JD Lassica, guest blogger at Freedom to Tinker, posts a story from his book Darknet about the terrible muddle that is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The story involves an unwitting violation of the law by Intel VP Donald S. Whiteside.

Whiteside used a short clip from the film "Rudy" in a homemade DVD of his son playing Pop Warner football. In the process, he used a program which needed DVD Jon's illegal DeCSS algorithm.

Whiteside made this admission at a meeting with congressmen interested in technological copyright protection schemes, such as the one DeCSS circumvents.

The point of his demonstration, Whiteside said, was not a mea culpa, but a real-world example of how Washington’s penchant for legislative solutions can hobble a new, flowering marketplace of innovation.

“This is precisely the kind of exciting consumer creativity that should be enabled,” he said. “I don’t claim to have all the answers. Should I have to go clear rights to use ten seconds from Rudy in my son’s video, or does it fall under fair use? Should I have to pay pennies for every second of a snippet? I don’t know. But I do know that we have to figure out a way for consumers to do something creative without breaking the law.

“To me, this episode was a great way to frame the question: Should copyright law permit this or not? Should the DMCA criminalize this sort of thing? Or should the creative community, high-tech community, and lawmakers get together to try to stimulate this kind of innovative behavior?”