“Are we expected to simply pay our money up front in the vain hope that sometimes we will be allowed to read? We believe this was not the intent of Congress.” – Paul Schroeder, vice president of governmental relations for the American Foundation for the Blind, as quoted by Wired News on the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The TeleRead take: This was just one of a number of scathing comments that the U.S. Copyright Office received on the act when the office sought public reaction as required by law. Meanwhile it’s good to see a court weakening the DMCA via the Elcomsoft case. Other programmers, too, are doing their share. And via a Reuters item mentioned in Pocket PC eBooks Watch and on a Mac-oriented Web site, we see that copyright zealots aren’t faring quite as well in Europe as before.

Message to Hollywood: Beware of technology-related business models that depend on buying votes in Congress. Public hatred of your policies, and changes in tech, just might do you in. Older voters apathetic about tech-related issues are dying off. Younger ones don’t want your copyright cops on their backs. Even today, politicians can take only so much. Copyright is a wonderful, essential concept, but only if carried out with fair use in mind. Vanity copyright laws, as we’ll call them–self-published, so to speak, by way of campaign cash–have corrupted a noble idea.

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