The Wall Street Journal’s Personal Technology Guru Walt Mossberg writes and tells us his editorial thoughts on the problems for consumers and innovators caused by current copyright law and the DMCA. He suggests Congress specifically address consumers’ problems using the digital media that they legally obtain on their devices of choice, and their ability to share small clips of others content.
I could tell you more, but why write when you can watch him yourself:
Found from this TechDirt article.
I'm not sure that
I’m not sure that tinkering with the law is the best idea. Sort of a “let sleeping bears lie” thing. I don’t think there’s enough understanding about the Constitutionally-defined purpose of copyright or enough outrage in Congress about how the content industry has infringed upon that purpose over the years through lobbying, litigation, DRM, and business practices.
I also am not sure that current law is really to blame, and I think a large part of the problem stems from two places.
One, we have a legal system is inaccessible to the layman, because it puts tremendous importance on court opinion precedents that aren’t collected in one place. You can pore over the US Code all you want and depend on a plain-English reading to help you, but there’s a good chance that it won’t mean much in court - there’s probably some precedent-setting case you’ve never heard of that applies some multipronged and convoluted test to the statute. Things are turning around here very very slowly, as many court opinions are being published for free online. Confusion with fair use and copyright, though, are merely symptoms of this much larger problem with the legal system.
And two, our legal system demands that a person suffer some sort of actual damages before being able to petition a court to get an opinion on the law in the first place. This greatly stifles potential innovation by opening innovators up to legal liability. The mere thought of a multiyear lawsuit being filed against them and the legal defense expenses associated with such a lawsuit are daunting. If we must have a legal system that is mired in precedent and opinion, it should at least let people petition the judiciary to find out what is legal and what isn’t before they break the law (or, before they offend someone else who files a huge lawsuit against them, the expense of which renders moot the actual issue of whether there was any civil liability).