DMCA is giving me nightmares.

In part three, chapter 9 of this week's readings in Brand Name Bullies, Bollier describes the real world consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and what affect it has had on our day to day life in America. Why was something this powerful passed by our congress without even the slightest hiccup? Aren't our law makers the ones that should understand what the terms of an act like this imply and mean for the future? Surely, our elected congressmen and women are smart enough to forecast these dire repercussions, so are they turning a blind eye or are they simply being bribed by the big corporations who gain so much power from laws like these? Aram discussed in class about how the DMCA prevents actively trying to crack any sort of encryption and how this is a grave detriment to our security because encryption only improves through testing it, i.e. trying to break it. Bollier talks specifically about the Diebold Election Systems and how they used the DMCA to swing into legal action when information about their faulty encryption systems leaked t the internet. Cease-and-desist letters in conjunction with unilaterally demanding -without due process- the withdrawal of the materials from internet were the new powers that Diebold was able to wield because of the DMCA. I noticed that when i try to explain a lot of the issues we are uncovering in class and in our readings about copyright people, they seem to roll their eyes, as if it doesn't apply to them, or that it doesn't matter. Diebold preventing people from uncovering the flaws in their voting systems directly applies to all of us in a serious way. If you believe in freedom and a fair election this should be grounds for taking up arms and fighting back.

Tehranian's article on our Infringement Nation points out very simply that copyright law on a practical level, if enforced to the fullest extent of the law, would immediately create a dystopia. When any average american can incur $4.5 billion in infringements each year, we see that copyright is fundamentally designed wrong: targeted at the wrong people, and giving the big corporations an unthinkable amount of power. It is important to note that the big corporations are really only the entities who can take advantage of these laws because they have the budgets and lawyers to bring the cases to court. This is exactly what Ray Beckerman and Bennett Lincoff were talking about. We need to be able to push back against the power grabbers... our system of law depends on that push.

Its time to fight. Just like its time to vote. We have to wake up from these nightmares, if we don't the reality we deserve will slowly slip away from us.