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Dear Democrats: Please Repeal the DMCA

Everybody's got an item they want to get on the Democratic Party's agenda as it takes control of the House and Senate, so why should I be any different? Mine is pretty straightforward. I want Congress to act speedily to repeal the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Not amend it. Not rewrite it. I want that sucker gone.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 is emerging as one of the two most pernicious pieces of anti-consumer legislation passed by the Republican-controlled Congresses of the past 12 years. (The other would arguably be the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, which effectively strips private citizens of rights enjoyed by corporations).

The DMCA is being used to subvert existing copyright law, and the problem is getting worse. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) last week served notice that it intends to use the DMCA to eliminate "fair use" of copyrighted materials. Members of the MPAA, all big Hollywood Studios, got together to sue Load'N Go Video, a little company near where I live in Massachusetts. Load 'N Go sells (or sold -- it's disappeared since the suit was filed) DVDs and video players, and if you bought movies and a player it would load the movies onto the player for you.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation points out on its Web site that "Although this lawsuit happens to be aimed at Load 'N Go, the DMCA theory in the complaint makes it crystal clear that the MPAA believes it is just as illegal for you to do the same thing for yourself at home. Apparently, Hollywood believes that you should have to re-purchase all your DVD movies a second time if you want to watch them on your iPod."

The MPAA is "snatching away our fair use rights" the EFF says. It's doing this by claiming the DMCA takes precedence over the body of law that supports fair use -- which includes, by the way, the Constitution itself. Because the content of a DVD is encrypted, the MPAA argues that unscrambling it in order to transcode the content onto a different medium -- a video player, for example, is a circumvention of copyright protection prohibited by the DMCA, legally protected fair use or not.

This defies logic. If I can copy an article from a magazine, or dub a cassette tape to a CD legally (and I can, as long as own the cassette) why can't I copy a DVD that I own to a video player? The answer because the DMCA says so. No other reason.

So let's repeal this nonsense now, before it gets out of hand. Because it's not just DVDs. Going forward, every new digital medium will include some copyright protection mechanism just to make sure there won't be any fair use possible. The EFF itself reminds us this already happening with High Definition Television: See the article Who Killed Tivo2Go on the EFF site.

If it's copyright protection the movie studios want, they've got more than they need -- they can go after anybody who misuses their copyrighted materials for 120 years. But what they want is something else. They want to cut off one of the cornerstones of copyright law in order to enhance their profits by picking the public's pockets. They spent millions of lobbying dollars buying the votes to get the DMCA passed, and thus contributed to the public's perception of rampant corruption in Congress -- a major factor in the Democrats' victories. So Democrats, show us you're listening. Repeal the DMCA. It's part of the legacy that's undermining the people's confidence in government. It's what you were elected to root out. It's got nothing to do with rights, and everything to do with simple greed.

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