As, I’ve mentioned in the past, our country and perhaps the world is letting corporations decide how democracies should determine laws. Democracies are supposed to be governing systems run by people where as corporations are not people though in some fake sense, they have some legal rights that are similar. The differences though are what are important and we as people must reinforce those differences and take over our governments across the world. This means making elected officials do what they are elected to do and represent people, not corporations.
Unfortunately, there are already laws in existence that favor corporations and two of my least favorite are DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and Copyright Laws in general. Rather than giving fair use and logical use to people, they give unreasonable power to corporations including a police like ability to hunt down copyright infringers. Also, the laws should give right that represent the life-span of a normal person but instead represent the near immortal life-space of a corporation. These laws are unrealistic, impractical and unfair.
Along these lines, check out this article on Techdirt about a DMCA take down notice for a professor. This story illustrates in a funny and sad way everything that is wrong with the system and wrong with corporations attitudes and why we need to fight back.
Here is the gist of the post:
Wendy Seltzer, a law professor who used to work for the EFF and who founded the awesome Chilling Effects clearinghouse for providing an archive of various takedown notices, has apparently received her very own first DMCA takedown notice (found via Boing Boing). Seltzer posted a snippet from the Superbowl for her students to see. Not just any snippet, mind you, but the snippet where its announced: “This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience. Any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL’s consent, is prohibited.” She posted it as an example of a copyright holder exaggerating its rights — as the NFL cannot ban all of the things they ban in that statement. Yes, this is getting more and more ironic. Take a moment to think this through for the layer upon layer of absurdity. A law professor puts up a short clip for educational purposes (fair use allows both short clips and educational uses of content) for the sake of showing how the NFL exaggerates its copyright control — and the NFL responds by then sending a DMCA takedown notice to better highlight how they not only exaggerate their claims, but then misuse the law to shut down fair use as well.
Keep up the fight!