FreeCulture.org is a lead sponsor of the new Petition for Public Access to Publicly Funded Research in the United States, along with the Alliance for Taxpayer Access and several library and consumer groups. The petition specifically calls for the reintroduction and passage of the Federal Research Public Access Act in the 110th Congress.

Please show your support by adding your signature.

P.S. I don’t think I ever blogged my letter to the editor in response to the Washington Post’s article about the National Day of Action for Open Access, but it was published and is available here.

The FAIR USE Act of 2007 is a bill that would reform the DMCA, restoring traditional fair use as one of 12 major exemptions to the DMCA and codifying the Betamax Doctrine that protects the creators of tools with significant non-infringing purposes should their tools be abused for copyright violations. This bill seems like something we have been awaiting for a long time, so I recommend that we move quickly with our support.

EFF info with link to full text.

UPDATE: One of our UPenn alumns, Bill Herman, writes in support of the FAIR USE Act of 2007, despite some reservations because it is a bit less awesome than the DMCA reform bill Boucher sponsored in 2005.

UPDATE 2: Check out the OpenCongress page for H.R. 1201.