Copyrighting Freedom of Expression

Copyrighting Freedom of ExpressionT

By Kembrew McLeod, In These Times
January 27, 2003

The power of corporations to censor was greatly expanded by the passage in
1998 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was written by and for
the lobbies that paid to push it through Congress - the software,
entertainment, pharmaceutical and other intellectual property industries.


Most significantly, the DMCA severely curtails the "fair use" of copyrighted
goods. The fair use statute was written into the 1976 Copyright Act to
prevent overzealous copyright owners from controlling all uses of their
goods. Fair use allows artists, writers and scholars to use fragments of
copyrighted works without permission for the purposes of education,
criticism and parody, among other things. The problem is that the DMCA,
passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by President Clinton,
places the judicial powers of deciding what is fair use and what is not into
the hands of copyright and trademark owners. They, of course, are not very
liberal in their interpretations of how their intellectual property is used
by others. For most intellectual property-owning corporations, any use is
stealing.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID026