DCMA - Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act HR 1201

The assault by media conglomerates continues to use technology to lock in for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, items produced since the CD era started back in the mid 1980s.

 

The main emphasis is that by putting into law definitions of very broad technology and what cannot be done to circumvent them - ever - effectively locks up items being produced FOREVER.

 

70 years from now when the copyright officially ends on something produced today (actually could be as long as 115 years in some circumstances of corporate ownership) anything that was encrypted in ANY manner would still be blocked from being copied due to the law against breaking  to reading and copying it onto another medium when ANY protection method is used.

 

Thus, that DVD of Disney's "Snow White" that you bought in 2006 when 2076 comes around and you want to copy that DVD onto a new medium doing so would violate the DCMA even though the copyright is expired! (And of course you could not alter the DVD at all to eliminate the ads that are put onto the beginning telling you about the 2006 releases coming out by Disney this year. Likely not even able to fast forward though them since if that feature is disabled by design bypassing that would ALSO be a crime!)

 

Now also there are changes affecting work for hire clauses going on for copyrights. Many record companies put into a contract that when an artist records a song is it a "work for hire" which means the RECORDING company owns the song and all rights to it - not the artist who wrote it and sang it. reading the law and the proposed changes online http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/judiciary/hju65223.000/hju65223_0.HTM is very time-consuming and confusing so I may be wrong on this part.

 

Also see http://judiciary.house.gov/OversightTestimony.aspx?ID=538

 

and a copy of the new act proposed draft Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2006 is available  http://static.publicknowledge.org/pdf/ip-protection-act-2006-20060413.pdf   a PDF

 

However, the main thrust is that the big companies are trying to tighten the DCMA to include a lot stiffer set of penalties, tighter regulation by using OTHER technologies to be written into law to ensure that anything that may come up in the future would effectively lock in copyright eternally.

 

How is relatively simple.

 

If you try and copy ANYTHING even after the copyright is expired you violate Federal Law and get from $1,000 fine to years in jail. So the companies would then RENT you software on a monthly basis would legally allows you to copy the no longer copyrighted material onto a NEW medium but doing so would THEN encrypt it into a NEW format that you would have to also RENT forever in order to watch that.

 

So they would then be able to claim that they are NOT stopping people from copying expired © material but they WOULD still be forever getting money from people in order to watch the expired protected material since there is NO provision in allowing that to be bypassed.

 

The problem with DCMA is that they threw technology solutions against a SOCIAL problem - and that NEVER works.