From Campaigns Wikia

[edit] The Issue: Why the DMCA is controversial and how to change it.

Could we start with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)?

• It is a law which benefits a limited few, and once implemented is being used to weed out all the smaller beneficiaries.
• Everyone from consumers, authors, musicians, inventors, researchers, developers and manufacturers who are new to the marketplace stand to lose in order that a primary brand may have right of way over digital media.
• It is a law which is being forced into nations around the world by threats of trade sanctions and no trade rounds unless the nation agrees to comply.
• The debate in Australia has been hobbled to only allow people to submit requests for specific exemptions from these laws.
• I feel we should be submitting an alternative copyright structure to the treaty body but that needs international cooperation/support.
• It is easy for the small business lobby who just wants right of way.
• It is harder for a varied group of people to get together and come up with a strategy which looks after broad interests and to support that locally and internationally.
• As wiki folk and bloggers I feel you may share an understanding that peer to peer can be healthy, creative good for the wider community.
• Would be cool to see this forum achieve a turn around on an issue as important as this.

Lucychili 22:25, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

First, let's give people a link to find out what the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is. Then we can have people join the discussion

Chadlupkes 03:28, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

Hi Chad.

• Fair enough, I linked to the DMCA page I thought there would be stuff collecting there.
• I have been pulling together some thoughts for AU folk on the issue at this blog [A2K v DMCA in Australia]
• There are a lot of people blogging on the topic. [DMCA Blogs]
• Peter Drahos has a number of publications on the issue at [Drahos publications]
• Ed Felten has a lot of good posts on the issue [Freedom to tinker - DMCA]
• CPTech is an organisation fighting for access rights at the international WIPO forums in Geneva [CPTech]

Lucychili 08:41, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

Hey guys. I think that we need to reform copyright legislation on an industry-specific basis. Copyright was made so that as a work becomes less commercially useful, it falls into the public domain. Because of various extensions (mostly due to the petition of Disney), nothing has fallen out of copyright since the Great Depression. What we need is a per-industry measurement for telling when a work should become public domian--a few years for software, maybe five years for song and movie recordings, etc. We also need a standard internet-searchable database where copyrights can be registered that's not, like, twelve years old. Compaqdrew 16:12, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Talking About What Action To Take

Let's grant that making intellectual property laws better for small entities (like people) and not so overwhelmingly advantageous for large entities (like the media conglomerate Vivendi) especially as it relates to technology that limits the use and flexibility of media by people who consume it is an issue worth "doing something" about.

So what?

Is Wikia really the right place to start something from scratch? I don't know... I just feel like wikis are an *enabling technology* for political organization and action rather than a thing to center a political movement around.

Just off the top of my head I figured "there must be such a campaign already" and googled "DMCA". One of the first page links for this is Anti-DMCA.Org. They have a web forum but no wiki. Two down from them is the Electronic Frontier Foundation's page against the DMCA. They don't have a forum *or* a wiki.

How's this for a proposal: maybe there should be a catagory like "POV:Anti-DMCA". There would be a hub page for this POV that both the EFF and the other group could link to... this would give a "POV pushing" overview of the rest of this kind of POV content.

We'd be done with the easy part: there would be a wiki (or better still a piece of this wiki with easy linking to neutral content, other POVs and campaigns, and so on) to organize people around this issue.

The hard part from my perspective is maintenance of a coherent POV. It seems like it requires at the very least an articulation of new standards for writing "within a POV".

What would be really really cool from my perspective would be a significant rewriting of MediaWiki to support political machinery that establishes "factions with stated POVs" and restricts edits to POV content to users who formally join such factions.

A related and important discussion is this other thread: Forum:Evolving the Perspectives section.

-JenniferForUnity 03:00, 16 July 2006 (UTC)