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“…Wade Randlett, of consumer rights group DigitalConsumer.org, said the entertainment industry’s efforts have criminalized behavior that used to be legal, including letting teenagers excerpt portions of copyrighted works for book reports. He told the story of a friend whose daughter wanted to compose a multimedia report for school. Because she could not legally obtain an excerpt from a DVD, she ended up using material whose copy control mechanisms had been cracked with a program that courts have ruled illegal. The student, he said, ‘put it on a disk, took it to school, and committed a felony.’ Such examples, he said, are evidence that ‘there is a war on against consumers.’” – DMCA defenders in enemy territory, ZDNet News, Aug. 1, 2002.

The TeleRead take: Hollywood is the world’s biggest threat to the concept of copyright. The entertainment industry is educating a whole generation of young consumers–some of them voters now, some of them voters in the future–to hate the C word. Someday we may well see the anger reach the point where it even balances out the entertainment industry’s massive contributions to politicians. The best solution remains a well-stocked national digital library system with provisions for fair use, so that we can stop making felons of schoolchildren.

 
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