Re: [Fsfe-uk] Re: UK Prepares Own Version of the DMCA

[Simon Waters]

Paul Mobbs wrote:
> 
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
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> 
> > "I've just been informed by the UK Patent Office, below, that the EUCD
> > (European Union Copyright Directive, the equivalent EU legislation to
> > the DMCA) consultation paper has been released. It's important that we
> > give feedback to the UK government that this legislation will have a
> > chilling effect on the software industry."
> >
> 
> I've followed this up, and if you want to see the relevant docs go to:
> http://www.patent.gov.uk/about/consultations/eccopyright/index.htm
> 
> Published 7th Aug., closing date for comments 31st October.

Will AFFS as a group post a response?

The groups consulted so far are heavily biased towards copyright
owners rather that users or consumers. 

The emphasis is that legitimate users of technology will not
have a problem with these restrictions, except for costs
incurred by libraries, archivists and other minority groups.

Interestingly one of the few categories of end user already
consulted were libraries. So the emphasis seems to be that it
isn't shoving the costs of piracy from producer to user, but it
clearly is, and should state as much.

I believe that mechanical measures to prevent copyright
infringement are inherently doomed to failure, by the need to
accurately reproduce the original, whilst they may well exclude
minority groups, and add expense to the users of such data.

The inability to legally reverse engineer such measures will in
my opinion impact on the availability of such technologies on
minority systems. Whilst the laws appear to try and exclude
software programs from these categories, it is unclear to me
what these items mean.

The emphasis seems to be that the costs fall on the good
publishers and the bad guys, and users will not be affected. Of
course the history of technical measures to enforce such issues
is littered with undue expense and technical problems, and in
the end these costs are passed onto the end user - either
directly - your DVD player is out of date, having to repurchase
the same content in different media, or through increased costs
of that media.

I have to say the whole document is almost completely
indecipherable, and won't be winning an plain english awards.

The justification, that the CD industry is losing $2,000,000,000
of sales in Europe due to piracy is obviously ridiculously
inflated, or at least the implication that technical measures
will completely eliminate such infringements. Those performing
large scale infrignements of copyright will subvert any measures
with ease, and are unlikely to be bothered by the fact that
these additional actions are also illegal.

In the meantime we will probably lose our ability to use certain
classes of Copyrighted material for the normal exceptions, such
as personal study. The eventual passing of such material into
the public domain will also be hampered, but this is seen only
as a cost affecting archivists, with no reference to the costs
of incomplete or inaccurate archives on the users of such
archives.

Whilst I support attempts to standardise laws internationally, I
don't think this is the way to do it. 

Thus this is not leveling the copyright field, this is expanding
the private monopoly rights granted to publishers, whilst
ignoring the existing inquities against users, and the public
domain.

If we are levelling copyright laws, Europe must weaken it's
electronic database restrictions, and America must stop
arbitarily extending the copyright period applying to existing
works that correctly belong in the public domain. But no
provision exists for these issues in the legislation because it
is the result of powerful publishing lobby groups driving the
agenda of the WTO, and the WIPO.

Oppose this, and oppose the hijacking of the processes of
government by the rich, for the rich.