The Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it illegal to reverse engineer most technical measures used by copyright owners to protect their works and to make or provide technologies designed to enable such reverse engineering. Congress thought it was merely protecting copyright industries against "piracy" but the anti-circumvention rules are so broadly written and have been so broadly interpreted that they are stifling innovation, research and other legitimate activities. This talk will consider how and why these rules might be narrowed to provide a better balance between protecting the interests of copyright owners and promoting innovation and other public interests.
About the speaker:
Pamela Samuelson is Chancellor's Professor of Law and Information Management at the University of California at Berkeley. She has written and spoken extensively on challenges that information technologies pose for the law, especially for intellectual property law. Samuelson is a Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, a Fellow of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a member of the American Law Institute.
Contact information:
Pamela Samuelson
SIMS, 102 South Hall
University of California
Berkeley CA 94720
Vox: (510) 642-6775
Fax: (510) 642-5814
pam@sims.berkeley.edu