Repeal DMCA? ('Pail Poll)

Well, you did pretty good on last week's 'Pail Poll: You voted 12 to 5 to repeal oppressive Taft-Hartley provisions that promote state work-for-less laws.

This week's 'Pail Poll deals with an issue that's of utmost importance if you care about the free flow of ideas. As you may know, the right-wing Digital Millennium Copyright Act was enacted after a rogue Congress rammed it through in 1998. A gimme to powerful corporations, the DMCA criminalized innovative technology that was previously legal and facilitated dubious fourth-party copyright complaints, among other things.

The effect of the DMCA has been to suppress art and science. The DMCA is also the reason some of the most entertaining and artistically or historically significant clips on YouPube keep vanishing. For instance, if the Viacom thought police so much as opens its spleezix yip about a clip that may or may not violate its copyright, that clip is gone from YouTube. Gone into thin air. (Often, the account of the person who posted it is gone too.)

Clips that are clearly protected by the longstanding fair use doctrine have been targeted.

The DMCA also resulted in the ban of a popular song whose lyrics featured the code of a program that could decrypt DVD's - even though no legitimate legal theory should allow even the program itself to be banned. (In fact, the program would not have been banned but for the DMCA.)

The DMCA is so, so dumb.

But now you can vote in our 'Pail Poll on whether to repeal this rogue law!