As we get closer to the RIAA/MPAA and the major ISPs rolling out their "voluntary" six strikes agreement, turning those ISPs into Hollywood's private police force, details are finally coming out about the Center for Copyright Information (CCI), the organization that the RIAA/MPAA were setting up to manage the six strikes effort. In a move that's at least slightly surprising, and shows that they realized they couldn't completely one-side this entire thing, CCI will be run by Jill Lesser. Lesser was a managing director at The Glover Park Group (a lobbying firm), but also on the board of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a group that is often on the correct side of these issues. That said, Glover Park was also one of the key lobbying firms that the MPAA used to promote SOPA.

However, lots of folks are pointing to the fact that CCI has also set up an advisory board with some familiar names of folks who have fought for consumer rights repeatedly. As Greg Sandoval reports at News.com:

CCI's advisory board will include a large number of privacy and technology advocates, including Jerry Berman, chairman of the Internet Education Foundation and founder of the Center for Democracy and Technology; Marsali Hancock, president of iKeepSafe.org; Jules Polenetsky, director of the Future of Privacy Forum; and Gigi Sohn, president and CEO of Public Knowledge.

This is, at the very least, a nod to the fact that the entertainment industry can't just completely control how this system works. Of course, it's an open question how much power this advisory board will actually have, and how much of this is really window dressing. In fact, the actual power to run CCI is in the hands of a separate "board of directors" which is entirely made up of entertainment industry and ISP representatives.

The "good news" is that many of the folks on the advisory board are certainly not at all shy about making their voices heard if they feel they're being ignored, and Public Knowledge's Gigi Sohn is not one to go away quietly on these issues. As she told Sandoval:

"It was not an easy decision for me to join this Advisory Board," Sohn said in a statement. "I did so because I saw the need to be an advocate for the rights of Internet users and to provide transparency."

Sohn said that one of the first things she wants to see once CCI is up and running is to abolish any kind of service suspension.

"I will ask at the appropriate time," Sohn said, "for the ISPs to promise not to interpret the agreement's 'temporary restriction' provision as allowing for suspension of user Internet accounts."

This whole thing will be worth watching closely, and I'm glad that at least a few good people are on the advisory board, but we'll see what happens when the actual "strikes" start issuing.

Carbon comes in several allotropes: graphene, diamond, nanotubes, buckyballs, nanofoam etc. Some forms are easier to manufacture than others, but someday we might have diamond-based semiconductors or diamond-based quantum computers. If you like shiny minerals, here are just a few interesting links on diamonds.

• The world's first all-diamond ring -- no setting needed, but it's kinda difficult to re-size -- weighs in at about 150 carats and $68 million. And if it gets stuck on your finger, it'll be really hard to cut off without taking your finger with it.... [url]
• The 45-carat Hope Diamond could provide some insights on the geology of the Earth, but it's not easy to conduct science on famous museum artifacts. Scientists are looking at how boron makes blue diamonds blue, and they're etching off a few atomic layers of the diamond to determine how much boron is in it. [url]
• Diamonds can store qubits at room temperature for at least a couple seconds -- a pretty long time in the world of quantum physics. This discovery might lead to more practical quantum computers -- but general quantum computing is still a long way from becoming as useful as traditional computing. [url]
• To discover more interesting science-related stuff, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

We'll have our discussion with Rebecca MacKinnon about her book soon, but as we've now hit April, I wanted to get people started on the second book we'll be discussing as a part of the Techdirt book club. This time it's Copyfraud and Other Abuses of Intellectual Property Law by law professor Jason Mazzone. This is a really fantastic book that came out last year, detailing how the overclaiming of rights is a huge problem these days. "Copyfraud" is a term that Mazzone came up with, but which has really caught on as a way to describe those who claim IP rights that simply don't exist.

As part of this, we're posting one of the chapters from the book (in two parts, starting with this post).

You can, of course, find the book at Amazon in hardcover or ebook form (those are both affiliate links, so we get a tiny cut if you buy via them) or get it from lots of other sources. It's also available to check out from many libraries. Stanford University Press also has some ebook rental options.

Since this came up with the last book, I'll address this head on: the ebook pricing on this book is kind of ridiculous. The Kindle offering is $15. The "rental" option from SUP is $7, but you only get to have the book for two weeks. I realize that these prices are not what most people here consider reasonable for an ebook (and I recognize that the idea of renting an ebook for two weeks at $7 will seem crazy to most folks). I spent some time discussing this with SUP, and they said that Amazon will not allow them to create a temporary discount via the Kindle store for just this group (though they tried), and said that they're a small, non-profit publisher, so purchasing the book would be about supporting their mission -- and they do publish some great books. I recognize where they're coming from, and also recognize that this will not satisfy many of you. For those who still want to participate in the discussion, there will still be this chapter that we're publishing, as well as Jason's original paper on Copyfraud. He was also recently on the Surprisingly Free podcast discussing the book.

For future books, we are looking for publishers and authors who actually understand why pricing ebooks at insane levels does them more harm than good, but that's a very small group of publishers, massively limiting our choices, and forcing us to avoid certain books that I believe are well worth reading. If people have suggestions for future books, we're more than happy to look them over.

In the meantime, read on for the first excerpt from Chapter 3 of Jason's book. Chapter 3 is all about Samples and Mashups, which is definitely relevant to what we usually talk about here.

One of the biggest problems with copyright law is orphaned works—material for which the copyright status is impossible to determine, or for which the current copyright holder is unknown. Closely tied to the issue of orphaned works is the sheer prohibitive difficulty of looking up copyright registration information: the Copyright Office has records going all the way back to 1870, but only those from 1978 onwards are available online. That leaves over a century of records that exist only in physical catalogues containing upwards of 70-million entries. Millions of these works have undoubtedly fallen into the public domain thanks to shorter, stricter copyright laws at the time of their creation—and yet they continue to have de facto copyright protection because very few people have the means to access and search the records.

Last year, the Copyright Office said that they would make it a priority to digitize these records. Naturally this is a difficult and expensive task: the scanning phase is well underway, but the office has yet to tackle the much bigger challenges of text-recognition and metadata tagging that are necessary to make the records searchable. As a stopgap solution, they are now considering the possibility of putting the raw scans online:

Of the 25,723 drawers in the Copyright Card Catalog, more than 12,000 have already been scanned resulting in more than 17 million card images safely tucked away in Library storage. The long term plan is to capture index terms from the card images using OCR and keyboarding and to build indexes for online searching. But this will require significant time and money to achieve. Must we wait to share these images with you? Maybe not.

As an interim step, the Copyright Office is considering making the images of the cards in the catalog available online through a hierarchical structure that would mimic the way a researcher would approach and use the physical card catalog. We’re calling this a virtual card catalog. While it would not provide the full record level indexing that remains a principal goal, it would make information available as we’re doing the scanning and as searchable as the actual cards.

Anything that makes these records more accessible is a good thing, but this situation really just serves to underline the massive imbalance in copyright law. The public domain—supposedly a key part of the bargain of copyright—is being curtailed by the failure of the system to keep up with technology and culture. In today's world, everyone is a content creator, and by extension, everyone is a remixer. For new generations, public records that don't exist online might as well not exist at all. Expecting people to wait for these records to be digitized (or fly to D.C. and request access to the physical catalogue) is laughable—a total denial of reality. Is it any surprise that people don't respect copyright law under such circumstances?

We've already discussed the ongoing fight about what happens to all of the content that was stored on Megaupload's servers. It's actually a case of strange bedfellows: the US government says they're done with the servers (which seems odd, since the content would appear to be evidence in a criminal case, but the feds seem to want it to disappear). Carpathia -- the hosing company spending $9,000 per day to hang onto the servers -- would like to stop having to pay that money. Megaupload wants to preserve it, saying that it will help it win its case. The MPAA wants to preserve it so that it might use the data to sue more people. And the EFF wants to save it because it notes that there's a lot of legitimate content there that people can't access any more.

To that end, the EFF has helped a guy in Ohio file a request with the court to preserve the data, noting that it's important to his business. The guy in question was filming school sports around Ohio and used Megaupload as a way to backup those files. Because of a hard drive crash just before the feds took down Megaupload, the guy has lost a bunch of his videos. As the EFF notes in its filing (pdf and embedded below):

It is one thing to take legal action against an alleged copyright infringer. It is quite another to do so at the expense of entirely innocent third parties, with no attempt to prevent or even mitigate the collateral damage.

That is what has happened here. When the government shut down Megaupload, it was one of the 100 most popular websites in the world, with reportedly 150 million registered users. One of those users, Kyle Goodwin, had recently started a business reporting on local high school sporting events across Ohio. In addition to backing up his files on a hard drive, Mr. Goodwin joined many others like him in placing his files on Megaupload’s servers, paying for a premium account, and taking advantage of the remote backup cloud-based system for storage and remote access to an unlimited number of files.

I'm still amazed that the feds went through with this takedown, rather than telling the MPAA to file a civil lawsuit for copyright infringement against Megaupload.

Almost exactly a year ago, we saw yet another trick come out of the copyright troll's bag. To justify the increasingly failed attempts to sue a ton of people in a single lawsuit, there was a claim that all of the people connected to a single BitTorrent swarm represented a conspiracy to infringe on copyrights together. As we said at the time, this seemed like an incredibly weak argument, and it appears that at least one court agrees. A judge in Illinois has rejected that argument pretty soundly:

Moreover, it appears that the claims of civil conspiracy themselves are unfounded, because the plaintiffs have not pleaded the existence of an agreement among the alleged conspirators... Additionally, based on what has been pleaded, it does not appear plausible that plaintiffs could plead the existence of a conspiracy. Consequently, the court finds that the complaints’ allegations of civil conspiracy are only unjustified attempts to bolster the obtaining of irrelevant discovery about non-parties.

The court also notes (as many more are doing) that it's quite clear that this lawsuit was filed not to litigate the actual issues, but to uncover the identities of those they identified to try to threaten them into "negotiating a settlement."

It's good to see both of these things. Courts recognizing that these arguments are huge stretches of legal theory just to justify a bogus joinder argument is a huge step forward. On top of that, the fact that more and more judges seem well aware of the true intention of copyright trolls in using the court system as a part of their business model, rather than for a legitimate judicial reason, means that fewer and fewer courts will be willing to accept such an abuse of the court system.

We're a little late for the April Fools target date, but we wanted to pass along this pitch-perfect press release from reader Zacqary Adam Green about his media organization Plankhead and their success with a highly effective anti-piracy solution:

Plankhead Experiences 0% Piracy Rate Thanks To CC0 Anti-Piracy Technology

Syosset, New York — April 1, 2012 — Plankhead announced today that their animated series, Your Face is a Saxophone, has sustained a 0% rate of illegal downloads since its debut last year. The group attributes this astronomical success to their use of CC0, an anti-piracy technology produced by the San Francisco, California-based organization Creative Commons (CC).

In an internal audit, the group determined that no consumer has ever obtained an episode of Your Face is a Saxophone through piracy. “We were stunned by these numbers,” said Zacqary Adam Green, founder and Chief Executive Plankhead of Plankhead. “Independent and well-established media companies alike have been reporting massive losses to pirated content, and yet every single person who has downloaded our series has done so legally. We have eliminated the problem of online piracy.”

Many anti-piracy technologies have been controversial due to their employment of a Digital Rights Management (DRM) system. CC0 works differently, by removing all copyright on a digital media file without modifying or locking the data within. This has the effect of severely limiting a consumer’s ability to do anything illegal with the content.

Plankhead was unable to track all downloads of Your Face is a Saxophone, but the CC0 technology makes this a non-issue. “It gives us peace of mind,” said David Lanz, Chief Operating Plankhead of Plankhead. “With CC0, we don’t have to account for every single download to be sure that none of them are illegal. We’ve consulted dozens of security experts, electrical engineers, and quantum physicists, and they’ve all agreed that it’s physically impossible to pirate our show. So we can be certain that nobody has ever done it.”

The group switched to CC0 technology in October of last year after Mr. Green voiced concerns with their previous choice of anti-piracy technology, Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY). “CC-BY is still much stronger than a DRM-based anti-piracy technology,” said Green, “but I was still able to conceive of a way that someone, somewhere might be able to infringe on our copyright with a CC-BY-protected product. CC0, on the other hand, is rock-solid.”

Green also believes that the technology has been a tremendous financial boon to the group. CC0 generates gratitude from informed consumers and digital activists, which differs from competing disdain- and hatred-based technology. “If we hadn’t used CC0, our revenue probably would have been halved,” said Green. “The goodwill it generates has been wonderful for our business.”

Plankhead is an organization devoted to the production, promotion, and proliferation of public media. In less pretentious terms, they make stuff, donate it to the world, and scream loudly about its existence. Your Face is a Saxophone is their first major release. For more information about Plankhead and Your Face is a Saxophone, please visit http://plankhead.com and http://yfias.com.

While most folks are looking elsewhere, it appears that Congress is trying to see if it can sneak an absolutely awful "cybersecurity" bill through Congress. We've discussed how there's been some fighting on the Senate side concerning which cybersecurity bill to support, but there's a similar battle going on in the House, and it appears that the Rogers-Ruppersberger bill, known as CISPA (for Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) or HR 3523 is winning out, with a planned attempt to move it through Congress later this month. The bill is awful -- and yet has somehow already gained over 100 sponsors. In an attempt to pretend that this isn't a "SOPA-like" problem, the supporters of this bill are highlighting the fact that Facebook, Microsoft and TechAmerica are supporting this bill.

However, this is a terrible bill for a variety of reasons. Even if we accept the mantra that new cybersecurity laws are needed (despite a near total lack of evidence to support this -- and, no, fearmongering about planes falling from the sky doesn't count), this bill has serious problems. As CDT warned when this bill first came out, it's way too broad and overreaching:

However, the bill goes much further, permitting ISPs to funnel private communications and related information back to the government without adequate privacy protections and controls. The bill does not specify which agencies ISPs could disclose customer data to, but the structure and incentives in the bill raise a very real possibility that the National Security Agency or the DOD’s Cybercommand would be the primary recipient.

If it's confusing to keep track of these different cybersecurity bills, the ACLU has put together a handy dandy (scary) chart (pdf) comparing them all. And what comes through loud and clear is that the Rogers-Ruppersberger CISPA bill will allow for much greater information sharing of companies sending private communication data to the government -- including the NSA, who has been trying very, very hard to get this data, not for cybersecurity reasons, but to spy on people. CISPA has broad definitions, very few limits on who can get the data, almost no limitations on how the government can use the data (i.e. they can use it to monitor, not just for cybersecurity reasons) and (of course) no real oversight at all for how the data is (ab)used.

CDT has put together a reasonable list of 8 things that should be done if politicians don't want to turn cybersecurity into a new SOPA, but so far, Congress is ignoring nearly all of them. Similarly, EFF is asking people to speak out against CISPA, noting that it basically creates a cybersecurity exemption to all existing laws. If the government wants your data, it just needs to claim that it got it for "cybersecurity purposes" and then it can do pretty much whatever it wants.

This is a really bad bill and it looks like it's going to pass unless people speak up.

When Jonathan Tasini and a few others filed a lawsuit against the Huffington Post last year, we called it the dumbest lawsuit ever. Even though Tasini has had some luck in filing class action lawsuits against media properties, this lawsuit was completely and absolutely frivolous. Tasini (and many others) had blogged on The Huffington Post for free. That was the deal from the beginning and it was clearly laid out: Huffington Post provided them with a platform which they could use, and they could promote themselves however they wanted, but they didn't get paid. Huffington Post does have some paid reporters, but they have different rules and responsibilities (including requirements on how much they write, etc.) When the Huffington Post sold for $315 million, Tasini decided that he and the other volunteer writers deserved $105 million.

There were all sorts of problems with his argument, beyond just the fact that he agreed to basic terms and was trying to go back and change them afterwards. It also showed a complete misunderstanding of the nature of equity in a company. If Huffington Post had flopped and was in debt, would Tasini then be legally required to help cover the debt? Of course not. Ownership (equity) is a totally separate issue from compensation -- and the capital gains on equity have everything to do with the risk that the founders and investors put into HuffPo, completely unrelated to the question of direct compensation. But, of course, none of that matters because, again, Tasini agreed to the deal upfront in which he blogged for free. If he didn't understand the terms of the deal, that was his problem. The arguments in his filing were even more ridiculous, where (despite this not being a copyright issue) he pretended that the Copyright Clause of the Constitution meant that content creators must be "appropriately compensated." The whole thing was a complete joke.

It was made even more ridiculous when it later came out that Tasini himself had a blog... on which he had volunteer writers who he did not pay. Not only was the lawsuit stupid, but it was filed by a hypocrite who didn't understand the law and did the same thing he was angry at HuffPo for doing.

Thankfully, it appears the judge agreed. Not only did the court dismiss the lawsuit, but it did so with prejudice, meaning that Tasini can't just refile the lawsuit to make up for its failings. The judge is effectively saying that it doesn't matter what legal arguments Tasini makes, he has absolutely no case.

There is no question that the plaintiffs submitted their materials to The Huffington Post with no expectation of monetary compensation and that they got what they paid for — exposure in The Huffington Post....

Moreover, equity and good conscience plainly do not support the plaintiffs in this matter. No one forced the plaintiffs to give their work to The Huffington Post for publication and the plaintiffs candidly admit that they did not expect compensation. The principles of equity and good conscience do not justify giving the plaintiffs a piece of the purchase price when they never expected to be paid, repeatedly agreed to the same bargain, and went into the arrangement with eyes wide open.... Quite simply, the plaintiffs offered a service and the defendants offered exposure in return, and the transaction occurred exactly as advertised. The defendants followed through on their end of the agreed-upon bargain. That the defendants ultimately profited more than the plaintiffs might have expected does not give the plaintiffs a right to change retroactively their clear, up-front agreement. That is an effort to change the rules of the game after the game has been played, and equity and good conscience require no such result.

Tasini is apparently considering appealing, which would be a waste of time and money. Any court is going to smack this lawsuit down.

In the meantime, Tasini has now branded himself as someone who has twice filed major lawsuits against publications that published his writings. It makes you wonder: what publication would want to put itself at such risk in the future?

Hadopi, the organization set up in France to administer its three strikes law (kicking people offline based on accusations -- not convictions -- of copyright infringement), has put out a new report looking at how things are going 17 months after its creation. It highlights a bunch of benchmarks to suggest that infringement is dropping and that people are no longer visiting file sharing sites. The report links to a bunch of reports showing a decline in traffic to those sites. They even include some data on traffic to sites like Megaupload -- despite the fact that cyberlocker downloads are not covered by Hadopi. However, as the TorrentFreak link above points out, it's worth noting that even if this is true, it hasn't turned into revenue:

For more than a decade the entertainment industry has claimed that digital piracy is the main cause for the gradual decline in revenues. So if piracy is down massively in France, one would expect that the revenues are soaring, right? But they’re not.

If we look at the French music industry we see that overall revenues were down by 3.9 percent in 2011.

Likewise, the French movie industry is still going through a rough period with revenues dropping 2.7 percent in 2011. Ironically, an industry insider even blamed online piracy for this drop.

To sum it up. in 2011 online piracy was slashed in half according to the Hadopi report, but despite this unprecedented decline the movie and music industries managed to generate less revenue than in 2010. If we follow the logic employed by the anti-piracy lobby during the past decade, this means that piracy is actually boosting sales.

Now, we've been pointing out for years that spending so much time and resources on reducing infringement is pretty pointless if it doesn't lead to an increase in revenue. And it appears that such a revenue increase isn't magically appearing (just as we predicted). Now, of course, there was that report that was trumpeted by Hadopi supporters claiming that there was an increase in iTunes sales, but the details showed that was correlated to new releases in Apple products (and Christmas) more than three strikes. And this new report actually shows just how little the iTunes boost really was. It has a chart showing different music services and how their usage has changed in France during Hadopi's existence: What you see... is kind of a mixed bag. iTunes usage increased just slightly -- but not that much at all, considering the numbers the reports brags about concerning decreases in infringement. You do see a big jump on two services: Beezik and Spotify, both of which allow for the ability to listen to music for free. You also see decreases in traffic to Deezer and Universal Music. If the industry was right that reducing piracy would magically boost all of these alternatives, there would certainly be a more noticeable trend. This really raises significant questions as to what's the point of all of this. Implementing Hadopi cost French taxpayers quite a lot of money and if it's not actually helping the industry, what good is it?

It just comes back to that same important question: which is more important? Reducing infringement or increasing revenue? The industry has acted for years as if the former is the most important (and when we ask this question, they insist that the former would lead to the latter). Yet, now the evidence doesn't appear to support that. If anything, Hadopi's report, while patting itself on the back for reducing infringement, really highlights just how useless Hadopi has been and what a waste it's been for both French taxpayers and the French entertainment industry that has supported it so strongly.

On Friday, the White House's annual report on "IP enforcement" came out, and we noted the serious problems with the report. However, we did miss a little tidbit that Declan McCullagh picked up on. Hidden in the details of the report, it does suggest that we still need a "legislative solution" to offshore file sharing -- which was the point of SOPA/PIPA:

"We believe that new legislative and non-legislative tools are needed to address offshore infringement."

Now, the report also does reiterate what the White House said earlier during the SOPA/PIPA fight: that it would not support DNS blocking or other legislative efforts that harm the internet, but just saying that it supports some legislation at all seems pretty questionable. If anything, it's probably a wink and a nod towards Hollywood to try again, with something less overreaching. Of course, anything that's cooked up in the backrooms again simply isn't going to go over well, and (as I noted in my previous post on the report) it's a real shame that the White House doesn't even seem to acknowledge that the landscape and awareness on this issue has changed.

Five years ago, we wrote a post comparing the RIAA (and the MPAA) to 17th century French buttonmakers, who used their guild to go absolutely crazy in blocking a horrifying new innovation: cloth buttons, which could be made by weavers, without making use of the members of the buttonmakers guilt. The story came from Robert L. Heilbroner's book The Worldly Philosophers (an all around excellent book if you want to learn some of the basics of the history of economics).

"The question has come up whether a guild master of the weaving industry should be allowed to try an innovation in his product. The verdict: 'If a cloth weaver intends to process a piece according to his own invention, he must not set it on the loom, but should obtain permission from the judges of the town to employ the number and length of threads that he desires, after the question has been considered by four of the oldest merchants and four of the oldest weavers of the guild.' One can imagine how many suggestions for change were tolerated.

Shortly after the matter of cloth weaving has been disposed of, the button makers guild raises a cry of outrage; the tailors are beginning to make buttons out of cloth, an unheard-of thing. The government, indignant that an innovation should threaten a settled industry, imposes a fine on the cloth-button makers. But the wardens of the button guild are not yet satisfied. They demand the right to search people's homes and wardrobes and fine and even arrest them on the streets if they are seen wearing these subversive goods."

I think the parallels to the RIAA and the MPAA are pretty self-evident. Freaking out about others entering the market? Check. Running to the government and demanding protections? Check. Expecting others to get permission to innovate? Check. Able to get government-sanctioned fines levied on those new players? Check. Feeling totally entitled to violate the property rights of others to "find" evidence of "subversive goods"? Check.

It seems this comparison between the RIAA/MPAA and protectionist, anti-innovation guilds of that era has occurred to others as well. In a recent episode of the Planet Money podcast, host Adam Davidson does a "deep dive" into the economics of a 16th century German weavers' guild and discovers the same patterns. Collusion in the guild to keep out innovation, to artificially limit the market, to keep wages of employees down and, most importantly, the first response to any competitive threat is to run to the government and lobby for greater protections.

The comparison to the RIAA and MPAA is so obvious that Adam Davidson calls it out pretty early on in the discussion, noting that these "guilds" don't seem all that different from those two groups today. Of course, given that they're both built on copyright law, which originally was designed as a protectionist tool for a similar publishers guild, perhaps the similarities aren't too surprising.

While we noted that the entertainment industry was absolutely freaking out over the possibility of greater copyright exceptions (fair use, fair dealing, etc.) in the UK, it's been really encouraging to see significant interest in copyright exceptions elsewhere. In that second link, we talked about efforts down in Australia to get the government to explore greater copyright exceptions as part of the TPP treaty. Perhaps those efforts are having an effect. It appears that the Australian Law Reform Commission is now considering the possibility of expanding the use of copyright exceptions within the law.

The the full document (pdf) notes that it needs to be explored if the existing exceptions are "adequate and appropriate in the digital environment" and if greater exceptions might:

• facilitate legitimate use of copyright works to create and deliver new products and services of public benefit; and
• allow legitimate non-commercial use of copyright works for uses on the internet such as social networking.

For those of you who live in Australia, there's an open comment period for what the "terms of reference" for the inquiry should include. You can be absolutely sure that the industry folks will be working hard to stifle copyright exceptions. Hopefully the public's voice -- and the voice of real creators who value and make use of exceptions every day -- will be heard as well.