Why dmca is bad

To see why, the DMCA hearings must include testimony focused needs and experiences of all kinds of users and services. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act DMCA has interfered with a staggering array of speech and innovation, from security research to accessibility for those with disabilities to remix and even repair.

We get a lot of requests for help here at EFF, with our tireless intake coordinator being the first point of contact for many. Instead, users just need an answer to a simple question: what does this company WPL , have been feuding for years in multiple courts in the U. Registration for this free online event is here. The possibility that All because When it comes to software, it seems that no matter how many times a company loses on a clearly wrong copyright claim, it will soldier on—especially if it can find a path to the U.

Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The Federal Circuit is supposed to be almost A knife was stuck in antitrust in the s and it bled out for the next 40 years. By the s, the orthodox view of antitrust went like this: horizontal monopolies are bad, but vertical monopolies are efficient. In other words, it was bad for consumers when one company Facebook recently banned the accounts of several New York University NYU researchers who run Ad Observer , an accountability project that tracks paid disinformation, from its platform.

This has major implications: not just for transparency, but for user autonomy and the fight for interoperable software.

Although Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon and perhaps Microsoft are the largest companies and therefore the ones generating the bulk of The giant record labels, their association, and their lobbyists have succeeded in getting a number of members of the U.

House of Representatives to pressure Twitter to pay money it does not owe, to labels who have no claim to it, against the interests of its users. This is a Join EFF Lists. Electronic Frontier Foundation. By Katharine Trendacosta. Three years later, the DMCA is still just as broken. Unless a site employs some sort of content filtering technology, the same content typically re-appears within hours after it is removed. To further illustrate his point, Boyden collected data on takedown notices sent by MPAA companies and counter-notices received.

The impossibility of keeping up with new [infringing] uploads means that an online service provider can create a site aimed at and dedicated to hosting infringing copyrighted works, comply with every takedown notice, and still benefit from the safe harbor, as long as its intent remains hidden. If the site has enough users, any popular content removed will be supplanted by new copies almost immediately. Google Search—one product of one company—has receive nearly 90 million takedown notices this month alone.

It's almost impossible that the RIAA or MPAA actually think that represents real damages, but it's brilliant tactically, since they only need to draw a tenuous line from a defendant's actions to the statutory damage. The range can in turn be treated as reasonable by a court, and that's how the absurd awards happen. But still, no word from Congress. They're also used by copyright trolls to intimidate lawsuit targets—innocent or guilty—into settlements.

These statutory damages are actually covered by standard copyright law, not the DMCA. But that's half the problem. The original laws dictating damages for distribution were made with physical bootlegging in mind.

The penalties are aimed at a more willful type of crime, like physically setting up shop and copying albums in a tape deck. So how do you fix that?

Simple: Congress has to fix statutory damages, McSherry says. Requiring the owner to show some actual damage would put us a long way to a sane copyright policy. This is a good time to talk about phone unlocking and jailbreaking, both notorious examples of the DMCA's quizzical reach beyond what would typically fall under copyright.

But aren't these more issues of access than problems with a "copy"? If you want someone different to work on your car, you can do that and void your warranty, and everyone gets that you can do that.

It wouldn't make any sense to say that because there is software in your car, it's illegal to go to another shop. And actually getting an exemption from the Library of Congress to carry out things that should be legal?

Next to impossible if you're not a lawyer. The last round, it took three of our lawyers hundreds of hours, plus traveling to and from D. Between three lawyers, well over , and that's just one round. And for a regular, non-lawyer person? It's very, very complicated with a lot of steps, and you have to be able to go to D.

It's an exhausting process, and needs to be renewed every three years. For instance, if you're trying to break DVD encryption so you can rip a segment to use in a totally obvious fair-use-friendly parody, you'd be in violation of the DMCA without an exemption.

But in order to get that exemption, you'd need to travel to and from Washington several times, dedicating hundreds and hundreds of hours of testimony, just to exercise fair use on a piece of media you've bought and paid for. What was once perfectly legal made frustratingly not. It's exhausting, and prohibitively complicated, and you have to do it every three years.

So what is the way out of this mess? Forget even trying to streamline the exemption process. Some tweaks would help, like changing the default after your three-year exemption is up to automatically renewing, instead of having to re-apply.

But really? Use a Kindle download as an example here. If you remove , it's still illegal for you to copy the file and give it to a friend, or thousands of strangers on the internet. But what is suddenly not illegal is breaking open the file to cut and paste a paragraph or two for a block quote in a paper, or to more easily parse it for specific words or phrases.

Seems simple, right? Use your files the way you want and need to use them, and let actual thought-out laws determine if it's illegal. And it has to be to be for things that are otherwise legal, except for the fact they fall under the absurd catch-all of 's "no breaking encryption" mandate.