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Pater Jaszi, professor of Law at the American University in Washington is one of the founders of the Digital Future coalition, an important organisation that has been attempting to reach a balance between content owners and user interests since the DMCA was first proposed and subsequently enacted.

www.dfc.org
The Digital Future Coalition (DFC) is committed to striking an appropriate balance in law and public policy between protecting intellectual property and affording public access to it. The DFC is the result of a unique collaboration of many of the nation's leading non-profit educational, scholarly, library, and consumer groups, together with major commercial trade associations representing leaders in the consumer electronics, telecommunications, computer, and network access industries. (Click here for a list of our members.) Since its inception, the DFC has played a major role -- domestically and internationally -- in the ongoing debate regarding the appropriate application of intellectual property law to the emerging digital network environment.

The DFC was forged in 1995 in response to the release of the Clinton administration's White Paper on Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure. The White Paper recommended significantly altering existing copyright law to increase the security of ownership rights for creators of motion pictures, publishers and others in the proprietary community. Members of the DFC recognized that if the policy proposals delineated in the White Paper were implemented, educators, businesses, libraries, consumers and others would be severely restricted in their efforts to take advantage of the benefits of digital networks.

In 1995-96, Congress debated legislation (NII Copyright Protection Act) to implement the changes listed in the White Paper. This legislation ultimately stalled as the 104th Congress closed in the fall of 1996, in part because the DFC and other concerned parties helped to demonstrate that the bill did not provide for adequate balance between ownership and access rights, and a domestic consensus did not yet exist on how to update copyright law.

In addition to its domestic legislative and policy efforts, representatives of the DFC and its members attended a December 1996 conference of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) that was called to revise the primary international copyright treaty -- the Berne Convention -- for the digital age. The DFC worked to ensure that any agreements reached during the conference did not limit existing rights provided for under U.S. copyright law, and did not affect the ability of the United States to establish new rights to benefit the public interest. The DFC successfully participated in the creation and adoption of agreements that explicitly recognized the need to protect copyright owners, encourage information distributors, and assure public access to information.

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