Aaron Swartz 349 Marshman Highland Park, IL 60035 Dear Representative Kirk, I am writing today to express my support for the Position Paper, "Arguments for Changes to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) via the Music Online Competition Act (MOCA): http://www.rice.edu/cb/sos/paper.html This is just the next battle in a long line of problems which have been caused by the restrictive provisions of the DMCA. The DMCA has made it illegal to distribute DVD-playing software, threw Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov in jail for allowing Adobe Ebooks to be read by the blind, and prevented security researchers at Princeton University from presenting their findings at conferences. The DMCA is having a chilling effect on free speech, and the rights of everyday citizens. Important foreign programmers, including some of the lead developers of the GNU/Linux operating system, fear entering the US due to these laws. If the programmers who are creating innovative software to let users do perfectly legal things -- for the DMCA does not have any provisions for fair use or other legal uses of copyrighted material -- are being thrown in jail, who will step up to create the next wave of innovative software? Now, as detailed in the position paper mentioned above, the DMCA is now putting many educational and community "webcasters", or online radio stations out of business by adding to already exorbitant fees and labyrinthine requirements to provide a Web broadcast. These are detailed in: http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/webcasting.html There are three issues of concern to Educational and Community stations with regard to their audio on the internet. The DMCA threatens the existence of these Educational and Community radio outlets with an unfair fee schedule, content restrictions and onerous reporting requirements. The position paper supports HR 2724, the Music On-Line Competition Act and urges that it incorporate provisions to protect Educational and Community stations. I agree with the position paper and ask you to help protect Educational and Community radio/web stations via HR 2724 or other pertinent legislation. Finally, I urge you to consider repealing or updating the DMCA. I urge you to understand its chilling effect on technological progress -- the progress that copyright law was invented to protect, not to hinder. Sometimes with all the lobbyists and major corporations demanding that they need to make money from their "intellectual property" we forget that copyright laws are not related to property at all but are instead "To promote the progress of science and useful arts" as written in the Constitution. I don't think the DMCA is doing that. Sincerely, Aaron Swartz
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