Letters to the Editor:

• My response to former US Registrar of Copyright Ralph Oman, after he speciously argued that Congress "owed" content holders extended terms in compensation for the "whittling away" of copyrights.

Right now, all across the globe, in realspace and cyberspace, a battle is being waged. It pits faceless corporations against the disenfranchised loners; law enforcement against the citizenry it's sworn to protect; and capitalism against democracy. The armaments are keyboard sniffers and encryption packages; the soldiers are bureaucrats and spiderbots, hackers and drones. The battlegrounds include our libraries, our schools, our homes, the DMV, the Library of Congress, the courts, and the Net. The target, the victim, and the casualty just might be human dignity as it has come to be understood during the past four centuries.

The Digital Millenium Copyright Act and its impacts