Tech giants back Fair Use bills (Register) [LWN.net]

The Register takes a look at a new bill announced by Congressman Rick Boucher. "Boucher's bill will specify that share denial CDs are labeled clearly, and like Lofgren's attempt to superseded the draconian provisions of the DMCA. "Boucher would essentially reverse the outcome, and fix the problems that gave us the 2600 case, the Felten case and the Sklyarov prosection," the EFF's Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann told us today."

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Tech giants back Fair Use bills (Register)

Posted Oct 4, 2002 20:01 UTC (Fri) by Peter (guest, #1127) [Link]

Nice bill. Short, sweet and to the point. Here's hoping it passes, and further, that certain bits of it are interpreted the way I think they should be. In particular, the section on circumvention of access control measures allows circumvention to lawful owners of material provided that:

(A) such act is necessary to make a non-infringing use under this title; and

(B) the copyright owner fails to make publicly available the necessary means to perform such non-infringing use without additional cost or burden to such person.

(Then it gives similar rights to those who would distribute tools to do just this.) The interesting bit is without additional cost or burden. It means that if the DVDCCA wants to prevent my use of DeCSS by claiming to provide an equivalent means to view my DVD discs under Linux, then they not only have to give me the player for free, but the player they provide must allow me to exercise all fair-use rights. That means no region coding or other DRM nonsense.

And, oh, by the way, the player they provide me must work on any hardware platform I might ever buy which is capable of (a) running Linux and (b) supporting an IDE DVD-ROM drive. (Replace "Linux" with "NetBSD" and they've got their work cut out for them....)