hmmmm, perhaps I spoke to soon,
let me make my stance more clear.
my last post was more in response to this
The DMCA is the worst. I got a threat email from some web sheriff enforcing it, then Cox also hit me up for it. I've stayed clean since, though. Sweden must have recently accepted it, too.
If you received a take down notice then it's pretty clear that either a: you ripped someone else's work off, and you shouldn't have had on your site without permission anyway.
or B: it was a malicious claim, lodged by someone who just wanted to take your site down, which is why I said that there should also include provision to punish those who abuse the law.
as for the other points.
fundamentally, I think that there should be allowed unlocking of cell phones, and this should not be restricted, so for example when you buy a phone, you can do what you like with it. after all you bought it.
In America it works slightly different to the UK, (I'm told) in that you tend to buy your phones up front, whilst in britain, we'll buy a phone on a contract and the phone price is heavily discounted as you;re buying a contract. even so, you are given a phone as a part of your contract, and so long as you continue to honour that contract, what difference does it make what you do with the phone.
in any case, I feel that this part of the law would actually be refined to deal with the way that phones are unlocked, which generally means reading and re-writing parts of the phones base memory, parts that the manufacturer doesn't want you to see, their locking methods are protected by law, and you;re essentially agreeing to an EULA type license when you open the box. so surely the law is already in place to disapprove of people disassembling phones etc for the purpose of unlocking?
Does the bill really say that you can't make video recordings? you can't backup data to off site storage facilities? or does it more likely say that you can't backup data that you don't own whilst claiming it's your own.
I think this is like saying that police checks form barriers to people getting involved in Child care, yes it forms barriers to paedophiles, but the rest of the law abiding world only need to spend ten minutes a year filling in a bit of paperwork for their police check.
so far as teachers saying that people should be able to copy books and that's fair use.
no, that's not fair use, that's copyright theft, and causes more damage than people copying fiction books simply because there is a higher production cost for reference books, (due to content checking). why should the people in this industry loose out because schools don't want to buy enough copies for students?
as for the music downloads, I agree, $500 isn't the cost of the actual song, but I'll be willing to put money on the fact that it's not far off the cost of tracking down people downloading sending them various letters, following the due process and taking them to court. why should the music industry have to pay to have the law enforced? it's usual in small claims cases that the loosing party would pay costs, this is just formalising that cost.
so far as the other stuff, it's already set out in law that these things are wrong.
that's why, (in britain at least) royalty collecting organisations like the PRS PPL exist to collect royalties from you when you want to publish works with other peoples copyrighted works in them to ensure that the original artist is actually paid
