“A new bill in the US Congress aimed at protecting the fair use rights for consumers of copyright material would ‘legalize hacking,’ the Recording Industry Association of America said,” Grant Gross reports for Macworld UK.
Gross reports, “The Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing US Entrepreneurship (FAIR USE) Act, introduced onTuesday by Representatives Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, and John Doolittle, a California Republican, would allow customers to circumvent digital copy restrictions in six limited areas when copyright owners’ business models are not threatened, Boucher said.”
“The bill would allow exemptions to the anticircumvention restrictions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), passed by Congress in 1998,” Gross reports. “‘The fair use doctrine is threatened today as never before,’ Boucher said in a statement. ‘Historically, the nation’s copyright laws have reflected a carefully calibrated balanced between the rights of copyright owners and the rights of the users of copyrighted material. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act dramatically tilted the copyright balance toward complete copyright protection at the expense of the public’s right to fair use.'”
Gross reports, “The Consumer Electronics Association applauded the bill, saying it would give protections to consumers, educators and libraries.”
More in the full article here.
Full text of H.R. 1201 [109th]: Digital Media Consumers’ Rights Act of 2005 here.
