"Governments should legislate that fair use entitlements cannot be overriden."

What is fair use?

"Fair use" is the doctrine in US copyright law entitling the public to access and use copyrighted works even when this would normally be infringement. It is effectively a limitation on copyright.
Copyright law requires that those wishing to reproduce or distribute a work may only do so with the permission of the copyright holder (normally the author or his publisher). Fair use permits certain exceptions to this rule:

certain types of educational use (generally by librarians and teachers)
criticism and review
private non-commercial copying (not in the UK)
parody (not in the UK)
The equivalent doctrine in the UK is called "Fair dealing", and works the same way, but isn't as permissive as the US or German formulation.
Why does fair use need to be positively defined?
Just as copyright is only really the entitlement to bring a court action, fair use only formally exists as an automatic defence to such an action. That is, fair use has a negative definition: it only exists in the law as something you're not allowed to be sued for doing. This is no longer enough.
You can't initiate a court action to get back an entitlement you should have under the fair use doctrine. This is a problem because it's possible to obstruct fair use by the use of law or technology. Here's how:

Circumventing Fair Use
Technology Contract Law
The rightholder can lock up his content with encryption or other access controls, and by mediating access to the work may control whether or not it can be reproduced, regardless of any limitations in copyright law.
There is no incentive for the rightholder to play fair and make the technological protection system honour the limits of copyright, indeed this is the attraction of technological protection: it doesn't expire seventy years after the death of the author, and money can be made from selling fair use entitlements back to the public.
The rightholder can get the user to agree to a contract restricting his use. This could potentially go further than technological measures, as the user could be made to agree, for instance, not to write a critical review of the rightholder's work.
A drawback to this approach is that contracts will only bind single individuals, and many such contractual terms are currently unenforceable. Big software firms in the US are seeking to change this through the passage of the UCITA.

Constituting as it does an abuse of the unequal bargaining positions of the rightholder and the user, such a contract might also be unenforceable on equitable grounds.



One has to ask, if such tactics are permitted, why the rightholder needs copyright protection at all, having two stronger mechanisms at his disposal ...
At any rate, there is a profit to be made from these sorts of extensions to intellectual property protection, and the public

What should be done?
Governments should legislate that fair use entitlements cannot be overriden. The current formulation of the law, where fair use entitlements are only protected by providing them as a defence to a lawsuit, is now inadequate.
Fair use and public libraries do not, as some have said, constitute a tax on rightholders. They should be supported as a reasonable democratic compromise, balancing the otherwise exclusive control which copyright grants rightholders over information works they have created, often by borrowing ideas from the public domain.

Isn't is possible that current fair use laws could cover the digital realm if someone were to just challange it in court? I would hope so.

Only problem there compmore, is that no one has the resources to challenge it in court. Or no one wants to risk their resources challenging an organization like the RIAA that have unlimited resources at their disposal.

So the RIAA may continue to extort money from the average American citizen.

true, then additional laws won't work then if they never get challanged

What was clear during the DMCRA hearings, was that Mary Bono, Butch Otter, and Darrell Issa, have not clue what fair use is.

Funny -- I was under the impression that these political hacks didn't CARE one whit about fair use. Certainly their pimps -- er, benefactors (a.k.a. the RIAA and MPAA) are suffused, as I've noted time and again, with the attitude that "fair use" is a mere (sniff) privilege, subject to revocation upon whim.

It was telling that Mary thought fair use was "ancient" and "outmoded" (or words to that effect). Oh, does that mean that she likewise thinks that the foundations for our system as laid out by the Founding Father are "ancient" and "outmoded," as well? Is she one of those who think that our system should be scrapped in favor of the secularist One World government agenda being pushed to death?

And as to this "no one has the resources": Given the decimation of the middle class over the last decade since NAFTA, CAFTA, SCHMAFTA (whatever), what with the exporting of jobs and all that (I.M.H.O., "outsourcing" is as misleading a word as "piracy" is with respect to "copyright infringement") and the masses' relegation to low-paying "service" jobs (as in "You want fries with that?"), is it any wonder? We are headed, as many have noted, to a situation where we only have the very rich and the very poor -- and the very rich use their power over the very poor like a gun to someone's head. That, plus the "justice" system being more and more skewed against the poorer sections of our population, and greater concentration of the media into fewer -- and bigger -- hands.

the average congressman can barely differentiate a gigabyte from a bite to eat, and is being lobbied by the riaa like a parent is nagged by her child.

to define fair use in this environment would be disasterous for the public trust.

we need to weather this storm, even if it takes 50 years, then bring up this discussion again when politicians have realized their insanity.

Politicians realize their insanity? When what freezes over? Quack.

Mass Civil Disobedience