Re: Clinton signs draconian antipiracy law, from the Netly News

[Tim May <tcmay@got.net>]

At 3:07 PM -0700 12/17/97, Brian the Obscure wrote:
>At 11:51 AM 12/17/97 -0800, Lizard wrote:
>>
>>At 02:42 PM 12/17/97 -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>>>At 12:37 -0500 12/17/97, Ray Arachelian wrote:
>>>>You have a CD player at home and use a walkwan when walking around, so you
>>>>tape your CD's so you can listen to them. Wham! Instant jail time.
>>>
>>>Yes, if you copy $1,000 worth of CDs within six months.
>>>
>>At rougly 15.00/CD, that is one CD every three days, more or less..not
>>utterly inconveivable, but a little difficult.
>
>Try this scenario:  I have 150+ audio cd's, many of which are rare, import,
>out of print, or even all of the above.  Since a fire could leave me
>missing many pieces of irreplaceable music, I had come up with a plan.  Get
>a cd-r burner, make backup copies of my audio discs, and store them in a
>safe deposit box.

All of this about jail time for copying CDs is nonsense, even under the new
law.

Some years back, circa 1989-91 or so, Congress passed a new tax on blank
tape and other such blank media...we've all been paying a little bit for
blank media as a result of this law. (The name of the law is no longer on
the tip of my tongue, but it was something about intellectual property
rights, or somesuch--the name may be the "Home Recording Act," it now
occurs to me.)

One of the key provisions was that home taping, or archival taping, or
taping for any _noncommercial_ use was now fully legal, with not even the
hint of illegality.

A friend of mine has over 4500 CDs he has borrowed from libraries, friends,
etc. and transferred to DAT tapes. (Until recently, DATs were cheaper per
hour of recording than CD-Rs....this has recently changed, and CD-Rs are
now as cheap or cheaper.)

Myself, I have about 200 CDs on DAT. All strictly legal under this Act.

It is possible that the new law just signed by Clinton will conflict with
the older explicit permission. I presume they'll return our blank tape
taxes, then, right? And I presume they'll have ways to know which tapes
were made when this taping was fully legal (explicitly), and which were
made after?

No on both of these accounts.

However, the new law is pernicious.

There is no way to establish the "value" of goods, except by sales price,
and this is problematic.

(I could declare this posting to have a "value" of $1000, and in fact offer
to sell it to non-Cyphepunks list members for $1000. It would be fully
legal and feasible for more to do this. Then, if someone made a "copy" of
it, as they might make a copy of Microsoft Office, they've broken the new
law. Of course, the Copyright Cops won't go after Joe Blow for "pirating"
my little article...they'll only go after their corporate donors.)

--Tim May


The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
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