The new DRM-breaking exemptions just dropped

But here’s the bad news…

The DMCA was signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1998. It has a weird history. Its inception came from Bruce Lehmann, Microsoft’s chief copyright enforcer, whom Clinton tapped to serve as his Copyright Czar. This was back in the “Information Superhighway” days, when Al Gore was holding hearings on the demilitarization and commercialization of the internet. Lehmann presented Gore with a proposal that was so utterly bonkers that it made subsequent net.lunacy (“series of tubes,” etc) look reasonable by comparison.

https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/DMCA/ntia_dmca_white_paper.pdf

Among other things, Lehmann wanted copyright licenses for every transient copy of every work that passed through a computer or network. Like, a separate license for RAM, hard-drive cache, framebuffer, network buffer, etc etc. Gore laughed him out of the room.

So Lehmann scurried off to Geneva, where he convinced the World Intellectual Property Org to put his batshittery into a global treaty, the WIPO Copyright Treaty (one half of the “Internet Treaties”, along with the Phonograms and Performers Treaty).

(Not for nothing that I call WIPO “the Mordor of stupid copyright policies” — they are the origin node for practically every destructive and evidence-free…