Journal yerricde's Journal: DMCA in Plain English 6
My latest essay, titled DMCA in Plain English, may help you begin to explain the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to the American masses and perhaps get more letters faxed to your representative and senators. (Yes, faxed, not e-mail that gets lost in the spam, not paper mail that is assumed to contain anthrax spores.) It's still very much a work in progress; please add comments.
Second version addresses these issues (Score:2)
Your sig link is broken for people without your cookie.
oops... Fixed. Do you know of a way to link to a specific journal article?
Being a 'bot, I'll just point out that a automotive safety defect and a access control device are not the same thing either legally or technically.
There are times when an identical defect in a product can allow both access control circumvention and safety defects. I've added information about this to the latest revision.
You just ramble too much about "red book" CDs
How should I explain it? What's a good thing to call discs that look like CDs and (on some players) act like CDs but aren't real CDs?
and "assistive devices" and so on.
I've added examples of assistive devices, such as a magnifying glass.
http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/legislation/dmca.pd f is a decent overview of what the DMCA actually says. ... manadating Macrovision, making web caching legal, law enforcement backdoors
The latest revision addresses these issues.
Not repeated. (Score:2)
You didn't use the illegal photocopier analogy!
This is great!
I can't believe it!
Analogies (Score:1)
The DVD and the DMCA: Imagine - you buy a book, you take it home, you open it. Inside, instead of nice, plain English (or your preferred native language), you find gibberish. Looking at it, you realize that it's a rather simple code, and you could probably decode it. Unless you decode it, or get somone else to, you can't read it. Also, on the inside front cover of the book is a stamp saying where (what country, or part of the world) you bought the book. That's a DVD. So, you contact a store and you find out that for a one-time fee, you can hire an employee of the publisher to ilve in your house and, when you tell him to, he'll decode the book and read it to you. Unless, of course, the area stamped on the inside of the book is not the one (and only one, mind you) that he is allowed to decode. If his allowed area and the area stamped insode the book are different, you'll have to hire another decoder. And if, say, you buy books from all around the worlding to need to hire a _lot_ of decoders. That person is a DVD player. How does the DMCA fit into all of this? Well the DMCA makes it illegal for you to:
1) Learn to decode books yourself or tell anyone how to decode the books
2) make a recording or make a transcription of your decoder reading the book.
3) hire a decoder that doesn't work for the publisher.
The DVD license makes it legal for the publisher to recall your decoder any time it wants to, and you get no refund.
So: You own a book that you are not allowed to read for yourself, and the only person who is allowed to read it for you cannot be hired by you, and is only lent to you, even though your payment for his services is not in any way or part refundable.
Maybe that works for an analogy?
May I use this? (Score:1)
[excellent analogy from dmca to books]
May I use this text?