Word: coding
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...thought from health care to gun control is rife with controversy about expensive dinner parties and well-concealed rider bills. And most experts suggest that the solution to these problems is to call for more effective campaign finance reform. Still, the incremental and largely specialized changes to the copyright code have left it warped and on the verge of breaking. To apply it in any practical sense requires the consultation of obscure and confusingly-worded exceptions designed only with the protection of very specific rights (say, that of a librarian to create a single copy of an academic paper...
...book that was printed in China or watch a video tape at the full quality allowed by your television set. What should have happened as technology pushed the powers of copyright law outside of their intended boundaries was a careful evaluation of how to frame additions to the code that bring it up to speed without breaking its underlying principals...
Unfortunately, this sort of balanced assessment has not been the impetus for changes in copyright law over the past quarter century. Consider for example section 114 of the copyright code, which more or less exempts satellite radio networks predating Jan. 1, 1995 from the obligation to obtain permission from a songwriter to rebroadcast their music. There were to my knowledge exactly two such networks before that date, XM Radio and Sirius, and it is wholly unsurprising that these remain the only two that are successful today. If you’d like to enter into this potentially lucrative industry...
Consider as a final instructive example a highly controversial portion of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which added to the copyright code (Chapter 12, section 1201) protection against the “circumvention of a technical measure” put in place to control access to copyrighted works. It is perfectly legal and not very difficult to manufacture a set of master keys that will allow you to open just about any deadbolt lock ever built, and it is evident that once you’ve purchased your house, if you’d like to pick...
...strict constructionist argument that we can’t violate the “framer’s intent” in updating copyright law or that somehow its fundamental purpose is sacred or inalterable. At the same time, we cannot tolerate the surreptitious enactment of additions to that code that alter it in powerful but inextensible ways just so the old business models of the creative industries are not put at risk. We must instead recognize that sharing and free access to information are fundamental features of the technological world we have stumbled upon, and we must find methods...