This type of patching the laws outside of the law itself make things more complicated, because it is not enough to study the law and the law’s jurisprudence, an already impossible task. You also have to be familiar with burocratic edicts that no one knows where they are to be found.
This is a pile of crap from an isolated Copyright Office (ther US Register of Copyrights) burocrat.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com
November 25th, 2006 at 1:03 pm
I have just seen a couple of news stories and both said the same thing: A Copyright Office decision legalized what was previously illegal.
Could it be that the Copyright Office is a higher authority than the legislature that creates the laws.
It’s bad enogh that the judges can change the meaning of the law through their sometimes wild interpretation of it.
An illogical system for creating the rules that society must abide, to say the least.