Today ZDNET writes about Bruce Lehman forming a group to defend the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Lehman ran the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a number of years and was one of the folks who helped write the copyright laws. Now he says the anti-copyright forces are winning the battle over the DMCA.
Unfortunately Lehman and other pro-copyright folks such as Jack Valenti don’t seem to understand why the DMCA is despised so much. The DMCA is an extreme piece of legislation that gives far too much power to copyright holders, who have demonstrated that they are more than willing to use this power in ways that many people find questionable.
Most people I know, for example, find nothing unethical about taking a compact discs they own and copying multiple tracks to a cassette to take the gym. It is the position of most of the major content providers, however, that consumers should essentially pay a fee for every single device they plan to listen to music on. The idea that in the future people will be forced to simply license music is one that many find absurd.
ZDNET mentions another absurdity in the DMCA’s ban on even attempting to circumvent copy protection. The Supreme Court has already made it clear that consumers have a right to make backup copies of software, music, etc., and the DMCA’s pro-copy protection stance strikes me and others as a blatant attempt to make an end run around the rights of consumers. It seems to have the same legitimacy as a law that would say, “Well the Supreme Court says we can’t enjoin speech prior to publication and we have no problem with that, but from now on you’ll have to have a license to buy paper and sign an agreement not to print things we don’t like on said paper.”
The main reason that copyright is coming under such withering criticism is that Lehman and others intentionally hitched the future of copyrights to the DMCA, perhaps thinking their Draconian anti-copying provisions would gain some legitimacy by being portrayed as simply an extension of long standing copyright law. Instead, exactly the opposite happened. People rejected the DMCA provisions and then said, “Wait a minute, if this is what it takes to enforce copyrights, maybe there’s something fundamentally wrong with the concept of intellectual property in the first place.”