The semantics of the Web...
One of the major fallacies of working with forward-looking i.e into-the-future legal issues is that sometimes it throws up more complications than the existing legal framework is equipped to handle. The excerpt from an article on Computerworld [full text available at www.computerworld.com] shows that more often than not semantics can take a matter just too far..

"For example, if someone develops the means to crack a copyright-protected CD
and makes the technology for doing so available to others, the DMCA allows civil and legal sanctions. That makes sense.
But it caused a problem for Edward Felten, a leading security researcher at Princeton University, and his team when they circumvented the proposed Secure
Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) watermarking technology standard for music. SDMI's
creators had invited researchers to crack the technology, but when Felten sought to publish the results, he was threatened with a lawsuit from SDMI's recording industry
backers.Felten fought back. The Electronic Freedom Foundation filed a lawsuit challenging
the prohibitions. But it never evolved into a test case because the research was
conducted before the DMCA's prohibition on acts of circumvention took effect in 2000. The suit was dismissed.
Felten says researchers are worried that their work will lead to lawsuits. "There is a
very strong sentiment in the research community that doing research in [content protection] is dangerous," he says.
The DMCA has survived one important test. The Motion Picture Association of
America (MPAA) sued Eric Corely, the publisher of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly when the magazine sought to post De-Content Scrambling System code that
circumvented DVD anticopying technology, arguing that First Amendment
protection applied.
New York District Judge Lewis Kaplan found for the MPAA but saw legitimate
arguments on both sides. "In our society, however, clashes of competing interests
like this are resolved by Congress," wrote Kaplan.
For now, at least, the courts have resolved this clash in the DMCA's and plaintiffs' favor.
For the motion picture industry and content providers in general, Kaplan's decision was critical.
If the publisher had prevailed, "the protection that Congress afforded content owners under the DMCA would have been eliminated," says Charles Sims, the New York attorney representing the MPAA.
"By defeating that challenge and establishing that the anticircumvention provisions are constitutional, we preserved the security for copyrighted works that the DMCA
afforded," he says.
But the Corely case is hardly the end of legal challenges to this complex law or new efforts in Congress to revise it. There will be battles for years to come."

All of us are quite at ease of copying information from diverse electronic media and other sources, sometimes crediting them but more often than not avoiding the credit lines. Soon this will evolve into something that is not kindly looked upon..

"The DMCA also raises issues that can affect the sharing and copying of data in the
workplace. Suppose, for instance, that an employee copies several paragraphs of an article off
the Web and disseminates it. The DMCA requires that those excerpts include copyright management information such as title, author, and terms and conditions of use, says Michael Overly, an attorney at Foley & Lardner in Los Angeles. He advises companies to review their content-sharing practices in light of the DMCA. Another problem raised by the DMCA is fair use of electronic data. If a copyright includes an anticircumvention clause that prevents copying, then anyone who breaks that provision could be liable under the DMCA. If the same material appears in paper, the reader is free to copy it for personal use. The law creates different rules for the same material, depending on the medium, says Overly. "

And therein lies the fallacy, protectionism is good and sometimes required to safeguard intellectual property rights. But how far is far enough ? And in a scenario for a country like India, when does the buck stop ? More importantly is it possible to lead a quiet life and not be bothered by the DMCA ?
- posted by sankarshan @ 12/05/2002 01:44:00 PM