Joanna Glasner of Wired has done a nice job writing up the super-, mini-, or baby-DMCA story. It’s interesting to read Vans Stevenson’s comment that these proposed laws “have nothing to do with the DMCA.” I’ve heard this from several people over the course of this campaign. There are certainly differences between these bills being proposed at the state legislative level and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 federal law. True, the DMCA has major portions that relate to implementation of international treaties and like, which are absent from these super-DMCAs.
But the similarities far outweigh the differences. The original DMCA and these super-DMCAs are both laws that are promoted by special interests (and only special interests, to be clear) to ensure that distributors of digital content can profit as substantially as possible from copyrighted works in digital settings — with a corresponding reduction in what non-copyright holders, a/k/a consumers and regular citizens, have the right to do relative to that digital content. There’s nothing wrong with making money, of course; that’s essential to our society. But there’s no need to tip the scales so far in this direction, either; these bills don’t level the playing field, they tilt the playing field. Second, both the original DMCA and the super-DMCAs include noxious clauses that ban speech, research and other good things that relate to computer security, filtering and other important Net topics. These laws alter the already tenuous balance between what copyright holders and the general public may do relative to a given work. (OK, so my metaphors have gotten hopelessly mixed, but you get the point.)
True enough, Mr. Stevenson: these are not exact replicas of the DMCA. But they are awfully close, and that scares a lot of us who are looking out for the public interest on the Net.
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