The First Amendment protects the right to read books but not the right to break into a bookstore for the purpose of reading—not even if the goal is to quote a passage from a book in a manner that would be fair use under copyright law. The hypothetical, lawful use of the book’s contents to produce protected expression does not ...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) was dealt a significant (possibly fatal) blow in its longstanding endeavor to have the courts abolish the entirety of DMCA Section 1201 as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment. The case Matthew D. Green, et al. v. United States Department of Justice was filed in July of 2016, and on December 6, the DC ...
Rep. Mondaire Jones (NY), along with co-sponsor Rep. Victoria Spartz (IN) introduced a bill in February called the Freedom to Repair Act. Seeking to remedy a specific, unintended consequence of one part of the Copyright Act, the bill overreaches so dramatically that it would effectively legalize piracy of creative works. If Congress wants to address unfair practices among certain manufacturers ...
On September 16th, the IP Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearing number five in its ongoing review of the 22-year-old Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The subject was Title I of the DMCA, also referred to as §1201, which proscribes the circumvention of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies used to protect copyrighted works distributed through digital systems. When the ...
In July of 2016, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit alleging that Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is unconstitutional. More recently, in September, Cory Doctorow announced the EFF’s “Project Apollo” vowing to “end DRM within a decade.” I personally tend to think of such high-drama tilting at windmills as mostly a fund-raising strategy for EFF, ...
