CONGRESS TO UPGRADE DMCA AND GET EVEN MORE UNCONSTITUTIONAL

Ever hear of the DMCA? It's the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and ironically it was passed into law before the year 2000 (you'd think with a name like that it would have at least been passed in the year 2000 or 2001, but this was during the Clinton era, 1998 to be exact). The DMCA is unConstitutional. How do I know this? Because it limits your free speech.

Imagine you write a book about safecracking. You detail how to do it, essentially giving any reader the knowledge they need to gain access to the inside of a safe without knowing the combination.

Imagine that book now being banned because it teaches someone how to beat the protection a safe provides.

Not that by cracking a safe you're automatically breaking the law. You could be cracking the safe for the next of kin after the only person in the family with the combination to a safe died. You could simply be cracking safes for fun--hey, we all have our hobbies. The point is, breaking into a safe isn't always illegal and to say it is unfairly limits the rights of American citizens to pursue happiness.

Now, the above scenario isn't illegal. You can write a book about safecracking and teach anyone how to break into safes--which is the way it should be. Knowledge of any kind should not be illegal nor should expressing that knowledge be illegal. However, if you translate the exact scenario above into the digital realm you would be breaking the law--that's the magic of the DMCA.

The DMCA says that if you post information detailing how to beat digital encryption of media (the safe for digital valuables) on the web (or anywhere else) you will be in violation of the law. So, even though you might have a good and legal reason to crack the encryption on that DVD, you are not allowed to do so.

Say, you want to watch a DVD on your iPod. Technically, you can't bust the copyprotection legally and copy it to your hard drive. Sure, there are a thousand different ways to do it for Macs and PCs (and even Linux boxes) but technically, you'd violate the DMCA if you were to post the code on how any of these ways worked. So far, enforcement of the DMCA has been lax, which is good for the DMCA since a trip to the Supreme Court would establish it's unConstitutionality. So if authorities go after enough people with it, they'll eventually run into one person who is willing to take it to the top.

BUT, in the post-911 world where corporate interests are being intentionally blended with national security interests, Congress is about to pass a beefed up version of the DMCA. Check out what [http://news.com.com/Congress%20readies%20new%20digital%20copyright%20bill/2100-1028_3-6064016.html?tag=nefd.top|this April 23, 2006 article] from News.Com.Com reports:

For the last few years, a coalition of technology companies, academics and computer programmers has been trying to persuade Congress to scale back the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Now Congress is preparing to do precisely the opposite. A proposed copyright law seen by CNET News.com would expand the DMCA's restrictions on software that can bypass copy protections and grant federal police more wiretapping and enforcement powers.

Hm, big brother tactics in protecting corporate intellectual property. Nice.

So, things like trademark infringement ([http://thepete.com/homeland-security-fights-trademark-infringement/|remember that time back in 2004]?) and intellectual property are now becoming things that are Constitutionally protected--as if these things are more important than the rights of the standard human.

I'm really starting to get annoyed with this trend.

Companies/corporations/businesses do not have a right to exist. They do not have Constitutionally granted rights--only our Creator grants rights. The Constitution is supposed to protect our rights--not grant them. God didn't create corporations, we humans did. Corporations are here to serve man--not the other way around.

In fact, the basic idea behind businesses, in general, was that they were needed to better provide something that people needed.

Oh, I'd like some milk, but I can't afford to buy a cow.

No worries, Bob, up the street, has several and he'll bottle some milk for you and drop it by in the morning for a fee.

Great!

But one day you save up enough money to buy your own cow. Now you don't need to keep buying milk from Bob's company, but according to the way things are now, when Bob's business starts to fold, the government will give him massive influxes of cash (your tax dollars) so that he can stay afloat. If you work out a way to get the milk directly from cows without even needing him to lift a finger, you're now breaking the law and you get to be sued by Bob.

Think about it--certain corporations exist to distribute movies and/or music. Thanks to the Internet, we don't need a distributor to get the music and movies from the artists to the consumers--now we can get both directly from the artist.

So what do we need the music "industry" for? Or the movie "industry"? Why should our government pass laws protecting them when they are clearly obsolete?

We have to put humanity back at the top of the food chain.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA|Read more about the current DMCA] at Wikepedia.Org