British Library Offers 6 Suggestions for UK Intellectual Property Law Reform

[mandy]

The British Library has the Magna Carta, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and Leonardo da Vinci's notebook, but it's still not happy. Why not? Because it has the intellectual property blues.

The Library issued a manifesto today on intellectual property law in the UK and offered six suggestions for cleaning up the current mess, all of which attempt to strike a proper balance between the rights of creators and consumers of content...

The rights in question include things like "fair dealing," the UK version of "fair use" in the US. In both countries, copyright law makes explicit exceptions for several uses of copyrighted material that require no permission from the copyright holder. While these laws are still on the books, they quickly become meaningless when DRM is used to lock down digital content—and cracking the DRM is illegal, even for legitimate uses. The British Library argues that neither DRM nor contracts should be allowed to "exceed the statutory exceptions for fair dealing access." As they point out, DRM can be designed so that it will never expire, potentially locking material behind a digital doorway forever...

full article: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060925-7821.html