Many pundits
fear that the DMCA can be used to curtail the use of nondigital copyrighted works such as books
because the law is so vague in defining its own borders.
While the courts are trying to clarify where the legal line is in any particular situation, the problem
is that, often, the company suing to protect its copyrights is a large corporation or group and the
defendant is either a new small company or even an individual user. Court battles are expensive,
and the broad scope of the DMCA essentially prevents ???the little guy??? from ever making his case,
because he cannot afford to fight.
In 1998, a law known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, or CTEA, was
passed. This act took the already lengthy copyright protection period (generally 70 years)
and extended it by another 20 years, preventing several valuable properties, including film and
images of Steamboat Willie (the first Mickey Mouse), from entering the public domain.
From a practical standpoint, what does all this mean to you as a Linux user? Well, it means that if
you have to use any trickery to copy MP3s off your CD collection, you could be breaking the law.
Several CD protection schemes used by record companies are designed to prevent digital piracy,
but they are very easy to circumvent in many cases.
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