Lobbying group believes gamers need exceptions to DMCA

October 30th, 2007, 20:01 Posted By: wraggster

Are gamers affected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act? The Entertainment Consumers Association argues that they are. The group has just announced its support for the FAIR USE Act in an attempt to make the world safe for democracy backing up game discs.

The ECA is a relative newcomer to the political scene. Founded in 2006, it's a nonprofit that wants to represent gamers in a way that the Entertainment Software Association can't. The ESA, despite having the resources to battle bad video game legislation across the country, looks out for the interests of the game developers and publishers.

The Act is a watered-down version of the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act, which Boucher and Doolittle have been pushing for years without success. The idea was that circumvention of copy controls would be legal so long as the intended use of the material was legal. In the FAIR USE Act, though, the actual exceptions proved much more narrow and did not include this broad immunity.
The upshot is that the FAIR USE Act is good for hardware manufacturers, but only moderately good for consumers.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ca-reform.html

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