Dear all
I am forwarding this for information because the issues and the case itself
will be of interest to many readers of the list in the UK and Overseas. A
previous list posting highlighted Cliff Lynch's article on " The Battle to
Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World" online at
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_6/lynch/index.html. Its discussion
of e-books and their associated hardware and software, the social
implications of digital content,content management and rights management
systems, and long-term preservation and access also looks very topical in
light of this case.
The DMCA allows exemptions for decoding for digital preservation purposes.
Similar technology protection measures are proposed in the EU Copyright
Directive and any exemptions for digital preservation will need to be enacted
in individual national legislation of this.
Please note the views expressed in rhe email below are those of Richard Kay
who questions the practicalities of the DMCA exemption and also raises wider
issues for users.
Neil
> ----------
> From: Richard Kay[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2001 6:26:22 PM
> To: JISC - [log in to unmask]
> Cc: Richard Kay
> Subject: London protest about anti-preservation DMCA law
> Auto forwarded by a Rule
>
To all those concerned with digital preservation.
I know this is very short notice, but those who are concerned about
future knowledge of the past are likely to be interested in
a demonstration occuring tomorrow (3rd August) against a US law
which has anti-preservation effects, known as the DMCA (Digital
Millenium Copyright Act), outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor
Square, near Hyde Park, London starting at 1PM.
Protests are taking place in many places worldwide against the
imprisonment of Dmitry Sklyarov in the US who has been charged
with an offence under the DMCA.
The DMCA makes it a criminal offence in the US to publish
details of the scrambling or encryption methods used to lock
digital content to the hardware used to read it.
Try and imagine what the future would hold for libraries, if
in order to be able to read a book you had to maintain the
instance of a digital reading device in working order for
which your copy of the book was exclusively encoded. The
DMCA allows exemptions for decoding for digital preservation
purposes, but in practice this decoding is less likely to be
economically viable unless it can be provided for all fair
uses of the digital content protected, e.g. for allowing for
interfaces to braille readers and users to keep thier own
backups. More to the point, such decoding is much less likely
to be possible for digital content preservation unless the
information needed to do this decoding can legitimately be
made more generally available.
The Russian programmer, Dmitry Sklyarov who was arrested a fortnight
ago in the US ago had been invited to speak at a computing
security conference in Las Vegas. He is currently in prison
awaiting trial on a charge relating to his Russian employer
(Elcomsoft) having developed and sold software which can be used to
interface the Adobe Ebook product to braille readers and to
allow purchasers of Ebook content to take backup copies.
Software sold in Russia must by law enable users to be able
to take backups so - to the extent Dmitry was involved in writing
this software - this was completely legal where this software
was written.
The DMCA attempts to override a long tradition of fair use
of copyrighted materials, for example allowing people to
sell second-hand copies of books, borrow books from libraries
and allowing teachers to photocopy small parts of books for
distribution to students. I think you will also find the DMCA
threatens our ability to archive in future the knowledge of
the past for the reasons stated above.
Even if you are unable to inform others within the UK library community of
this protest in time for tomorrow, it would be useful for information
about the DMCA to be disseminated and discussed in order to raise
awareness of these issues. It would be of very great assistance to
those within the software-engineering community who are attempting to
defend the rights to freedom of expression and liberty of our colleagues
if you could use the networks available to information professionals
to help us in this activity.
You will find more information under the references:
http://freesklyarov.org/ and http://anti-dmca.org/ .
Many thanks for your consideration,
Yours sincerely,
Richard Kay
Senior Lecturer in Software Engineering,
Technology Innovation Centre,
University of Central England,
Perry Barr,
Birmingham B42 2SU
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