fwd: new bill reduces our rights

[Philip Verdieck <pv04+@andrew.cmu.edu>]

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Date: Fri, 28 Apr 89 20:56:36 EDT
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Reply-To: rms@prep.ai.mit.edu
Subject: [rms@ai.mit.edu: new bill reduces our rights]
Senator Orrin Hatch is pushing a law against lending and rental of
software and also of musical recordings.  This would take away (in one
area) a public freedom that has existed since the beginning of
copyright law: the freedom to borrow and lend.

I found out about this from librarians to other librarians.  The
American Library Association considers this a serious threat.  There
is no telling how far it would go; eventually, public libraries could
be forced out of existence by limiting them to media which by then
have become obsolete.

Hatch's position is that people rent software only in order to copy
it.  I'm told this untrue--people often rent software to decide
whether to buy it--but even when people do want to copy it for their
own use, they are only trying to exercize another traditional right
which had existed in copyright law for hundreds of years and was taken
away from us fairly recently.

It seems that there is a continuing effort to restrict or eliminate
traditional rights of "fair use" of copyrighted works.  Whenever
people start really using these rights, and deriving a lot of benefit
from them, publishers try to take them away.

The reason given by the publishers is that they make less money than
they would if people did not have these rights.  In other words, they
think the law should be designed to maximize their profits, and the
interests of the users are secondary.

They have their priorities backwards.  The purpose of copyright
(stated in the constitution and by the Supreme Court) was to benefit
the public in general--helping publishers is just a means to an end.
We must not let the means wag the end.

Regaining these rights would be much harder than preserving them.  If
we can muster enough opposition now, we can avoid a much harder fight
in the future.

Please help wake people up.  Write Senators Hatch and Kennedy, and
your own senators.  A sufficient address is:

  Senator so and so
  Washington, DC

The bill is S.198, the Computer Software Rental Amendments Act, and is
being considered in the Copyright and Trademarks Subcommittee of the
Senate Judiciary Committee.

Pass this message on to bulletin boards, netnews, and anywhere else
you can.