Thursday, March 28, 2013

The Copyright Rule We Need to Repeal If We Want to Preserve Our Cultural Heritage

The Copyright Rule We Need to Repeal If We Want to Preserve Our Cultural Heritage. Benj Edwards. The Atlantic. Mar 15 2013.
The anti-circumvention section (1201) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act needs to be repealed. The law threatens consumer control over the electronic devices we buy, but if the DMCA remains unaltered, cultural scholarship will soon be conducted only at the behest of corporations, and public libraries may disappear entirely. The DMCA prevents sharing information and sharing is vital to  preserve information. To properly preserve digital works, libraries and archives must be able to copy and media-shift them without fear of legal problems. The provisions in the DCMA are unacceptable and must change, or as a society we must be willing to say goodbye to libraries and the concept of universal public access to knowledge.


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