Jon Simpson’s Weblog

So the Free Speech Coalition managed to get a block from 2257 investigation of their members, as members seem to fall under the scope of ‘plaintiffs’ in the Free Speech Coalition et al v. Alberto Gonzales case which forms their main thrust against the legislation.

2257 is nothing new, and something the webmasters dealing in ‘primary production’ have been dealing with for quite some time to keep on the right side of the DOJ. This latest move, to qualify distributors and republishers as ’secondary production’ and classify them under the same record keeping statutes as primary producers, is absurd. It literally means US webmasters could face criminal charges and possible imprisonment over missing documentation for any pictures on their website, no matter what the source. European and foreign webmasters don’t escape lightly either, as 2257 compliance is increasingly urged by sponsors.

Here’s hoping this doesn’t stand and the situation is rectified back to record holding at the primary producer (something that I consider perfectly acceptable and *common sense*) rather than this documentation hell supposedly being enforced ‘real soon now’.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 24th, 2005 at 12:51 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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