Mitchell makes pretty good sense. But it's ironic that people around here would get behind an argument that favors strenghtening and supporting the DMCA! Mitchell points out that the new bill would reduce the effectiveness of legal challenges to the DMCA, and decrease the pressure to re-consider that law. I wonder if the EFF agrees with these goals?

The problem with the DMCRA is this. Technically, there is no practical way to allow someone to get access to excerpts of a protected work for "fair use" purposes, without giving them effective access to the whole work. Maybe some day a system can be invented to allow this, but with the current protection mechanisms it is not possible. So if people are allowed to traffic in technology that decrypts just a portion of some protected work for fair use purposes, in practice that technology will be used to strip the protection entirely.

The real problem is a mismatch as we move from a legal regime to a technological one for protection of content. People are trying to take the old ideas of copyrights, first sale, fair use, etc., and to re-instantiate them in technological terms. But they don't fit!

I'd rather see us start with a clean slate. Let providers "opt out" of legal copyright protection, and in return, they don't have to honor first sale, fair use and the other limitations on copyright. They can use all the crypto and watermarks and DRM they want. They can release their content on new media which will only play in players that honor the restrictions, or they can download only to people running Palladium systems that will control distribution. Let the technological race begin and see what happens.

Problem is, nobody is willing to take the risk that their side might lose. Neither the content providers nor the online rights crowd will take the chance that the ultimate outcome won't be the one they want. But in the end, reality matters. Either the universe is such that content can be effectively protected, or it is not. Maybe we should find out the answer to that question before trying to legislate a pre-ordained outcome, one which may be doomed to failure.

The DMCRA is a good bill, but it's an answer to the DMCA's outrageous bannings, not the expansion of copyright scope and terms.

"We make it a crime to break into cars, but we don?t criminalize breaking into your own car when you locked the keys inside."

After I read this I had a pretty interesting thought. We're allowed to break into our own property because if we weren't it would be a customer support nightmare. If you locked your keys in your car and it was a felony to break in to retrieve them, you'd have to call somebody to get them out for you, probably the dealer of the automobile. If you had to pay for them to unlock the car for you no one would buy your car, so you would have to support this at no charge. This creates a customer support nightmare for the automobile industry.

So what if we did the same thing to the MPAA/RIAA? Since it's still (knock on wood) legal to make backup copies of your movies, records, etc., but it's illegal to circumvent their copy-protection schemes, why don't we create a customer support nightmare for them by flooding them with phone calls asking how to backup our Celien Dion album that we can't burn a copy of and the DVD movies we can't burn copies of?