10 Years Later, Misunderstood DMCA Is the Law That "Saved the Web" 205
mattOzan writes "On the tenth anniversary of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [PDF], Wired Magazine posits that the DMCA should be praised for catalyzing the interactive '2.0' Web that we enjoy today. While acknowledging the troublesome 'anti-circumvention' provision of the act, they claim that any harm caused by that is far outweighed by the act's "notice-and-takedown" provision and the safe harbor that this provides to intermediary ISPs. Fritz Attaway, policy adviser for the MPAA weighed in saying 'It's not perfect. But it's better than nothing.'"
Because our ISPs totally need the protection (Score:2, Informative)
any harm caused ... is far outweighed by the act's "notice-and-takedown" provision and the safe harbor that this provides to intermediary ISPs
Revenue:
Comcast [thestreet.com]
AT&T [pcworld.com]
Verizon [pcworld.com]
These billion-dollar companies are charging us exorbitant rates for service and still don't have enough balls to stand up to the other bullies on the block (ex. MPAA & RIAA)?
To be fair (Score:5, Informative)
The DMCA is an umbrella act of at least five different acts (well, four and a few miscellaneous stuff). The article's praise is for the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, whereas most of the criticism over the past decade is actually aimed at the WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties Implementation Act.
Re:Praising the DMCA is going a bit far (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Safe Harbor made innovation work (Score:3, Informative)
Nobody prusues it because congress knew the clause was a joke when they made it a part of the law. I can not find one instance where perjury charges have been brought against false and/or purely malicious DMCA take-down notices. The reason being is that the DCMA being a federal law, your local/state DA doesn't care, and good luck getting the feds to ever go after corporate corruption, unless they aren't paying their taxes.
Re:Darth Vader (Score:2, Informative)
Headline: 10 Years Later, Misunderstood DMCA Is the Law That "Saved the Web"
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices of anti-copyright extremists suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
Re:Safe Harbor made innovation work (Score:5, Informative)
There is - perjury. The problem is that nobody pursues it.
Everyone misunderstands that clause. The penalty is not perjury if you don't own the copyright. The penalty is perjury if you didn't have a "good faith" belief that you own the copyright. So if you send your take-down to something that has a similar name to your movie, you can prove that you had a "good faith" believe that it was your movie, even if it was something else.
THAT is why nobody pursues it. It's almost impossible to prove that the person did committed perjury. They really need to fix that clause because, as it stands, it's completely toothless.
Electronic Frontier Foundation (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Safe Harbor made innovation work (Score:2, Informative)
From the article: "President Clinton signed into law exactly a decade ago Tuesday."
Well good job Bill! (cheers). By the way, you're the same joker who signed into law the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed a portion of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 (forbidding banks from speculating in stock markets), and thereby caused the current housing mess & rampant bank failures of 2007-8 and approximately 1.5 trillion in taxpayer bailouts to the rich fat cats on Wall Street (corporate welfare).
Nice job there ol' buddy.
Re:Responsible for Web 2.0? (Score:3, Informative)
You never had fair use rights in the US. You only ever had an affirmative defence. The distinction is rather significant in cases like this.
Not that I agree with the anti-circumvention principle, but if you're going to make an argument about the legal situation, I suggest that it will normally be more credible if you start from where we are and not where you'd like us to be.
Re:Safe Harbor made innovation work (Score:3, Informative)
From the article: "President Clinton signed into law exactly a decade ago Tuesday."
Well good job Bill! (cheers). By the way, you're the same joker who signed into law the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, [...]
Don't forget the Communications Decency Act and the Child Online Protection Act, both subsequently struck down as abridging First Amendment rights.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Online_Protection_Act [wikipedia.org]
Re:Safe Harbor made innovation work (Score:3, Informative)
If the 1999 act had not repealed the provision about banks speculating in stocks, the banks that collapsed this past year would still be standing, because they would have been almost-completely unaffected by the stock market fall.
>>>Bill couldn't have vetoed that bill since it was passed as a veto-proof majority.
That's not how it works.
- the Congress passes a bill
- the president vetoes it
- the Congress has a SECOND 66.7% vote to pass the bill. In the interim some members particularly Democrats, influenced by the president's action, might reconsider their vote and cast "nay".
- the bill fails
You cannot presume that just because a bill passed once, it will pass again, especially when the second vote requires a supermajority of 2/3rds, and especially if you can get the Democrats to stand-behind their President's veto.
Re:Safe Harbor made innovation work (Score:2, Informative)
From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch were both pure investment banks. Neither company performed commercial banking services before or after the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.
Re:Safe Harbor made innovation work (Score:3, Informative)
The truth is that the meltdown in credit was caused by the meltdown in housing; taking banks and the counter-parties in credit default swaps down further than the market expected they could reasonably go. This caused a panic in inter-bank lending, as no one could be sure whether any institution, even those well-rated risks, could be trusted. The meltdown had many fathers, but the Gramm-Leach-Bliley act was not one them.
Blaming Clinton's lack of a veto on a piece of legislation that actually firmed up the banks that took advantage of the removal of the pointless regulations, allowing, for instance JP Morgan to buy Bear Stearns. The major impact of the act was to allow you to buy a mutual fund at the same place you had your savings and checking accounts. The bill was not controversial, and was long past its time. It passed the house by...(looking it up) 362-57 and the senate by 90-8. It was no cause of the meltdown. http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/who_caused_the_economic_crisis.html [factcheck.org]