[Reader-list] copyright ad absurdum

[Arun Mehta]

from The Weekly Spin, Wednesday, February 5, 2003:
>COPYRIGHTING FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION™
>http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15026
>   The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 has given
>   corporations increased power to censor speech that they don't like.
>   It severely curtails the "fair use” doctrine which allows artists,
>   writers and scholars to use fragments of copyrighted works without
>   permission for the purposes of education, criticism and parody.
>   Kembrew McLeod notes that trademark law has been used to spike a
>   web site that parodied Dow Chemical, and Vivendi Universal studios
>   used it to kill VivendiUniversalSucks.com on grounds that "certain
>   members of the public ... would be likely to understand 'sucks' as
>   a banal and obscure addition to the reasonably well-known mark
>   Vivendi Universal." Just to prove the absurdity of the law, McLeod
>   has taken out a trademark on the phrase "freedom of expression"
>   itself. "Apparently, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office did not
>   find the idea of someone controlling this phrase morally, socially
>   and politically unsettling, and it granted me ownership of the mark
>   in 1998," he writes.
>SOURCE: AlterNet, January 27, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/January_2003.html#1043643601
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