News.com: Time to rewrite the DMCA (Rep. Rick Boucher)

[ Thanks to kgeffert for this link. ]

“When Congress considered the content community’s
anti-circumvention proposal, I put forward a series of amendments
intended to preserve the fair-use rights of consumers. My
colleagues and I feared that broad application of the proposed new
anti-circumvention law would threaten the viability of the fair-use
doctrine in the digital age.

Unfortunately, as so often happens, Congress paid more attention
to the loudest voices in the debate.

In writing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998,
Congress made some important, but ultimately modest, changes to the
original proposal. And we persuaded ourselves that we had achieved
a rough balance of interests. But in the end, Congress agreed to a
fundamentally flawed bill, which created the new crime of
circumvention–a crime divorced from over a century and a half of
respect for the fair-use rights of consumers.”

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