tower@LIFE.AI.MIT.EDU (04/29/89)
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.