Maura Corbett warns of abuses of copyright by media corporations that often include gross misrepresentations of federal law and characterize as unlawful acts that are explicitly permitted by law.
Warnings attached to movies, sports broadcasts and other media often provide wildly misleading information about consumer rights under copyright law. For example, warnings on many Universal DVDs state, in part, that “any unauthorized exhibition, distribution or copying of this film or any part thereof (including soundtrack) is an infringement of the relevant copyright and will subject the infringer to severe civil and criminal penalties.”
This statement is simply untrue–the federal copyright statutes specifically allow unauthorized reproduction for criticism, commentary and other purposes
She concludes:
We should not permit rights holders to use copyright law to create new powers for themselves. Even as we urge consumers to respect the law–and we should–large copyright owners have the same obligation.
Copyright law was never intended to serve as a big stick for the rights holder to wield against the freedom of information and ideas.
alan herrell - the head lemur
on Aug 28th, 2007
@ 3:21 am:
14 years is long enough
http://www.ravinglunacy.org/index.php/2007/08/08/copyright-reboot-1/
also:
Pamela Samuelson is a Professor at the University of California at Berkeley with a joint appointment in the School of Information Management and Systems and the School of Law.
She recently posted
reliminary Thoughts on Copyright Reform (pdf)
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/Preliminary%20Thoughts%20utah.pdf
which should go a long way toward opening a dialog to Reboot Copyright.
Adriana
on Aug 28th, 2007
@ 9:44 am:
Thank you, that’s actually a great idea – rebooting copyright!
Copyright was introduced to encourage innovation. Now it is being used to protect ‘content owners’ from it. Also, any industry that uses legal force against it’s markets is seriously in trouble…