TechStuff Classic: What is the DMCA?

The whole reason we're tackling this again is that it's it's you know, when we talk about piracy and we talk about copyright and we talk about intellectual property and safe haven, most of that has to do with the various copyright laws, at least here in the United States that we have several copyright laws, but a lot of it refers back to the d m c A. And the reason why the d m c A is even a thing is because once we started entering the digital era, uh,

the landscape changed dramatically, all right. So before the digital era, when everything was analog, you could make copies of stuff, but it tended to be slow. It tended to take a lot of effort on the part of the person making the copy. It was not easy for your average person to make a copy of something and then distribute

it right for you you know. For for example, before digital books, in order to make a copy of a book, you had to either um, you know, put it on a copy machine, or in the olden days of break into a printing press room or hold some monks at crossbow point and say illuminated the script faster. Um. Yeah,

it was not easy. And so while there were protections in place to keep intellectual property under the the ownership of the person who created it or the entity that owned the rights to it, because of course we all know the copyright holder is not necessarily the person who actually made created yes, but anyway, there were laws in place to protect that property. But you know, the it was pretty easy to combat any sort of piracy just because it was. It was a lot of trouble to

pirates stuff. Uh you know. I can remember back in the day when I was a little kid occasionally using a cassette recorder to copy a song that was playing on the radio. Soak, right, But have been until right until U cassettes both video and audio came out, it wasn't so much an issue, no, no, And and in fact, the various industries that have an interest in distributing and producing and distributing media very much opposed things like cassettes

and video tapes. But eventually the government said, no, the benefit of this outweighs the potential threat to your industry, and in many ways they were They were very much right, because again it just was not easy to circumvent that stuff. But once we get into the digital era, now you're talking about the ability to take information. Zeros and ones

is ultimately what we're talking about here. You can take information and you can make copies of it relatively easily and distribute it relatively easily, especially once the internet Internet became a thing. And yeah, so now now we're in an era where you could have a book published and someone could take a digital version of that book, strip away any sort of copyright protection that happens to be there,

and distribute it freely to whomever they like. And obviously the various publication industries, music industries, movie television, all that kind of stuff, they were very much concerned about this, and and rightfully so, because if it is easier to get at the material by pirating it than by buying it,

that's what people are going to do. Well, sure, there there's a little bit of contention about that, you know, studies and pretty informal studies as if you have the people have done about how being able to preview something for free actually increases sales on that paid object. Sure, there's there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that says that pirates tend to buy more stuff than anyone else does.

So in other words, like a pirate will will download a torrent of a movie or a television show, really enjoy it, and then go out and buy a copy of it, because they want to have that legitimate copy

that has all the bells and whistles. Right, Although publishers are starting to take steps these days, you know, and letting you preview more and more of songs online or or access and things through something like Netflix so that you can really check something out and see if it's something that you're interested in purchasing before you right, and Amazon has a lending library, so but all of these things are kind of subscription based, so you're still paying

into a system. It's just now you're you've gotten a lot more options instead of just I want to buy this site unseen and hopefully I will like it. But anyway, So the d m c A was was this series of tweaks to existing law in the United States, and

itself was not just a brand new law. It was really to add amendments to existing law in the US and it was trying to bring US law into alignment with world the world intellectual property treaties from two of them in particular, one called the Wipeo Copyright Treaty and one called the wipe Out Performances and Phonograms Treaty. And so this was also to kind of help make a united front and on the global scale of copyright holders versus the evil, nasty, horrible pirates who are going to

destroy everything from within. Yeah, those those Wipeo treaties were introduced in the d m c A was originally sponsored by Republican Howard Koble of North Carolina in the US House. YEP and uh. And it went through several revisions, a few iterations that ended up adding some interesting things which we will get to. Uh wait to get to it. I am just chomping at the bit to get to the end of this podcast. It finally, it finally passed in October when then President Bill Clinton signed it YEP,

signed into law. So let's kind of start talking about what is actually in the d m c A. It's divided into five titles or five sections, and the first two titles are the ones that have the most interesting content from where we are, So we're gonna we're gonna really concern those first two titles, but don't worry, the other three will get covered because title five is a doozy alright. So title one, this is from a summary of the d m c A. So I'm gonna just

read the little blurb verbatim. The White Bow Copyright and Performances in Phonograms Treaties Implementation Act of implements the White Bow Treaties, and so it amends US law to provide appropriate references and links to the White Bow Treaties. It also prohibits circumvention of technological measures used by copyright owners to protect their works, such as dr M that I added, such as d r M by the way, that's not in the original language. That is very important. Yes, adds

civil remedies and criminal penalties for violating the prohibitions. So, in other words, this is the part of the d m c A that makes it illegal to try and

get around copy protection. So if that copy protection is something that's physically part of a device that plays digital media, or if it's something that's within the digital media itself, so software based, it is, by by the definition of the d m c A illegal to circumvent that in any way unless unless there are certain circumstances in play right and its specifically covers unauthorized access, but not unauthorized

copying only for fair use. Unauthorized copy is still covered if it's not for fair use, So that that raises the question what is fair use. Fair use is this concept where you are allowed to use someone else's work, some other copyrighted work in very specific specific circumstances, such

as if you were providing commentary about that work. So let's say, for example, that Lauren and I wanted to take something that had been published and copyrighted, UH and it's about technology, and we wanted to really critique it and explain it and explore it and and add to it with our own point points of view. UH, and

we wanted to quote an entire page of that work. Well, as long as we're doing it responsibly and we are actually providing commentary that adds to the discussions as long as we're not just broadcasting this back out at you for free, whereas normally you would have to pay to get it, as long as you know we're adding enough to it to make it fair use, Yeah, that would be fair use. And so you'll you'll often hear people say, oh, like with music, you could play about fifteen seconds of

music and then that's fair use. No, there is actually not a definition of how much work you can quote or or play that remains free. Like your your intent and your ability to make money off of the product is definitely in a lot of the consideration here. For for example, there was a case in two thousand seven Stephanie Lens versus Universal move Music Corporation, which was really interesting. I'm kind of cutting into the middle of the meat here,

but but I wanted to bring this up. We're talking about the East because this was a This was a woman who uploaded a picture of her thirteen month old baby dancing to princes Let's go crazy onto YouTube. Um fun times for everybody, right. It was a twenty nine second clip and Universal told YouTube to take it down. They said this violates copyright law. She did not ask for permission to Prince to to use that song take

it down. They did take it down, and she she soon universal for UM legal fees to contact YouTube to get it back up, and also for you know, just just messing with your life, and and and and the judge ruled in that particular case that it it was fair use, and that also UM companies really do need to check the fair use isn't being broken before they ask for content to be removed. Yeah, you'll often hear

about that too. I mean there's a I don't I didn't write down this particular instance, but I know for a fact that it happened because I know some of the people who are involved. Uh. This Weekend Text Tech News Today, Uh The The that's a show that's done with Sarah Lane, Tom Merritt and i Azactar on Leo Reports Network. They did a a show that at one point they were talking about a video that was also a copyright of work. And so part of their show

is both an audio podcast and a video podcast. You can get it in either format, and the video podcasts also get uploaded to YouTube. YouTube ended up taking that one down when they got a request from the owner of the video, even though it was very much evident that this was a case where it was fair uses in play because they were providing commentary about the video itself.

They weren't just playing the video. It was all about uh really analyzing and talking about it in a way that was was transformative and uh As it took quite some time to get that turned around. On YouTube's defense, I will say that if they don't act quickly, bad things can happen to YouTube. But we'll get into that. That's a little bit later. Into a title one also

covers some other stuff. One thing it says is that if you are talking about public domain public domains, another thing we need to talk about public domain is when you have a work that has existed longer than copyright protection will cover that work. So it varies from country to country. So for example, let's just say what will make a hypothetical example. Let's say that a country protects

any copyright of work for twenty years. After a work has existed for more than twenty years, it enters into the public domain, meaning anyone can use it any way they like. You can publish as many you can take that work. You could print out your own copies so you can distribute them freely. You could run down the

street laughing like a maniac and chucking copies at people's heads. Uh, people say sometimes around band booked week with with Mark Twain properties, for example, you could get arrested for some form of assault and battery that way, but you won't be arrested for distributing copyright at work. Because it's in

the public domain. You can do whatever you like with it. Again, the amount of time that a work exists before it's in public domain varies by country to country, and in the United States, for example, that number keeps going up because we have some pretty powerful people who are saying like, no, no, no, we we really want to keep Snow White for example. Yeah, even though it published in the there's a certain mouse that has had a large amount of influence on this

particular subject. Yeah, it's very true. Disney has been very active in keeping uh you know, adding more years to what would be considered copyright. And then there's the question of well, can we transfer it so that even after the copyright holder has passed away or maybe the company turns into something else, like, can we keep it so that those rights continue can be transferred to the next Yeah. So so there are a lot of issues with that. Well.

The title one of d m c A tells us that the the rules about public domain revert to the country of origin of that work. So if the work was produced in uh, say, France, then whatever France, as the rules are for public domain, would be in play, no matter where else in the world you might be, or well, in this case, in the United States, because DMC only covers the US. Clearly right right in the United States, is not adding jurisdiction of the entire world here,

they are not. However, an important part of that title one is that um it names the US as a member country of of WIPO, and it really is, and says that it provides equal protection to any other member country of WIPO in the United States, any any work from Yeah. So in other words, it's supposed to apply the same rules and same rigor for any copyrighted work that's under threat from a WHIPPO country as it would for anything that's from the United States. So no preferential

treatment for US versus non US. And also with this public domain issue, you defer to the rules of the country of origin. So whichever country produced said work, that's the rules that apply for public domain um and the whole unauthorized access versus unauthorized copying. There are some exemptions

that are allowed, but they are pretty specific. For one thing, law enforcement, intelligence and other governmental agencies are exempt from Title one, so uh, the you know, the FBI doesn't have to worry about following these rules that kind of thing. Other exceptions apply to nonprofit library, archive, and educational institutions that wish to obtain authorized access to works. So again, uh,

the access still has to be authorized. They can't circumvent and it can't just do it all will and nially they have to ask, right, but they can make copies if it's for archival purposes. So in that sense, because

I remember there's two sections here. There's the access and then there's the actual copying, because there's been a lot of questions about that, uh and and the about the you know, making things like a gadget that could circumvent uh, the access block part that's illegal, But creating a gadget that can get around the copy protection is not illegal. That's just the access part that you have to worry about.

And again it's not illegal, but you have to use it in very specific circumstances to not get in trouble. Other exceptions include reverse engineering for computer programmers. So if you're trying to make a computer program that can be interoperable with an existing program, then you can start making copies of the existing program in an effort to learn how it works so that you can make sure that your new software works seamlessly with the old software. That's

really what that was there to protect. Encryption research is protected, so uh, if your work is designed to analyze, evaluate, and improve encryption technologies, you're protected. Also for the protection of miners. So if there's any technology that's designed to limit access to materials that you know are considered to be harmful to miners, but it would otherwise violate part of Title one, those are exempt from the Title one

issues as well. And then there's personal privacy, which is if the technology that was used to protect a work would gain or disseminate unauthorized information about a quote natural person unquote, it can be circumvented. So if you were to put d r M on something and that DRM, as part of what it does besides protecting the copyrighted work, would also gather information about you, you can you can then circumvent because because they consider that the dissemination of

the private information is worse than circumventing the DRM. And finally, security testing is also exempt from this. So uh yeah, any devices that are primarily designed or produced to circumvent copyright protection, uh, that have only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent, or are marketed for use in circumventing our big no nose under tital one. Yeah, this is this is some interesting stuff. So again, really

it's the access is the big deal here. Copying. Copying is still a problem, you know, you can't just copy like crazy. You have to be able to justify it under those rules I was talking about. But the access is definitely a big issue. So in other words, if something is behind a paywall, you can't circumvent the pay

wall to get at the stuff, because that's how about access. Now, if you if you don't have a paywall, if you can freely access it, or you've paid to get through it, then making the copy, that's more of a question of do you fall under one of those exemptions? Right right? Uh? It does also say maybe you were getting to this one,

but I thought that this one was particularly interesting. It It says that it does not and will never mandate that the design of products be be such that they specifically prevent the creation of devices made to circumvent themselves. It gets a little a little complicated and timey wimy wibbly wobbly, doesn't it. It does, But but it's really to protect companies and say say that if you're designing products, then it's not your problem if someone creates something that

can circumvent it. One other thing that title one covers. It actually says that the provision prohibits rights holders, meaning people who own copyright to material. It prevents them from applying the be right prevention or a copyright circumvention prevention technologies to free television and basic and extended Basic tier cable broadcasts, meaning that you can't put copyright protection on

stuff that is freely distributed in any way. So you could not put some sort of copy protection over over the air broadcast because of the very nature of how it's distributed. Okay, so so share So so if you wanted to record something that was airing on PPS, then do it. You could do that. Yeah, anything that was on any sort of over the air transmission you would

be you would. It doesn't fall fall under the umbrella of d M c A as as opposed to a lot of other digital transmissions or cable transmissions that which are here. Here's another thing, like, if that same same program that you would have gotten over the air on an antenna and you wanted to record it on your your home system, if it's perfectly okay under that circumstance, it's not perfectly okay if that same program is being distributed over the internet. It interesting, huh, because it's two

different means of distribution. It has nothing to do with the content, has nothing to do with whether or not it's in their copyright, has everything to do with the method of distribution. What a crazy world we live in. Do you have anything else to say about Title one, Lauren? Anything else? Um? Because it gets crazier from here on out.

It does get crazier. Now. There's a lot of interesting court cases that have come up about what it means to be an owner versus a licensee versus a user of any of these pieces of media, especially one case in two thousand seven Timothy S. Verner versus Autodesk, and Verner sued Autodesk because he had been buying all of the software from garage sales and selling it on eBay and um, some of that. One of these things that was included was a program called AutoCAD, owned by Autodesk.

It's a computer assisted design sure um. The user agreement in in AutoCAD says that it's a you are a licensee and that your license to use this as non transferable. So whoever buys it, that's who. But Verner said it wasn't his fault that someone had sold it to him at a garage sale and that he should therefore have the right to sell it on eBay. And an Autodesk said, and it is interesting, I mean, what do you do because the person who sold it to Verner as essentially

the one who's violating that licensing agreement. Right. But but the courts, the courts upheld out at desk. They said, they said, no, because you have entered into a legal agreement period, you are responsible for what you do. It's weird. I would have said that the person who entered the legal agreement was the one who originally bought the software, not him, because if he bought it from a garage sale, he did not clearly buy it from any retailer that

was Autodesk. So it's interesting to me, not that I'm contesting what you're saying, but it's interesting to me that the court would say that because, as you know, they basically ruled that he was never a legitimate owner. Okay, So so therefore, because he's not a legitimate owner, he

cannot be a reseller, cannot be a reseller Crescy. And this is one of those things where it kind of it's it brings up that whole idea of the right of first sale, which is if you buy something, then you have the right to sell it off to someone else. The digital era has really changed that as well, because you can sell something that's digital, and that that's the entire that's the entire issue that I'm talking about with licensee right, a user versus an owner? Right, Well, I

and you can understand autodesks point. They might say, well, how can we be certain that other than you know, through registration, how can we be certain that the copy of the of AutoCAD has been white from all the computers that the original owner had. So if I bought AutoCAD, hypothetically, the key wouldn't work. Yeah, right, which again, uh, the problem is that there are programs out there that will generate new keys so that you can circumvent it what

you're not supposed to do. But yeah, so this is interesting. That's interesting that it goes all the way down to selling stuff on eBay. Right. Yeah. On a grander scale, this is the same kind of issue that has to do or or Title one anyway has to do with why unlocking your cell phone is illegal because disabling the DRM software in a cellphone that that locks it to a single carrier is illegal. So you can jail break

your phone, but you can't you cannot unlock it. Well, you're you're you're allowed to, you're little to jail break it to install software, but not unlock it for moving it from one character to another. And this is a thing that once every three years, the Library of Congress sits down and reviews complaints that people have submitted to them about various bits of legislation and law. And during one of these uh, one of these tricycle is what are they called, try any I'll try anial reviews. I

like tricycles better. During during one of these tricycles, recently, the Library of Congress um of help this that that, yeah, that jailbreaking to another network is not legal because and I do not quote, but this is the gist of their argument. There are so many devices on the market these days that surely you can find one on the network. Blame the victim, why don't you? Wow? I definitely feel

a sting on this one. But then again, I bought my phone unlocked already, because I bought a phone that was designed to be unlocked so that you could buy it and then put it on what's your network. That's still legal. By the way, companies can choose to offer up an unlocked device. You just cannot take a device that has been locked and then unlock it. Yeah, there's a there's a bit of authorization again in this issue. Guys, I gotta deal with a copyright strike. While I do that,

let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. All right, getting back into the d m c A. We're ready to move on to title two. And I know some of you are thinking, there are five titles here, how long is this going to go? But really, titles one and two are the big ones, and the other ones are well, you know, we'll touch on them, but they

won't be quite as extensive. So Title two is the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, which creates limitations on liability for online service providers for copyright infringement when engaged in certain types of activities. So this is of course

where the term safe harbor comes from. Is this title too of the d m c A. So safe harbor is essentially this idea that if you are an online service provider, and that could be anything from an Internet service provider, you know, an I s P. To a platform that people use on the Internet, like like Tumblr or YouTube, yeah, exactly, that if you provide that service, you are not necessary, serially, monetarily liable for any sort of copyright infringement that's being performed by the users of

your platform. Right. But there are again very specific rules in play. It's not that you're a given free license. You can't just sit there and say safe harbor, Safe harbor, I'm okay. You have to actually, uh, you know, show that you are one unaware that the stuff is going on, and two you cannot be benefiting from the fact that infringement is going on, right And and furthermore, if a company contacts you and says, hey, this thing is on

your site. It's it's it's copyright infringement. Please take it down. You have to do that. You have to respond very quickly. And that's one of the reasons why we see these these things happen where YouTube will pull something very quickly because they have to under the rules of d m c A if they receive that notification. I mean, there's probably several big cases against YouTube that are all about

copyright infringement. Viacom has a huge case which is which is still going on, that was filed in two thousand seven of very contention of hundred and sixty thousand clips that had been viewed fifty one point five billion times um and and they were basically saying YouTube you um

I'll quote from it. Because YouTube directly profits from the available availability of popular infringing works on its site, it has decided decided to shift the burden entirely onto copyright owners to monitor the YouTube site on a daili or hourly basis to detect infringing videos. So Viacom saying hey, this should not be our job, and YouTube saying hey,

it shouldn't be our job. Either, there's so many two hours worth of material being uploaded every minute, there's no one who can sit there and go over every single frame of every single video that's always being submitted to this service. Um. And that's basically what the court said. They threw it out without even being tried in it

came back actually in April there was a reversal. The court said that basically a reasonable jury could have found that the YouTube was aware of what was going on and just not taking steps, right, Yes, And then that's that's one of the things under d m c A is that if the the service providers aware of it,

they have to take uh steps to prevent it. Now again, if it's something where it comes under fair use, that's where it gets money again because yeah, because I mean, like it's it's not it's not YouTube's job to determine what is fair use and what is not. Uh, and the the the copyright holder is supposed to at least take that into consideration before taking steps. But ultimately, fair use is something that's decided in a court of law.

I mean, you know, it's it's it's all down to does the copyright holder want to take the steps to actually, uh, prosecute someone and then the court decides if it was fair use or not. That's that's the real problem with fair uses, that it's really something that's decided after a court case. Um if it if no court case happens. So if a copyright holder never comes after you for the way you've used something, you could argue that's because

it's fair use. But legally speaking, that's not the determination. It's just that no one came after you. That doesn't mean that they won't come after you sometime in the future. This is the fun part of copyright law, right. So let's talk about some of the things that that the limitations on liability cover for copyright infringement, this whole safe harbor idea. One of them is transitory communications. Now, this limits the liability of a service provider when all the

provider is doing is acting as a data conduit. In other words, all they're doing is allowing information to pass from one entity to another entity. They're not they're not taking part in whatever the content is. Uh, They're just essentially they're the pipes, and if you are the one who owns the pipes, you cannot be held responsible monetarily for any copy right infringement material that passes along there as long as you are not complicit in that transaction.

So in other words, if you're a service provider and you are not knowingly providing people the chance to send copyright infringed material back and forth, or you're not profiting from it, then you're not liable. But if you're profiting from it, then there's a problem. And that's one of the things against YouTube is that if YouTube is running ads against videos, then that means, yeah, they're profiting from

those videos. So if the videos are videos that infringe upon something, then there's there's a case there for d m c A. Now, granted, most of the time, the first step is still saying take this down, and if YouTube does that, that's usually as far as it goes, but it's something to keep in mind. Next, you have system caching that limits the liability of a service that retains data to send it later at the sender's discretion. So there are a lot of different ways of thinking

about this. But imagine that you have scheduled something to post at a particular time. Well, a copy of that information maybe existing on a service provider's site, but what you're saying is that if the materials copyrighted and it's unauthorized, it's an unauthorized copy, the system cannot be held responsible for holding that copy because they're really just fulfilling their end of a service. Again, same rules apply. They can't

be complicit, they can't be profiting from it. Uh. Storage of information on systems or networks at direction of users.

Same sort of thing you have cloud storage. If if I have a cloud storage account and the you know part of that is that I am trusting that my provider is not snooping in on all the stuff that I'm storing on my cloud storage, then you know, you can't hold the cloud storage company responsible if I'm filling up my storage with you know, it can't be expected to to look at all every single one of the files. When I put put my unauthorized discography of Britney Spears

up there, they can't. You know, they're not held responsible for it. I should definitely hold responsibility for something like that if I were to ever do that, and I fully expect to be held responsible and also will never happen. Uh. Then there's the information location tools. So this is things like search engines. So if you were to type in

something in a search engine. For example, you were interested in a particular television show, let's say I don't know Supernatural, and you were to type that in, and some of the links that came back linked to things that were infringing copyright. The search engine would not be held responsible for those links unless again, it was violating those other rules. So in other words, you can't blame Google for putting a link up to material that infringes upon copyright because

Google is not the one responsible for the material. It's just it's just indexing links. Although it does do so with ads, so that makes me wonder if there's any kind of any of that sticky there. That's probably another issue. But again, and they're also told that if someone reports it, they are supposed to block access or take those links down.

That that's raised a lot of ire in the various communities online about the idea of blocking links because it's talking about essentially breaking one of the fundamental part to the Internet, or at least of the Web, if not the Internet. Anyway, it's a different discussion. Uh, those are the four main areas where the liability is limited. Um. They also it says section twelve, which is the specific section of the UH the law that this UH the suppresses. Yeah,

it says. It also contains a provision to ensure that service providers are not placed in the position of choosing between limitations on liability on the one hand and preserving the privacy of their subscribers on the other. So, in other words, they are not supposed to be put into any kind of position where they have to identify someone when part of their business is all about, hey, your privacy. Yeah, so they are supposed to be allowed to to remain free of that. Uh. But that even that has some

issues so like. But essentially this is to to make sure that they remain in compliance with things like the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. So, in other words, you're talking about there are two different laws here that kind of conflict with one another, which one has precedence in this case,

the privacy holds up over the copyright violation. Uh. And really the reason why this whole section exists is to prevent companies from having to undergo massive amounts of expenses to defend themselves or also to endure excessive interference from copyright holders or from government officials. And so you know the fact that this d m c A stuff is in a way it's you could you could see it as a way of bending to the will of copyright holders.

That's the way a lot of critics painted, right, like the d m c A is just the government laying down in front of copyright holders, right. But this one, this one really actually works in the other direction in the favor of the service providers. Providers who are just just trying to do their jobs and are not necessarily There was a case in two thousand six IO Group failed a complaint against Video Networks for video Networks had

a site that would let users transcode video into flash. Okay, sure, and and I a group was saying that view networks users were trans transcoding videos into flash that that were copyright infringement. Okay, So that they were taking videos that were under copyright and through the process of transcoding them that was violating the copyright. Yes, And they said that they said that VO was responsible for this because as as a transcoder, they were they were implicit in them.

They were they were actually they were giving the people the ability to infringe just from the very nature of what the service was and the court ruled that the process was automated and that therefore Video had no knowledge and like they could not know what the content was because the actual process of transcoding had nothing to do with a human being reviewing stuff and saying, hey, wait a minute, it was a was a really good but a really important, clear cut case to prevent that kind

of legal actions being taken in the future. That makes a lot of sense, because, i mean, YouTube had for a long time was always encoding videos into flash until you know, a couple of until started to switch over to HTML five. But same sort of thing. Yeah, and that that Viacom case is just kind of spinning in courts right now. Both sides are arguing that the other is burdened with the proof that that YouTube and therefore

Google had no idea what was going on. And really, how do you prove that someone doesn't know something, right, You have to have evidence that they did know. That's the only way you can prove. You can't prove a negative. But if you are able to prove that they did know and knowingly allowed it to happen, that would be the case. All right, Well, we've got a little bit more to say about the d m c A. But

before we get into that, let's take another quick break. Well, let's move on to title three, which mercifully short, it's the Computer Maintenance Competition Assurance Act, which creates an exemption for making a copy of a computer program by activating

a computer for purposes of maintenance or repair. So essentially, this means that if you've got a computer and you need to do some work on it, like you need to repair it or do some maintenance work on it, and you've got programs on there already, you can go ahead and make copies of that stuff for the purposes of doing this maintenance or repair work. But once all that work is done, you then must destroy the co Yeah, that was Settle three. See how easy that was. Four.

Title four, Now, this one's a little more wacky because it has six miscellaneous provisions relating to the functions of the Copyright Office, distance education, the exceptions and the Copyright Act for libraries and for making ephemeral recordings, also webcasting of sound recordings on the Internet, and the applicability of collective bargaining agreement obligations in the case of transfers of rights in motion pictures. And it's just as exciting as

it sounds people. So in general, ephemeral recording means that you can make a copy of material for broadcast purposes. So like a radio station, it might make a copy of all these different songs from various albums onto a new medium and use that for broadcast purposes. That's perfectly fine. Um Again, but they can only keep it up to a certain length of time. I think it's like six months.

Then you've got things like the Distance Education Study, which was really it was worded this way into the d m c A because that the you know, Congress wanted to explore ways to promote distance education to give people more opportunities for educational purposes. UM. So that was just really kind of put in there to say, let's put a placeholder here and really think about what this means. So it doesn't directly affect the d m c A in this case, but later legislation definitely does. Um. The

nonprofit libraries we've already kind of talked about. Webcasting was interesting because this ended up setting up certain rules that internet radio stations have to follow that terrestrial radio stations don't necessarily have to follow, and this has caused a lot of cern among both parties. Sure. Yeah, and this is why Pandora, for example, works the way that it does. If if you've ever used Pandora, you know that, uh, it will never play a specific song that you that

you tell it to play right off the bat. It has to to take a sample of similar songs and play them in a random order. It also cannot play a certain song more than more often than you know, a certain amount of time. Yeah, there's usually like the rules are kind of weird, Like there's one that says you cannot, uh, you cannot have the same songs from the same album play in like a three hour period, or you can only do a certain number like it's

it's really specific rules. Yeah, and it's it's why you can't skip too many songs at once because it might mess with the algorithm and force something to be randomly played sooner than right. Yeah, and then you also there's even things about like like if you have a looping program that's broadcast on the internet, it has to be at least three hours long, Like you can't have a one hour Like let's say you made a playlist and

it's about a one hour long playlist. You could not have that being looped on the internet because it's not long enough to meet these requirements. Also, of course, if you were playing anything that was under copyright, you would have to pay whatever the the appropriate licensing fees were in order to have that. Uh and uh and that's also an issue, but we won't you know, that's that's

almost its own podcast really to cover all of those issues. Um, the motion pictures section has to do with residual payments that go out whenever a motion picture or movie as some of us are our film even if we're want to go old school super fansom, but you know, there there are residual payments. They go out to the people who worked on a film whenever it's being broadcast or played or whatever. Uh. And so that had that's what that part of the title four had to do with it.

Now we get to title five, which my favorite of all the titles because it is the one that makes my brain explode. So I am going to tell you what title five covers, and I promise this is not a joke. Now keep in right mind. This is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. So the d m c A Title five says the vessel hull design Protection Act creates a new form of protection for the design of vessel hulls.

And you might say, wait a minute, or are you talking about and yes, I am talking about boats people. So it creates a new system for protecting original designs of certain useful articles that make the article attractive or distinctive in appearance. Uh. That means it's specifically about the aesthetic design of a boat hull. It is limited to the holes of vessels no longer than two hundred feet in the d m c A. Well, it's it. It's not digital. It's a design. You could this could apply

to something that's written on paper. There's nothing digital about this. It has nothing to do with the rest of the Act. It is just about boats. Now. You know what makes me think? Makes me think that some old senator out there, and apologies to you, old senator if you're the one who said this, but clearly, clearly these boats are for surfing the interweb. I've seen. What I think is there was an old senator out there who was saying protecting

against parrishy something parish alright, parasity, let's protect boats. And uh also probably said that the Internet is a series of tubes. Oh, it drives me crazy. This. By the way, if you were not from the United States, hey, this

is how our law works. We have laws where occasionally you're reading through the law and something completely not connected to the rest of the law gets thrown in there for reasons that are probably best not explored because it will just make you despair over the state of affairs in the legal system in the United States. You know,

they really wanted to pass it through. This was a big popular thing that was going on, and they figured they figured, you know, those kids with their with their Internet surfboards in there and their piracy are never going to notice. So let's I mean, if you do it now. I when I read it, I thought this has got to be a joke. And I thought, there's no there's no other humor in this very long document that I'm reading. Why would this be the only thing? I just I

don't get. It is so ridiculous. Okay, Well, and anyway, there are a lot of parts about the d m c A that make my brain angry and want me to go hulk smash, But this is this is probably the capper on it, both figuratively and literal lasons. It is the last of the five titles. So that's the d m c A, folks. That's the that Those are the amendments to the existing law that all are there to uh to try and protect copyright owners from having

their works stolen willie and or nilly across the interwebs. Um, there's a there's It's been under fire many many times for several of the passages within the d m c A. There have been lots of court cases that have challenged various parts of the d m c A with varying degree eas of success. And of course there have been other proposed forms of law that kind of tied back into the d m c A. And some people say, well, why do we even why why is this law being proposed?

We already have the d m c A in effect in the United States, so therefore we should not pursue even more, Like why why are you painting over this fence that has already painted painted extremely thoroughly, right, Yeah, this is no somehow into the air in the borders above the fence. It's no Tom Sawyer job here, folks. This is a very well painted We're bringing it back to Mark Twain very literary podcast today. So yeah, you know,

it's kind of interesting. It's also kind of infuriating. Um, but I do understand the perspective of copyright holders and wanting to protect their property. Uh. I don't necessarily agree with how it's come about, but I totally agree with

the desire to do so. Some measures clearly had to be made to prevent things like our Buddies and Napster from Yeah, and again, like I still, my argument is still that if you make something that's easy too for people to buy and you know, and if you have guaranteed the quality of that product, then people will tend to buy it. If you can't do that or won't do that, then people are more willing to try and find, you know, underhanded means of getting access to that content.

And that wraps up another classic episode of tech Stuff. Hope you guys enjoyed it. If you have any suggestions for future tech stuff topics, let me know by reaching out on Facebook or Twitter. I use the handle text stuff h s W for both, and I'll talk to you again relea so soon. Yeah. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.