As Jason Schultz has reported on Copyfight, Senator John McCain (one of the few politicians I personally respect) is standing up against poor legislation that aims to deprive consumers of our fair use rights. A choice quote:
> From the text of the bills that have been available to date for Senators to review, I believe that one part of this broad legislation, the Family Movie Act, may actually harm consumers while appearing to help them. To be clear, I support the stated goal of the Act’s authors: immunizing from legal challenges a technology that enables parents to skip offensive material from prerecorded copies of films and television. While I applaud the merits of their stated intent, I fear that the very exemption designed to achieve this laudable goal simultaneously creates an implication that certain basic practices that consumers have enjoyed for years — like fast-forwarding through advertisements — would constitute criminal copyright infringement. I note that Consumers Union and Public Knowledge, as well as a host of others parties interested in protecting consumers, share my concerns.
On a side note, Senator McCain’s Web site also provides a list of his ‘Pork Statements‘, identifying “items that are unnecessary, low-priority or wasteful spending contained in the annual appropriations bills”.
Killing digital viewing
Just as we are on the verge of space-shifting viewing (to go with the ‘time-shifting’ all but necessary now in a post-VCR era where we have multi-channel time-starved modern worklives), the Hollywood studios want to stop it. The flurry of proposals i…