| A couple of links concerning copyrights. This may appear to be a minor thing, certainly not something the newstainment anchors would concern themselves with, but it is another way the corporations are taking away our rights. They really don't wan't you to lend that book to a friend. They really feel that libraries are unAmerican.
Book threat
IT'S Déjà Vu all over again. A Russian has been imprisoned for criticizing the ideology of a major state power. And, to compound his thought crimes, he's been helping people gain access to books. Is this a USSR horror story from the Stalin-era vaults? A cautionary tale from Ray Bradbury? –Nope. Unless you've been buried under a rock for the past couple of weeks, you know that it's taken directly from headlines in the good old USA. On July 15, Russian graduate student researcher Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested by the FBI shortly after leaving the DefCon hackers conference, where he'd delivered a fairly academic treatise on why Adobe's eBooks software isn't as secure as the company claims it is. Almost anyone with a bit of know-how could crack Adobe's encryption code.
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Obviously the implications of the DMCA for the publishing world are far broader than keeping rampant copyright violators at bay. What the Sklyarov arrest demonstrates is that anyone who defies the corporate control of books – whether that's control over their electronic form or their publishing-house-dictated content – can go to jail. And oddly enough for this digital age, the Sklyarov case reminds us that books are still a threat to state power, just as they have been for thousands of years.
The following is a more detailed review of the current copyright situation.
Copyright Endurance and Change
by GEORGIA K. HARPER
The fundamental concepts of copyright law have existed for two hundred years. Some of these basic copyright principles are likely to continue to endure: maintaining the intended purpose of copyright to fairly balance the rights of the public for access to information with the incentives for creation; providing authors with exclusive rights but limiting what copyright protects and the time period of copyright protection; and giving users certain rights, such as fair use, that restrict the owner's monopoly.
The balance that copyright law has achieved between the interests of copyright owners and the interests of the public has evolved slowly and has been only periodically adjusted. Today, however, the pace and the magnitude of change threaten to skew this balance to the point of collapse. Some of these changes -- licenses, access controls, certain provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) -- have the potential to drastically undermine the public right to access information, to comment on events, and even to share information with others.
both thanks to BookNotes
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