We all know that Hollywood is making plans to give them as much control over copyrights as possible. But as more and more details come out in the open, it's get clearer how evil their plans actually are. Altough the industry (represent by Jack Valenti) keeps saying it only wants to protect their current products, it seems that all they want is total control over their products.
If they have the full control, they can charge whatever they like and prosecute anyone who is trying to break their protections, even if it's only for backup purposes. Unfortunately they have a lot of money which also makes them powerfull and gives them influence in the US congress.
Even if it were, what's legal today is already limited, thanks to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which sailed through Congress at the behest of the entertainment cartel. That law, as more prescient observers warned, turned copyright owners into despotic rulers of their domains. It allowed the entertainment companies (as well as software companies that have been among the chief abusers) to create digital tools to thwart unauthorized use, and then criminalized users' attempts to tamper with the controls even, in many cases, for traditional and highly legitimate purposes. |
Consider fair use, the ability to make personal copies and quote from copyrighted materials to create new works. The movie industry effectively rejects the idea that you should be able to quote from a movie, by putting an excerpt into another work, the way you can quote from text. To Valenti, fair use of a DVD is putting it in a DVD player and showing it in a classroom.
Imagine if that standard applied to the major communications medium of the past, text. You'd never see another history book if the copyright owner could insist on a payment for even the tiniest quote. Yet judges have interpreted the DMCA in precisely the way Valenti and his cohorts want.
It's a shame that you can buy so much power in the United States. The entertaiment industry just benefits from it's big amount of money. Besides that, most congress men, will probably not care about the consumers, as they have money enough. Read the entire story here.
Source: Mercury News
