Tuesday, June 22, 2004

the Personal Technology Freedom Coalition

CNET News.com - Tech heavies support challenge to copyright law

Others more respectable than myself have reported on this already, but I will contribute to the blog world's culture of redundancy that promotes the spread of information so effectively. The Personal Technology Freedom Coalition, as it appears it will be called, consists of a number of Silicon Valley companies including such heavyweights as Intel, Sun Microsystems, and Verizon along with a number of dedicated consumer interest and other public service organizations (notably the EFF, but also non-technology groups including the American Foundation for the Blind who have reasons to push for alternative uses of technology). It is not surprising that the biggest IP players in the valley (here I am thinking of IBM, Microsoft, and Cisco, though I'm sure there are others) have not joined in. Some, such as Microsoft, stand to make more from stricter copyright regulations. Others are perhaps hesitant to take a side at all.

The purpose of the coalition is to oppose the Digital Millenium Copyright Act's copyright circumvention provision, largely through supporting Rep. Boucher's DMCRA (Digitial Media Consumers' Rights Act). This provision is quite offensive to those of us who feel the computer and the software on it are our business; it essentially restricts the consumer's actions by forcing them to comply with copyright control technologies even if the product protected by the technology to be used in substantial beneficial ways. I see a legal basis for restricting commerce, such as illegal file sharing. But if you own the CD and the computer, and you want to break the encoding on your CD using your computer so that you can listen to your purchased music in some non-manufacturer-supported format, that is your right, as far as I'm concerned. It's sort of like owning a gun. They can say it's illegal to shoot someone, but if you want to keep a gun in your house and use it by yourself you can. Maybe someday the higher ups will recognize the significance of this principle.

I don't know how far along this bill is now, but it's been occasionally mentioned for a while. I myself blogged on the bill when I first heard of it (in the previous incarnation of this blog), which was on April 6th.

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