Rick Boucher’s Fair Use bill unveiled

‘Boucher raised the spectre of pay-per-use libraries in the future if the copyright holders were not checked.

“Under the 1998 law, copyright owners now have the power virtually to extinguish the Fair Use doctrine with respect to material delivered in digital format. Even a simple technological protection measure, such as a password, can be placed in front of copyrighted material and a small payment then exacted for every use of the material. Inevitably, more and more copyright owners will use this broad legal power,” he said in a press statement.

The DMCA also penalized the disabled, academics and Linux users, he said.’ [More.]