Speaking Friday at a University of California at Berkeley conference on the law and policy of digital rights management, experts from all circles seem to agree that more is going wrong than right with the current approach to protecting digital content. Moreover, they argue that current laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)--which makes cracking copyright protections illegal, even when otherwise acceptable under other laws--are serving the extremes, not the mainstream populace.
"There has to be a way between the lunatics at the two extremes," said Larry Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University and well-known opponent of the DMCA. "We need to build a layer of reasonable copyright law on top of this background of unreasonable extremism."
Such sentiments for loosening the control of copyright holders are finding far more fertile ground these days, in the wake of a number of lawsuits that illustrate the dangers of the DMCA. Far fewer people believe that the DMCA is an appropriate method to stave off digital pirates in the Internet age.
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