O Copyright, Thou Art Sick

This is "only" in the US, but as we know, like the plague, these things have a habit of spreading. It's proposed new legislation called SIRA. As the EFF site explains:

SIRA's main aim is clearing the way for online music services by revising the current mechanical compulsory license set out in Section 115 of the Copyright Act to accommodate "full downloads, limited downloads, and interactive streams." So far so good, but the devil is in the details. This license specifically includes and treats as license-able "incidental reproductions...including cached, network, and RAM buffer reproductions."

By smuggling this language into the Copyright Act, the copyright industries are stacking the deck for future fights against other digital technologies that depend on making incidental copies. Just think of all the incidental copies that litter your computer today -- do you have a license for every copy in your browser's cache?

This is the key point: every time you view a Web page you make a copy; every time you play a CD, you make a copy. As the wise Larry Lessig put it to me recently: "in a digital age, copying is as natural as breathing."

Indeed, we need to take the copy out of copyright: it's not about copying, it's about publishing. But this SIRA thing is going in the opposite direction, explicitly making even incidental and evanescent copying something that needs to be regulated and approved. Bad news, people. (Via BoingBoing.)

Update: Not looking good so far.