Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)

See the following -

Right-To-Repair Law Proposed ... For Cars

Fred Von Lohmann | Electronic Frontier Foundation | May 20, 2009

It's not often that you get former presidential candidates from the Green Party and the Libertarian Party to agree on legislation, but Bob Barr and Ralph Nader have done just that -- jointly supporting the Right-To-Repair Act of 2009 (H.R. 2057)... Read More »

Congress Considers Anti-Piracy Bills That Could Cripple Internet Industries

Alex Howard | O'Reilly Radar | November 22, 2011

Imagine a world where YouTube, Flickr, Facebook or Twitter had never been created due to the cost of regulatory compliance. Imagine an Internet where any website where users can upload text, pictures or video is liable for copyrighted material uploaded to it. Imagine a world where the addresses to those websites could not be found using search engines like Google and Bing, even if you typed them in directly.

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Copyright and Wrong

Nicholas Deleon | The Daily | October 28, 2011

A piece of legislation backed by the MPAA was introduced in the House of Representatives this week and threatens to upend the way we use the Internet. The E-Parasites Act, a contrived acronym for Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation, seeks to give the attorney general broad power to create a blacklist of websites that “induce” copyright in Read More »

Copyrights Are No Longer About Copies (Part 1)

William Patry | Bloomberg | December 26, 2011

Yet copyright policy makers often fail to appreciate that the underlying issue today is pricing, not technology. Technology is not the enemy but simply the means by which market expectations are created and satisfied...Copyright laws should not act to shore up outdated business models against the tide of new technologies...

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Cory Doctorow And EFF Aim To “Eradicate DRM In Our lifetime”

David Kravets | Ars Technica | January 20, 2015

...The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced Tuesday that Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow has been commissioned to tackle digital rights management technologies (DRM) that the rights group says threatens security, privacy, and undermines public rights and innovation...

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Download Hosts Withdrawing

Simon Phipps | Computerworld | June 21, 2013

Fewer and fewer services offer open source projects the ability to host downloads of their binaries. Should we be worried? Read More »

Education, Not SOPA, Best Weapon Against Web Piracy

James Marshall Crotty | Forbes | January 31, 2012

One innocent bystander of proposed anti-piracy legislation might be libraries, students, and educators. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, many trailblazing open source education initiatives I’ve written about on Forbes might be silenced if the “broad” and “vague” enforcement provisions of the proposed SOPA (Stop Online Piracy act) and/or PIPA (Protect IP Act) were to become law.

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Ford Tries To Shut Down Independent Repair Tool With Copyright

Kit Walsh | Electronic Frontier Foundation | January 6, 2015

At EFF, we think people ought to be able to understand how their devices work and repair them without asking permission of the manufacturer. We also think independent repair companies should to be able to compete with manufacturers in the aftermarket...

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How Medical Device Manufacturers Inject Copyright Into Treatments

Arguments for proprietary data hoarding have been aired in the computer movement for decades, and have been decisively overturned by open source advocates and security experts. The real question is why any patient should be denied access to data that can improve his quality of life and chances of survival. In an age where "patient activation" and "Quantified Self" are buzzwords uttered throughout the medical industry, it is inconceivable that it could tolerate the present situation.

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International Day Against DRM: It's Time To Fix U.S. Copyright Law

April Glaser and Corynne McSherry | Electronic Frontier Foundation | May 6, 2014

At EFF, we think you should have the right and ability to make full use of your stuff – to tinker, reuse, re-sell, improve, break, and lend. That’s why EFF has been fighting against DRM for more than 15 years...

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MPAA Wants To Use DMCA To Effectively Bring Back SOPA

Christine Hall | Foss Force | December 18, 2014

...According to memos leaked from the recent hack on Sony, the big studios would like to employ a Winston Smith to remove domain name listings from ISPs DNS directories, effectively removing entire websites from the Internet for most users, as if they never existed...

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RIAA Still Can't Figure Out How To Use Google's DMCA Tools, Blames Google

Mike Masnick | Techdirt | February 20, 2013

This will hardly comes as a surprise, but the RIAA and other "anti-piracy groups" are still complaining that Google "isn't doing enough" to prop up their old and obsolete business models. The latest complaint? That Google's system only accepts a mere 10,000 DMCA takedowns per day and somehow that's just not enough. Read More »

The 2012 DMCA Rulemaking: What We Got, What We Didn’t, And How To Improve The Process Next Time

Corynne McSherry and Marcia Hofmann | Electronic Frontier Foundation | November 2, 2012

Last week the Librarian of Congress issued his final decision (pdf) limiting copyright owners’ ability to sue you for making full use of the works you buy.  The short version: it’s a mixed bag. Read More »

The Copyright Rule We Need To Repeal If We Want To Preserve Our Cultural Heritage

Benj Edwards | The Atlantic | March 15, 2013

The anti-circumvention section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act threatens to make archivists criminals if they try to preserve our society's artifacts for future generations. Read More »

The Public Domain Still Needs Idealism

Anna Wiener | New Republic | January 15, 2016

In the current startup universe, there’s still a lot of chatter about changing the world, an objective that has become so cliché—and ridiculed—that it’s easy to forget that those voicing this desire genuinely, vehemently believe it. From the outside, the prospect of a world-changing software product is either very exciting or completely delusional, depending on who’s talking...Idealism about technology as a democratizing force currently looks a lot like defense: protecting digital civil liberties, and fighting against further erosion. This is the side that Justin Peters is most committed to documenting in his book The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet, a partial biography of the late activist and Open Access advocate...

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