Category: Copyright

www.nyfairuse.org – New Yorkers for Protecting Fair Use of Copyrighted Material
From the site:
New Yorkers for Fair Use is a group that supports copyright law as Congress originally framed and implemented it. Congress first conceived of copyright law as a limited term protection for authors and inventors. This limited term protection was meant to be an incentive to creators of original work to distribute their inventions as quickly and as widely as possible. Congress hoped that this distribution would facilitate scientific and artistic progress. Today, the extension of copyright to 70 or more years past the death of the author and the passage of laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, support the interests of corporations in maintaining monopolies over their creations at the expense of scientific and artistic progress. The DMCA is a particularly egregious example of this trend in copyright law. The DMCA grants the authors of digital works the ability to specify how their work my be used in perpetuity. Moreover, the DMCA even allows authors to prohibit the copying and quoting of their digital work for the purpose of education — a use of copyrighted works which has traditionally been allowed under the doctrine of fair use. Because the DMCA allows authors to prevent other members of the public from using their work as a basis for further creative endeavor, we believe the DMCA fatally harms the original intent of copyright law, which was to promote progress in the useful arts and sciences. As such, we support the revocation of the DMCA in the interests of scientific and artistic progress. We also support the extension of the fair use doctrine into the digital domain so that some balance is restored between the interests of the public and the interests of authors and inventors.