i-sako.com

I happened to catch this news tidbit on Digg today:

British Library calls for digital copyright action

The British Library has called for a “serious updating” of current copyright law to “unambiguously” include digital content and take technological advances into account.

In a manifesto released on Monday at the Labor Party Conference in Manchester, the United Kingdom’s national library warned that the country’s traditional copyright law needs to be extended to fully recognize digital content.

“Unless there is a serious updating of copyright law to recognize the changing technological environment, the law becomes an ass,” Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, told ZDNet UK.

Digital rights management (DRM) technologies and licensing agreements currently can impose restrictions on copying content that go beyond the requirements of copyright law. This needs legal clarification, according to the British Library.

I think the general public needs to hear more of this, because these days it seems like our rights, particularly with respect to issues like copyrights, are being defined more and more by corporations than by governments. At times I think we are at risk of losing the rights we once enjoyed as citizens and are acquiring in return only the so-called “rights” that companies choose to grant us as consumers. It is well beyond time that copyright laws were updated to reflect modern realities, lest corporations be at the forefront of defining our rights in perpetuity.