The DMCA
DCMA is another abbreviation that I’ve used, and received blank looks about. I’ll be giving what it officially stands for, as well as my definition.
- DCMA
- The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998
- The Defrauding Misappropriation Copyright Act of 1998
- A law passed by congress in 1998, which restricts and inhibits the creation of new ideas and technology by causing copyright law to cover derivative works as well as the original work. The law also criminalizing the unauthorized accessing or copying of materials who’s use or ability to copy has been restricted through any technological means.
History of Copyright Law
In order to fully understand the DCMA, it is necessary to do a brief recap of the history of copyright law.
Common Law
According to Digital Law Online, and Lawrence Lessig, author of the book “Free Culture,” United States Copyright law began as common law, inherited from Great Brittain.
During this time, copyright lasted only 14 years, which was renewable for another 14 years if the original author still lived. This only covered the right to print or “copy” the original work. Derivative works were not covered. This meant that people could create new works building upon old ones, and thus improve the state of the arts. They could then apply for copyrights of their own, and reap the rewards of those improvements.
Copyright Act of 1790
The first law legislated in the United States which concerned copyright wasThe Copyright Act of 1790, and was basically a codifying of the common law. In addition, it only covered books, charts and maps, and specifically states that content created outside the United States is not protected. The law is only 2 pages law.
1909 Amendment
Several minor amendments were made to the copyright law, however the Next full version was “An Act to Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright.” in 1909, which as the name states, consolidated those amendments with the law, and added additional provisions. This brought the law up to 23 pages.
This law expanded the term of copyright to 28 years, with a 28 year renewal. It also expanded the copyright to protect several new areas such as works of music and drama; as well as technical documents. Derivative works were also covered as well, but only in a limited fashion, such as assigning to the original composer the right to create arrangements of his or her own music, or have performances for profit derived from this composition.
It also allowed foreign authors to register their works with the United States in order to gain protection of their content rights within the United States, but only when residing in the United States, or when the person’s country of nationality has a reciprocal agreement with the United States.
1973 Copyright Law
The next version was “Copyright Law” in 1973, in which the scope of the protection was expanded to cover any variation of the original work, such as creating a movie from a play or visa versa.
Also notably, this law extended the length of copyright to last the entire life of the author, and then 50 years afterwards. In other words, if something was created during any time during your lifetime, it’s unlikely to pass into the public domain any time during your life.
This was later extended to life of the Author + 70 years. Yep, if you’re alive right now, the copyright on anything produced in the next 10 minutes won’t run out until you’re dead. With perhaps the exception of newborns that wind up living to be 72 and works where the author dies right after creating them.
Oh, and the copyright is up to 31 pages.
Current Copyright Law
I’m providing you a copy of the entire 290 page version of the copyright law as it currently stands after the DMCA, and other minor legislative acts through 2003. But let me summarize how copyright law currently stands, using excerpts from the actual law.
Copyright covers “original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.” So in othrwords, if it can be created and recorded in any way, you can gain a copyright for it.
The exclusive privileges that copyright law grants to the copyright owner are as follows.
- to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords
- to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work
- to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending
- in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the
- in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly
- in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
copyrighted work publicly
In other words, except for limited exceptions, copyright law allows the copyright owner the exclusive privilege of creating any work derived in any way from the copyrighted one. Further, while not-for-profit public performances were previously allowed by copyright law, they are no longer allowed.
Further, if you are the “author” visual art, and gain the copyright, you are granted the following privileges.
- shall have the right—
- to claim authorship of that work, and
- to prevent the use of his or her name as the author of any work of visual art which he or she did not create;
- shall have the right to prevent the use of his or her name as the author of the work of visual art in the event of a distortion, mutilation, or other modification of the work which would be prejudicial to his or her honor or reputation; and
- subject to the limitations set forth in section 113(d), shall have the right—
- to prevent any intentional distortion, mutilation, or other modification of that work which would be prejudicial to his or her honor or reputation, and any intentional distortion, mutilation, or modification of that work is a violation of that right, and
- to prevent any destruction of a work of recognized stature, and any intentional or grossly negligent destruction of that work is a violation of that right.
In other words, if you buy a print of a work of art, if the author objects you can’t draw a mustache on it, even if you own that particular print. And if you decide to scan it, turn it to grey scale, and alter it to fit your needs to the point that it’s unrecognizable as definitely being that work of art, this is not only a “derivative work” but also a “modification” of the work of visual art.
While there are several exceptions made for all of this, these are ‘exceptions’ to the privileges that author has, the last few bits of our rights to do what we want with our own property, and the ability of authors to be inspired by existing works, and to create new works from that inspiration.
But current copyright law is not the only thing affected by the DCMA.
Other Affects of the DCMA
The Defrauding Misappropriation Copyright Act of 1998. That link is only a summary of the act, and is still 30 pages long.
The DCMA makes it illegal to produce, sell, or distribute any device designed to defeat any form of Digital Rights Management. It also makes it illegal to defeat any such protection designed to prevent access to that material without permission. However it specifically does not make defeating digital copy restrictions illegal.
As you can see, over the years more and more of the publics rights to produce derivative works have been usurped by our government and the government has, in their place, given privileges to restrict the production of these works to the person holding the copyright to the original work. In addition, the exclusive privileges granted to copyright holders have begun to last longer and longer. Worse, these copyright laws have begun to restrict how people can use things that they buy!
The reason that congress has been given the ability to grant copyrights to authors was to promote innovation and creativity, but at this point it is stifling the very creativity that congress was supposed to protect when the public invested this power in them.
Further Information
You can find more information at the following sites, which I used in my research for this post.
The United States Copyright Office
The Website for the Book “Free Culture”, by Lawrence Lessig where you can download a free copy of the book.
Digital Law Online - A site dedicated to the law as it regards digital information.
July 29th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
Meh. The law can say what it wants; no one has the manpower to enforce it in anything other than token shows of intimidation. The people making DRM hardware and software are the ones to be concerned about.
July 29th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
Ryv, the problem we have is that random folks are being singled out and charged under this law. Me, I’m working on a long letter to my representatives in congress, because I’m sure they don’t know what exactly is going on with the laws they keep passing up there. I’m also voting Libertarian, because laws such as these restrict the rights of the citizens to do what they want. As for the DRM software. I use Linux ^^ that shit doesn’t work on Linux. Whups, I’ve just circumvented….defeated the protections…. Oh, well.
July 29th, 2007 at 4:53 pm
No, Harsan, you haven’t circumvented the protections. You just don’t install them in the first place, so there is nothing to circumvent. That’s generally why I don’t buy things that have versions of DRM in place. If I don’t buy the DRM, then there’s nothing to circumvent, and people might hopefully get the message that DRM will loose them money.
From now on, I will actually check if any DVD I might buy has DRM in it. If it does, I won’t buy it. One of the things I’m going to press my “congress critters” to do is to pass a law requiring manufacturers to place a label on anything they make stating if it has DRM in the product, including stating what kind.
Thanks for the term Harsan.
And Ryv, I think you’re right. I’m not sure if our congress people have any idea at all what they are doing, or how they are creating a generation of people who, more and more, see the government’s laws to be not only oppressive, but irrelevant. I think that any that do, don’t care, and are on the side of the corporations, rather than of natural citizens.
Content doesn’t “want to be free” but when you make it impossible for a person to use the content they purchased, and then make it illegal for them to circumvent what is making it impossible for them to use they way they want, people actually come down on the side of the “real criminals” you want to catch with the law, rather than on the side of the government.
The music and video companies liken pirates, and honest users who are activists to terrorists. I agree with them… they are terrorists in the same way that Robin Hood was a terrorist. And we all remember what happened to Prince John.
July 29th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
By the way, someone who works in journalism has told me privately that my story seems “rather one sided” and asked if I’d be willing to post as an advocate for those in favor of DCMA. My answer is no. And here’s why.
First of all, the problem with the trap of “balanced” news that journalists have fallen into is that when you have the truth on one side, and someone who is lieing or delusional on the other side, in order to give ‘balanced’ news coverage, you have to present lies, or delusion as a valid view point, and people believe that the truth is really somewhere between the truth and a lie.
Further, if you have an opinion on a matter that is a matter of opinion, it is unlikely you will be capable of presenting balanced coverage, as is evidenced by the alternating liberal and conservative hosts on fox news.
So, when I have a strong opinion, I don’t even attempt to present “Balanced” coverage in my opinions and editorials.
I am, however, willing to let those in favor of DCMA present their opinions. I am also willing to post what I understand their opinions to be. That just won’t be masqueraded as being my opinion.
In fact, I intend to present those opinions in my next main post relating to this particular topic.
July 29th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
You say black, he says white, I think grey. Easy, simple, lazy thinking.
As to the old ‘wants to be free’ slogan…that’s where the technology is. Digital communication goes hand in hand with all the technology that makes media easily reproduced and distributed. The industry needs to change, not try to turn the clock back to the 90s.
July 29th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
You say I haven’t, the lawyers for Sony Music USA can say whatever they want, so long as they word it just the right way it can sound very much like the law reads that way. The companies aren’t trying to look back at the glory days, either. The 90’s were crap, people making mix tapes and copying movies off the saturday night showing of said movie, well after it’d been released, mind you, most likely well after it was no longer being sold at the various stores. About that, by the way, I will refer you to the Betamax decision, an interesting footnote in our history of copyright, and a surprising background for Sony to have come from. The courts ruled that devices such as the BetaMax and other VTRs, Video Tape Recorders, are legitimate to own for the copying and personal usage of publicly available material on television. Movies and whatnot. It is known officially as “Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc”. Wikipedia Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc.
Cliff Notes Version is as such: You can use your recording device to record something to view it at a time more convenient to you. That’s what the court ruled on. That there is at least one legitimate usage of the VTR device
Tape recorders and digital recording devices are similarily covered under an actual copyright law called the Audio Home Recording Act, which was passed in 1992, which allowed for people to make copies of audio or video and store it, even change its format or location which was called in Recording Indus. Ass’n of Am. v. Diamond Multimedia Sys., Inc. “space-shifting”. it’s what allows you to take a song, put it on your hard drive from your CD and have it be legal. To my knowledge the DMCA doesn’t prohibit that.
That’s the 90’s, though. To the overzealous copyright holders the 90’s must have sucked. Now we’re in the technological age, computers are everywhere, and now tape and recorded songs can make their way to a P2P network. Sucks more, that. Great thing about our modern era we’re in now, nobody seems to think more laws are gonna hit. Which is why everyone was shocked when the Induce act was defeated by a call-in campaign from the Save Betamax group. The Induce act would have given copyright owners and their representatives (The RIAA, the MPAA, any other AA’s out there) the veto power over any new technology they thought might infringe on copyrights. It would have made your DVD player, your DVD recorder, your VHS recorder, all that, illegal because the manufacturer, by selling it, was inducing the infringement of copyrights. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induce_Act wiki link.
That’s our modern era, it is, to say, a far cry from the 90’s.
July 30th, 2007 at 12:55 am
I was not aware that there were actually laws, rather than just court decisions supporting our ability to do these things. I am quite pleasantly surprised.
July 30th, 2007 at 1:15 am
Heh, like I said, though, that was the 90’s. The race is on as to whether the RIAA and MPAA can get new laws passed that change those rights before people realize what’s actually happening. Me, and my family believe that it’s gonna happen, people are gonna start going to jail in larger numbers, and soon the backlash will be so severe, all copyright laws will go back, once again, to not existing, or at least being severely limited. My letter to my reps is well in the making, got to get it just right before I can send it, lest my wording not be clear enough.
July 30th, 2007 at 1:56 am
OK, so I got the wrong timeframe. The media industry didn’t exactly factor into my daily life when I was seven. I was taking my timecues from the DMCA. Oops.
But, really, the fact that those laws were even needed factors into my main point; technology has been moving steadily to the point where the action of viewing media and the action of recording media are interchangeable, and the communication technology of the interweb has made distribution trivial. Trying to uncreate the technology, limit it, or anything else in that regard is doomed to failure.
July 30th, 2007 at 3:07 am
And not only is it doomed to failure, it also restricts future creativity, and threatens our placement as one of the most advanced technological nations. Lack of competition on broadband, and in certain other technological areas is already creating a stagnancy that has allowed other nations to not only catch up to us, but to surpass us in many areas.
The sad thing is that the state of our education, the state our technology is in, and the state of the freedom to use that technology are all tightly interlinked. Legislators are simultaneously trying to improve the education of our young, especially in the area of technology, and are also calling our talented young people with technical competency, and the will to use that competency (which are also linked) criminals!
August 2nd, 2007 at 12:55 am
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