The Copyright Rule We Need to Repeal If We Want to Preserve Our Cultural Heritage

[Commentary] If the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) remains unaltered, cultural scholarship will soon be conducted only at the behest of corporations, and public libraries may disappear entirely.

That's because the DMCA attacks one of the of the fundamental pillars of human civilization: the sharing of knowledge and culture between generations. Under the DMCA, manmade mechanisms that prevent the sharing of information are backed with the force of law. And sharing is vital for the survival of information. Take that away, and you have a recipe for disaster. "DMCA is a mess," says Henry Lowood, Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections at Stanford University Libraries. "It's basically putting cultural repositories in positions where they either have to interpret very murky scenarios or they have to decide that they are going to do something that they realize is forbidden and hope that nobody's going to notice."