July 11th, 2007
It's Fair Use Day - good luck celebrating it
Today is Fair Use Day, notes Ars Technica. Not quite recognized as a national holiday, Fair Use Day was crated by Eric Clifford three years ago to raise awareness of the raidly shifting copyright landscape. This year the day is reconized by the Pirate Party of the Unites States, a digital rights group.
“It is important the people are aware of what they can legally do with regards to copyrighted material,” said Pirate Party US spokesman Andrew Norton. “Very often people believe that a use of copyrighted material that would normally fall into fair use is an infringement of copyright. It is a belief that copyright holders seek to enforce, either through frivolous litigation, intimidation, or legal and political maneuvering to legally restrict what can be considered fair use. This is especially true when it comes to critical reviews, or parodies.”
The Pirate Party is calling on citizens to support the Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship Act of 2007 (FAIR USE Act). Ars Technica writer Ken Fisher says the FAIR USE Act is woefully inadequate is actually restoring full fair use rights.
Our own examination of the FAIR USE Act of 2007 raised serious doubts about the Act’s power to accomplish any true revamp of fair use in the United States, or any of the other major issues brought about by the DMCA. In our view, the proposed legislation is oriented towards making the lives of consumer electronics manufacturers easier, but without any payoff for end users.
The Pirate Party’s Norton responded that “any step in the right direction is better than what we have now. A bigger step would be better, but any movement in the right direction is a movement that should be supported.”
The problem is with fair use rights is that they often conflict with federal copyright protection laws. Case in point, although DVD buyers have a fair use right to make one backup copy of the disc, DVDs use CSS or Macrovision technology to prevent copying. Software that allows you to make that one backup copy has been ruled to violate the DMCA’s prohibition against circumvention of copyright protection schemes.
In 2004, a federal judge ruled that 321 Studios’ DVD copying software was illegal, even though users had a right to make a single copy of purchased DVDs.
“It is the technology itself at issue, not the uses to which the copyrighted material may be put,” Judge Susan Illston wrote. “Legal downstream use of the copyrighted material by customers is not a defense to the software manufacturer’s violation of the provisions (of copyright law).”
