Euro DMCA Fails

Kr3m3Puff writes "Looks like the Euro DCMA has failed according to Yahoo! It seems that only two member nations had adopted the local law and therfore the Euro wide law will not be adopted. The BSA is complaining they have no protections." Update: 12/23 17:50 GMT by T : That's DMCA rather than DCMA -- silly acronyms.

Spellcheck!

[TheSHAD0W]

Shouldn't that be "DMCA"?

Hmmm...

[rickthewizkid]

Now when will the USA version fall?

Or, when can I move to europe? :)
-RickTheWizKid

crafty

[k3v0]

it's smart of the EU member nations to look to the model that the US has set and the problems surrounding implemetation of these laws

The DMCA is pretty ineffective anyway...

[Valar]

Sure, the RIAA and MPAA and their buddies in the government have tried to apply the DMCA to every aspect of life, but if you look at how it is being enforced, versus how it could be enforced it really isn't that bad. Afterall, they could break your door down, tear gas your dog, spray you in the face with pepper spray then push you down the stairs for DMCA violation...or at least that's what they told me.

Rejoice!

[WPIDalamar]

You guys sure are lucky over there to have politicians that can actually think without being prompted by big-business. Go EU!

DRM will always be cracked

[Anonymous Coward]

Wether its legal or not. Cracks are everywhere for this stuff, this will just hurt fair rights!

Luckily the UK goverment has been keeping up with computers. As long as 0s and 1's can be extracted, drm will never suceed (and good thing too).

If companies really want to stop piracy, they have to make it easier to get it legitmatley (in music, provide HIGH quality media, which can be downloaded from FAST servers, which can be burned to disc for a LOW price (£1 for a good song would be resonable) AND IS INTEROPERABLE, so anyone can use it, mobile phones, linux, set top boxes et al. That way, people will stop using spyware ridden slow and dangerous software to get low quality, potentally virus ridden files.

What I don't get...

[BorgDrone]

From the article:

With hopes dashed of having a strong copyright law in place for the start of 2003, media and software companies complain that they are largely unprotected from digital piracy

I don't get this, making copies of copyrighted content was already illegal, why would they need extra laws for digital content ? Why would a law that forbids decrypting data protect them any more than they are now ? It's not like the pirates are suddenly going to care about the fact that what they doing is illegal.

Re:Well.. it's not theft!

[AYeomans]

See the article by Fast's Paul Brennan on Computer Weekly's article "Make copyright law user-friendly" [cw360.com] (Search for "copyright law" in quotes, might require registration.)

Quoting from the article: "However when an employee takes source code, or a company removes protection from a demo version of software and sells it as its own product, it certainly feels like theft, but technically it is not stealing. The case of Oxford v Morris held that software was not property and copying it was not stealing for the purpose of the Theft Act. However it is copyright infringement."

You may well not agree with other points in this article, such as the need to criminalise circumvention, as software publishers are too poor to bring their own court case.

But let's not further devalue the language, by calling copyright infringement by incorrect emotive words such as theft and piracy.

Re:Rejoice!

[JensChr]

They are not thinking, they are just slow...
The infosoc directive is (unfortunately) not stopped, they just did not make it national laws within the agreed deadline.
Once the EU has agreed upon the directive, the member countries cannot decide not to implement it.

Re:What's DMCA?

[titaniam]

Shame on those who replied rudely to this person! If this poster is for real, you might have just alienated him/her not only from you, but from your cause as well. All of us learn of these things for the first time, so relax and be informative instead of just angry.

Re:Surprised ...

[MamasGun]

Yeah, but guess who gets stuck with those costs? Not the record companies. It's the ARTIST.

Re:There's no point to this article...

[doctomoe]

Well, i guess it's too late to back off now for the countries. As for the reference to the federal system, the EU, though a unique system, will tend more and more to a federal type system in future. Especially as they are currently working on a EU Constitution, which will be the basement to a European Federation.

The answer is simple...

[Slur]

Imagine you own a house. One day you leave the door unlocked, thieves enter and steal your television. If the thieves are caught they will be arrested only once. This is because you are only a citizen, and are not afforded any special privileges.

Now imagine that your door was locked. Thieves break your lock and enter and steal your television. Under the current laws they would still only be arrested once. This is because there are no special laws applying to the lock on your door, and so the theft is not a special case.

Now imagine you are a big media conglomerate with lobbyists in Washington. You get the government to pass a special law covering the locks on your doors, so that if a thief actually breaks the lock on your door they can be arrested and charged extra-heavily and go to jail for even longer.

Isn't that excellent? See, in the first case you didn't have a lock on your door, so it could be argued that you were inviting anyone to take your television. Once you put locks on your door, it tells people you don't want them entering your house and stealing your television. But this is still not enough, because there is nothing in the law that says "by having this lock on my door I'm not kidding, I really don't want you to take my television."

The DMCA is that new special law that says, "locks on doors are extra-specially-explicitly things meant to keep others out."

Without the DMCA there would be all kinds of confusion and no one would know what locks are for, or what's legal and what's not.

Aren't you glad we have people in government to clear these things up for us?