Question:
September 6: An anonymous donor has endowed Duke University's law school with a $1 million gift to fund advocacy and research aimed at curtailing the recent expansion of copyright law.
The school, which announced the gift yesterday, said it would use the funds to help find what it called "the correct balance" between intellectual property rights and public domain.
CNET is reporting: "James Boyle, a Duke law professor and co-director of the school's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, says that the center is likely to look skeptically at recent laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and a measure that extended duration of copyrights by 20 years.
"This is an attempt to figure out the balance between intellectual property and the public domain," Boyle said. "How much protection do we need?...If you want to have a rich culture and an innovative society, you have to leave a large amount of material freely available for all to use." Boyle says he is not a copyright abolitionist. He agrees that some legal protection is necessary. But, he added, "the burden of proof should be on those who say we need to have property rights in this situation. Why will this work? Why is this necessary? We see the system getting out of control, out of balance. This is a way to restore the balance."
CNET said: "Recent debates in Congress have started from the viewpoint of the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, rather than from what's good for consumers, Boyle said. Eight movie studios have successfully wielded the DMCA to force 2600 magazine to delete a copy of a DVD-decoding utility from its Web site, and the U.S. government last year arrested a Russian
programmer on charges of creating and selling a program to rip the copy-protection technology away from Adobe Systems' electronic books. More recently, Reps. Howard Berman, D-Calif., and Howard Coble, R-N.C., have introduced a bill designed to limit peer-to-peer piracy. It would rewrite federal law to permit nearly unchecked electronic disruptions if a copyright holder has a "reasonable basis" to believe that piracy is
occurring on peer-to-peer networks."
Full Story (http://news.com.com/2100-1023-956637.html?tag=fd_top)
It would rewrite federal law to permit nearly unchecked electronic disruptions
:eek: They are right to be thinking this is going too far!
The school, which announced the gift yesterday, said it would use the funds to help find what it called "the correct balance" between intellectual property rights and public domain.
CNET is reporting: "James Boyle, a Duke law professor and co-director of the school's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, says that the center is likely to look skeptically at recent laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and a measure that extended duration of copyrights by 20 years.
"This is an attempt to figure out the balance between intellectual property and the public domain," Boyle said. "How much protection do we need?...If you want to have a rich culture and an innovative society, you have to leave a large amount of material freely available for all to use." Boyle says he is not a copyright abolitionist. He agrees that some legal protection is necessary. But, he added, "the burden of proof should be on those who say we need to have property rights in this situation. Why will this work? Why is this necessary? We see the system getting out of control, out of balance. This is a way to restore the balance."
CNET said: "Recent debates in Congress have started from the viewpoint of the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, rather than from what's good for consumers, Boyle said. Eight movie studios have successfully wielded the DMCA to force 2600 magazine to delete a copy of a DVD-decoding utility from its Web site, and the U.S. government last year arrested a Russian
programmer on charges of creating and selling a program to rip the copy-protection technology away from Adobe Systems' electronic books. More recently, Reps. Howard Berman, D-Calif., and Howard Coble, R-N.C., have introduced a bill designed to limit peer-to-peer piracy. It would rewrite federal law to permit nearly unchecked electronic disruptions if a copyright holder has a "reasonable basis" to believe that piracy is
occurring on peer-to-peer networks."
Full Story (http://news.com.com/2100-1023-956637.html?tag=fd_top)
Answers:
It would rewrite federal law to permit nearly unchecked electronic disruptions
:eek: They are right to be thinking this is going too far!
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