the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is based on a flawed premise: that the preservation of copyright in a digital world is so difficult, it's necessary to eviscerate long-standing rights and freedoms. while the DMCA has served its Big Content sponsors well, it's largely been a disaster for consumers, academics, and entrepreneurs. in the music industry, for example, the effect of the DMCA has been to help destroy independent competition for the major labels' in-house online music services, to silence small-scale internet radio, and to handcuff consumers with "copy-protected" CDs (not only inconveniencing them, but potentially damaging their computers and corrupting data).
the DMCA outlaws technology that would allow users to preserve the rights they had before its enactment -- for example, the right to make a copy of digital content for their own personal use. Rep Boucher's hoping to reverse some of the damage by codifying traditionally unwritten fair-use rights:
He said he would introduce legislation that would essentially codify "fair use" provisions of copyright law (that have been implied but not necessarily guaranteed). He also wants to ease up some of the more copy-restrictive provisions of the 1998 Digital Milennium Copyright Act, whose pay-per-use provisions on copies he has criticized as a threat not only to "fair use," but to innovation, idea exchange, even First Amendment guarantees on free speech.
