Internet Archive Gets DMCA Exemption 84
Paul Hickman writes "The Internet Archive has successfully lobbied for a DMCA exemption for the Software Archive. The IA keeps out-of-date programs, games and other random craziness for future programmers to savor. At the rapid pace of software development, this makes sure that we can create a history for us to remember and wonder at the programming of early games."
Now all that we need is (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Now all that we need is (Score:2, Insightful)
hmm... how indeed.
Re:Can they ignore takedown orders? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Can they ignore takedown orders? (Score:5, Insightful)
Starting to change my mind (Score:4, Insightful)
In the past, cultures that didn't care, didn't leave readable records-we don't know-or *care*- much about them. They are gone, as they should be. Whereas cultures that wrote things down in an intelligent way, using the best tech of the time, had their culture and language and works survive and they are still important today. Evolution not only goes to survival of the fittest, but survival of the most robust and open, because their knowledge base expanded rapidly, which lead to them being important, which lead them to being viable down through time.
Let the jerks go to all the trouble to create something, then make it a bear to stay viable or readable, their loss! Let them lock it up, charge huge fees for every peek at it or use, let them stay walled off, keep it buried in their vaults, throw away the key, bury it, obfuscate it, make it just so hard to use that..no one in the future will care! Let their own hubris be their legacy, their paranoid delusions of grandeur that their stuff is so valuable that humans will make the effort to try and decipher their weirdly coded and encumbered "works", when reality will be that the stuff that is easy to get to and easy to read and use and enjoy will stick around much better.
Re:All 6 exemptions (Score:3, Insightful)
Would have been much shorter if they just typed "checking out and/or removing Sony's rootkit".
Yeah, but ... (Score:2, Insightful)
And let's not forget - this "exemption" is courtesy of the very same people who created the need for an exemption - congress.
Stop voting for incumbent politicians and DMCA-type garbage will stop happening in the first place.
Re:Can they ignore takedown orders? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd argue political commentary or protest, such as incitement to pirate Steamboat Willie, when the object of protest is the very copyright extensions made on its behalf, should also be considered fair use, though I doubt the law (let alone Disney) would agree.
Jumping the ocean, though "the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole" is one of the measures of fair use, it does not proscribe the use of a work in its entirety from enjoying a fair use defense (e.g. use of entire Barbie dolls in a parody (Mattel Inc. v. Walking Mountain Productions) and the recording of entire television shows for timeshifted personal private viewing (Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, granted that "personal private" limitation undermines, not underlines the original point)).
I'd also argue that I should have unfettered right to reproduce and distribute any and all commercials ever made (and Giganews should carry alt.binaries.multimedia.commercials in its feed so that I can) as by their nature every viewing public or private benefits them, for which each viewing costs them nothing (when they normally have to pay huge sums to get air time). Promotional materials should not be protected by copyright. And certainly materials whose lifetime is substantially shorter than the copyright term protecting them should not be granted effectively indefinite protection!
And the same for any unpaid incidental appearance of a product in another work, or any use for which a work has become traditional, such as the singing of "Happy Birthday" in a restaurant or in an audiovisual work of fiction. Holiday songs created to become sung every time that holiday comes along should not enjoy protection from the very behavior they sought to engender.
(BTW, I should let you know that I often go out on tangents when discussing such things, or respond in part to others who are not the parent message, such as and especially the original article or its summary. I try to allow context to properly attach my meaning and the subject of my address. Please don't get upset that I may not be talking your points.)
BTW, Ob:IANAL.
Re:Starting to change my mind (Score:2, Insightful)