DMCRA hearing and points of view

Matt Rolls a Hoover has a follow-up assessment of the DMCRA hearings (remember, the confusingly-named "DMCRA", the "Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act", is the anti-DMCA). Matt collects a set of reactions, In particular, my DMCRA hearing impressions, where he summarizes:

Seth Finkelstein has his notes about the hearing at Infothought. He refers to the discussion of the DMCA rulemaking process, saying "I definitely thought I had something to say!" I thought his point of view was well represented by various panelists, including Miriam Nisbet of the American Library Association and Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge.

Will all due respect to the fine efforts noted above, I'd like to assert it's not the same. My point of view, of how hard it was, of spending hundreds of dollars of my own money while unemployed since I couldn't get any funding support, of having to basically potentially admit liability under standard copyright, trade secret, and reverse-engineering in violation of shrink-wrap license, of making oneself a personal target - these aspects did not seem to be well-represented. And my victory turned out to ultimately be somewhat pyrrhic in its cost.

Moreover, tool-making and distribution is important in this context, so other people can reproduce and do validation, which is the essence of research. The censorware companies will just lie, and for me, there sure won't be any Slashdot story defense of "a lie about the results" (heck, I'd be lucky if there wasn't Slashdot support for attacks on me!). Perhaps that's put a bit raw, but the idea that those interests facing embarrassing exposes will lie and use legal grounds to suppress embarrassing material, should be thoroughly understood (Diebold!)

Maybe all of that is irrelevant to the focus of the hearings. But I think the fair use and technology discussions missed some important nuances.

Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog (Wikipedia, Google, censorware, and an inside view of net-politics) - Syndicate site (subscribe, RSS)