Public Interest (Score 1)

Something has been lost in this whole thing... Copyrights, like patents, are a monopoly, _granted by the government for the common good_. The theory is, for both patents and copyrights, to grant that monopoly for a limited time in exchange for the ultimate addition of the copyrighted material or patented techniques into the public domain. This has apparently been forgotten. Or perhaps was never realized by some. The recent purchase, by the Disney corporation, of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, guarantees that thousands of worthy works, now out of publication, will never again see the light of day. The DMCA takes that horror, and multiplies it 1000-fold. Now copyrighted material will be completely controlled by the producer. The only societal benefits the DMCA generates are the profits of those who produce DVD players and those who produce DVD materials. Now, there is not only no guarantee that works will ever fall into the public domain, there's a guarantee that they will not. Orphaned DVDs cannot be reproduced, saved, studied, or archived for the future. Works cannot be excerpted, analyzed, modified, or used at all w/o the grantor's explicit permission and cooperation. My personal opinion on this is that if DVDs contrive to limit use tighter than the copyright laws (the ones prior to the DMCA), then copyright law should no longer apply at all, and this should be codifed into law. I.e., one should be faced with the copyright, patent, or trade secret conundrum all over again. If one insists on licensing w/ more restrictive terms than copyright law allows, trade secret law should apply. Reverse engineering then is legal, copies generated by tapping the analog video out of a DVD player would be legal, and hacking or reverse-engineering the encryption would be legal. (Provided that one didn't sign NDAs...) RJ