Copyright act not right

In an effort to transcribe copyright law to cyberspace, Congress passed the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in October of 1998. The law includes provisions for copyrighted materials on the Internet and limits the liability of online service providers.\n One particularly controversial section of the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent copyright protection systems. These "anti-circumvention" provisions have come under fire from experts in the legal and digital communities for the threats they pose to our freedom of speech and fair use exemptions from copyright law. \nUnder the DMCA, for example, it is illegal to create or distribute software that circumvents copyright protection devices. In 2000, eight major motion picture companies filed suit against online magazine "2600" for posting the source code for the DeCSS software program that bypasses DVD encryption. The suit was successful, and "2600" was forced to remove the source code from their Web site. From their prospective, though, that source code is the intellectual expression of its author; isn't such a ruling in violation of our freedom of speech? \nThe DMCA also compromises fair use -- the right to make copies of copyrighted materials for certain protected purposes, such as research, criticism and nonprofit, personal uses. When you quote a passage from a novel without the author's permission, you are exercising your right to fair use. Many record companies have begun using "copy-protection" on their latest music CDs. Making a copy of a CD for personal use is protected under fair use. In order to make a copy of a copy-protected CD, though, one would have to use software that bypassed the copy-protection system, and thus risk a lawsuit under the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA. While the DMCA does include some fair use provisions, legal experts claim they are excessively narrow, and the vague terms in which the anti-circumvention clause is written could give rise to such a lawsuit.\nAn example of these vague terms is the DMCA's provision for the illegality of the manufacturing or distribution of software that "has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner." (Sec. 1201 of the DMCA) What is considered "limited commercially significant purpose?"\n In July of 2001, Russian programmer Dimitry Sklyarov was arrested when he came to the U.S. to speak at a Las Vegas conference for having worked on a software program used to convert Adobe's e-Book format into Adobe's Portable Document File format. Sklyarov was in violation of the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA simply because it was possible to abuse the software. Keep in mind that the program had obvious legitimate uses, such as extracting the text of an electronic book so that it could be read by an audio reader for the blind, something Adobe's software does not do.\nCopyright law must be adapted for the digital age, but not in heavy-handed manner of the DMCA. Our freedom of speech and right to fair use are being disputed. Scientists are afraid to publish encryption research for fear of prosecution. \nThe DMCA must be repealed and rewritten. To support the movement against the DMCA, donate to the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both of which are filing lawsuits challenging the digital copyright law. We need to place the liability with the perpetrators, and not with legitimate software writers, scientists and citizens exercising their freedom of speech and right to fair use.