DRM Critique Airs On National Public Radio 353
An anonymous reader writes to point out that a critique of Digital Rights Management made it onto the mainstream media this morning. NPR's Marketplace Morning Report ran a piece noting that with the demise of the VHS format we risk losing fair-use rights since we now have only digital media. From the article: "As our country moves forward to regulate digital copying, I urge us all to bear in mind T. S. Eliot's famous saying. 'Good poets borrow; great poets steal.'"
demise of vhs? wtf? (Score:3, Insightful)
VHS isn't dead, nor will it be for a very long time. There's a big difference between DRM supporting companies wishing it would die, and it actually dying.
Incidentally, we have a record shop in town that does a brisk trade in the vinyl media that *ahem* 'died' a few years back....
Mainstream Media? (Score:4, Insightful)
VHS has little to do with it. (Score:5, Insightful)
People are willing to sell away anything to get a lower initial price--they're willing to accept more restrictive use if it means saving a buck. It's not just media entertainment, but food, furniture, and almost anything that involves the exchange of money. They'll reserve the right to complain later, but the remedy of that complaint can NEVER be raising the prices to fix what consumers voluntarily sold off.
Yeah, we can sue McDonald's for making us fat, or we could stop thinking that paying $15 for a restaurant meal that won't kill you is some great injustice. We can complain all we want about outsourcing support jobs to wherever, but good god, don't charge us $20 more for our computers. We can balk at the several hundred dollar price of hardwood furniture and complain about deforestation, but IKEA still gets frowned upon for its "cheap" quality in comparison (when in fact, many of their products are surprisingly durable for being made of sawdust and paper).
Price is all-important, and anything that gets us a lower price is a good idea...until we realize that what we threw out the window to get there might actually have been important. Then we want it back, but we want someone else to eat the costs involved with bringing it back.
Incorrect (Score:3, Insightful)
Companies have been preventing us from exercising them.
I know the difference is very subtle.
You must know this and get used to saying it bacause from a legal, and political view point, you still ahve those rights. SO when you say we 'lost our rights' it makes you look ignorant, and can be rubutted with "No we didn't you still ahve the right to do that."
Also, you can make the corporations l;ook bad and not the politicians, which is a better way of communicating with your elected officials. You have been writing to your elected officials..right?
Yet another thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
After all, it's impossible to control people who aren't criminals. You see it on Law & Order all the time: If someone isn't cooperating, they threaten to enforce some other law unless the guy does cooperate. As shit laws like these pile up, the state becomes fascist through no particular malice or evil intent. You being a thorn in their side? Well, I'd sure hate to take your entire DVD collection to make sure they weren't pirated. And you better have receipts, too.
Dead serious: Before any new law may be passed, the legal code shall be reviewed in it's entirety and thoroughly checked for existing laws serving the same purpose. If any such law shall exist, the proposed law may not be passed. If multiple laws serving the same purpose are found, they shall be reconciled into one non-self-contradictory law with the eldest law taking precedence. Not only will Congress be too preoccupied by this to do any more damage, but eventually the legal code will become understandable again. Imagine... justice returns as rich/well-funded criminals can no longer appeal their sentences for 25 years before they go to jail. To help initial implementation, I suggest forming a "council" of 1000 lawyers covering every legal field, and directing them to find contradictory and/or redundant laws.
The problem is that as the legal code grows, the most general search becomes O(N^2) because you need to compare every law with every other law. This needs to happen before N becomes so large that the only way to finish before the End of Time is to completely reboot. Queue arguments that we're already there...
Re:Incorrect (Score:5, Insightful)
No, we lost them -- go read the DMCA. All the copyright holder has to do is say "this was ROT13 encrypted twice" and you have no Fair Use rights anymore.
Re:Incorrect (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have a right, but are prevented from using it, you really *don't* have that right anymore. Just being written down somewhere doesn't make a right a right. The written form is just the description of the right. A right is only a right when it can actually be exercised. Regarding the topic at hand, the corporations have actually taken away (violated) our right to fair use.
The flaw in your argument, as I see it, is the implicit assumption that only the government can take away or grant rights. In reality, it's those with power that grant or take away rights. It just so happens that usually it's the state that has ultimate power, but if the state leaves things to their own devices (ie: free market fundamentalism), all they have done is given the crown of ultimate power over to the next in line, which in the case of America, is the corporations (in other countries, the next in line might be corporations, organized crime organizations, warlords, etc).
Your argument, while it does make the corporations look bad, also absolves them of any legal (which for some, equates to moral) wrong-doing, and undermines efforts to have the government step in to protect our rights.
Re:Mainstream Media? (Score:3, Insightful)
The choice is simple... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yet another thing... (Score:3, Insightful)
Before any additional law (or tax, regulation, etc) two other laws must be canceled, until such a time as the general public has a firm understanding of all of the laws they are required to obey. At that point, every new law must cancel a previous law in order to be entered into the books. The end result should be a 200 page paper back book that is required reading for a high school student. Enforcement of the law should be done by the letter of the law and not by looking over past cases. If a law is ambiguous, it should be clarified and replaced with a new law.
Consider what would happen to the bureaucracy if the most complex tax return was 5 pages long, how much better the legal system would be if anyone could defend themselves without knowledge of years of case law, and what would happen to the special interest if you had to fight against every other special interest for the little space left in the law books left for exemptions.
Of course, that is about as likely to happen as congress voting for a pay cut or the two party system implementing a ranking voting method that doesn't have a built in bias for the two party system.
Who are the real thieves? They are! (Score:5, Insightful)
Suppose that you buy a car on 'time' and agree to make five years worth of monthly payments. After five years (if you don't miss payments) then the car is yours. Suppose that after four years and six months, the finance company bribes the local legislature to extend the amount of time that you have to make payments for another five years. Emmimently fair for them; a rip-off for you. If you refuse to make another payment after the initial five years of payments have come to completion, they call you a thief and get the local law to take your car at gunpoint and put you in jail.
Copyright works the same way. Agreement is made to make payments for an agreed time period for the use of the films, books, or recordings. After that period is up, the films, books, and recordings are paid for and can be used by the public freely. The material enters the public domain.
Paying off politicians to extend this period is theft: it is theft of the public domain. The global media companies have relentlessly and successfully lobbied and bribed for 'extensions' of the copyright period in individual countries throughout the world. They keep extending the time period that the public must pay them in total violation of the spirit of the balance between copyright and public domain. They are the real thieves here, not someone burning a CD or downloading a movie. Never forget this.
Criminals don't get to chose which laws are enforced for all the rest of us. Nor do we have to pay serious attention to the justifications that they use to legitimize their criminal behavior.
Re:Missed it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Everything after that was wrong...
The threat to your "rights" and the rights of copyright holders is low cost digital duplication and distribution. Guess what, 100 years ago copying a book required that you buy the physical materials to print the book on and an expensive printer to print the book. It wasn't cheap. Enter VHS and VCRs... all of sudden where copyright holders had been protected by the high cost of copying their products they're now exposed to easy ultra-low cost duplication means. Enter p2p and you're totally fucked if you create ideas and content and hope to sell it.
The model has been that you create content that people are willing to pay for, and you limit the distribution of that content, and people buy it. If you kill off the ability to limit the distribution of that content then you've killed off the incentive to invest resources into commercial media.
Sure, you'll have all types of mix-ins and exciting mashups and derivative works for the first few years, but who is going to invest in the next Star Wars? The only people with money to invest in expensive media projects that will not return direct profits will be corporations and the rich. Star Wars... in a Ford Focus far far away...
Copyright is good. Protecting it is good. DRM is not inherently evil. Yeah, the media giants are a pain in the ass and generally despicable, but that doesn't make copyright bad and it doesn't mean that they aren't going to be forced to change over time.
DRM is completely unconstitutional (Score:3, Insightful)
This is most likely moot, because in order to properly test this in court, we'd need DRM-protected media of material with an expired copyright. That hasn't happened, and probably never will happen. Congress has asserted their right to extend copyright as much as they wish, and the Supreme Court has agreed - 1 day less than eternity is "limited."
As long as the ??AA funnels money to Congress, and as long as Congress accepts it, copyrights will never expire, and the Public Domain is effectively DEAD.
His quote bears true... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Missed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who are the real thieves? They are! (Score:3, Insightful)
But it does make a pretty good argument for a moral right to copy copyrighted material.
Re:Who are the real thieves? They are! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Missed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
God, apparently. That right is part of the right of free speech and press, which is inherent in humanity. Copyright is an infringement on this right, as it is a right by an author, not to create works (which he already had) but to deny other people their equally inherent right to copy them. It is an acceptable infringement under the right circumstances, but its true nature should not be forgotten. And under the wrong circumstances (i.e. bad, overexpansive copyright law) the artificial right of copyright is not an acceptable infringement on our natural rights.
Re:Yet another thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, your idea is unworkable on its face: laws are lengthy and complex when there is a desire for certainty. When laws are short and simple, there is less certainty as to what they mean (which, incidentally, means that you want to use caselaw, since then the courts will be able to all agree and take a largely uniform approach, rather than varying wildly as they all take their best guess, which will differ).
Saying that the law should be as you describe is as stupid as if I said that the source code for an entire, fast, efficient, feature-packed OS, windowing UI, and apps (office suite, web browser, media player, etc.) should all fit, uncompressed, on a single floppy, and be human-readable, and easily understood by any average high school graduate. It would be nice, but it's a foolish demand to make, and probably can't even be done because some things are simply complicated, and that's how life is.
A legal system can be simple, consistant, just, and efficient, but not all at the same time. In our society, and pretty much every other civilized society, we've chosen to go for just and consistant and where possible, efficient. Most simple and efficient legal systems tend to be of the 'might makes right' or 'eye for an eye' variety, and usually are not very consistant or just.
Re:We lost our fair use rights years ago... (Score:3, Insightful)
The irony here is that the people buying these laser record players [laser-vinyl.com] are the same ones complaining about how CD's sound "digital", and how vinyl is just so "warm"...while going out and buying a record player that basically turns their records into giant CD's.
Re:Missed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hooray. Commercial, one-way media of all kinds deserve to die, or at the very least stop multiplying like virii.
Some random thoughts on this topic:
Money encourages production, not creativity.
What is owned cannot be culture. For me that's an axiom.
Own it if you want, but don't pretend that its got anything to do with culture. If I have to ask someone's permission to use it, it isn't culture. Culture *is* that which can be freely shared.
If you pay me to say it, I'll eventually end up lying.
Money encourages production, but it often encourages the production of crap. The "market" doesn't impose any standard of quality on what gets produced.
The reason we give people a monopoly on copying is so that eventually we have lots of free stuff. Unless you can show that the benefit of increased production outweighs the harm of restricting freedom, don't dare talk about extending copyright in time or space. In fact, we should reduce the term and reach of copyright to the minimum level required to encourage production. *That* makes sense to me. The idea that all this shrink-wrapped blather is someone or other's private property seems to me to be a parlour game gone bad.
Creativity can be encouraged in many ways. In Canada, parents are paid to spend time (a year or something) with their newly born child. Why couldn't individuals be given sabbatical to produce something of cultural importance? If you don't produce, your time off is repaid from source deductions.
Re:Missed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
You need to start realising that the third sentence here has nothing whatsoever to do with the first two sentences.
DRM, inherently evil? You bet it is. DRM is an imposition on the rights of the public way beyond the restrictions imposed by copyright. It's double-dipping.
Copyright is saying, "I own this, so you're not allowed to make money out of it"; DRM is saying, "It doesn't matter whether I own this or not, but if you do anything with it that I choose to prevent you from doing, you're a criminal."
Copyright is a compromise that in a reasonable world should promote creativity. DRM is designed precisely to impose obligations and restrictions on the public that have nothing whatsoever to do with copyright, but everything to do with greed and taking away legitimate rights.
Re:Missed it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Copyright that never expires is theft from the Public Domain. So copyright is theft, at least. (Or is that 'at best'?)
Re:Missed it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, just don't forget that the reason a lot of people create things is to make money. Not to share culture, not to enter into some agreement, long ago cobbled together by people they didn't know and had no input to or representation with. DRM is bad - even evil - when it makes stuff you buy not work on equipment you own, or makes you unable to archive it; but optimism aside, if creating something doesn't provide a sufficient return, creative types are going to turn to other modes of earning a living.
Some things we can all do to reduce copy protection problems: Do not support HDMI. Buy displays and players that provide component connections. Component connections are analog, and they don't support copy protection, whereas HDMI enables HDCP, which is death on toast for the rights you accept as normal. Got an iPod? Do not buy from iTunes. Buy a CD; copy the tracks to your iTunes, then your iPod. Above all, don't copy creative works and give them away. These are the keys. Every time some loser copies a movie or a song and "shares" it, the honest members of the market are made to suffer the attempts to compensate for said losers.
Me, I'm 100% component. I've a big screen home theatre, all manner of stuff connected to it, and a huge media library. I don't "lend" movies or CDs, and I do move content onto my iPod, PSP and palm in various ways, for my legitimate use.
Re:Missed it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Missed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
He said "book", not "copyrighted book". Further, his main point was that "fair use" becoming a widely available option to people, with the availability of digital content, was counteracted by the DMCA and DRM blocking the ability to legally (at least, questionably legally) exercise such "fair use".
Not exactly. Copyright came about precisely because it was so easy for publishers to print up "pirated" copies of works. In the American colonies, there were enough printing presses that a large share of the populace read daily newspapers. The fact that computers are now their own printing press certainly has greatly magnified that initial problem, but even today it's possible to track down the source of copyright infringement in many cases. The real problem is that there are so many infringers and that they don't have any direct commercial gain (even if it were merely the cost of the supplies to make the copies), that there's very little motivation to go after every last outfit that's mass copying works.
The DMCA is inherently evil because its vague wording could be taken to make computers illegal. More generally, it makes it illegal to use the key included with content or the hardware to use said content, except in a narrow scope of exceptions. Further, it is illegal to provide information to others the information to find or use said key, even if they use it only under the narrow scope of legal exceptions. Together, this greatly hinders the ability to speak and effectively cuts off the ability of a vast majority of people to fair use, as they are too computer illiterate to discover on their own the techniques necessary to exercise their rights, and it's not possible to directly teach them the information to take advantage of their rights.
From a practical standpoint, the DMCA isn't an effective way to protect the integrity of DRM as the same means that allows copyright infringement which DRM is meant to stop can be used to either (a) disseminate the cracked DRM-protected content or (b) disseminate the information to crack the DRM-protected content. From a legal standpoint, it provides further basis to punish copyright infringers as well as a stronger legal basis to shut down organizations that collaborate to break DRM schemes. From a technical standpoint, DRM is technologically flawed because it includes the key with the lock.
As stated, DRM is not an effective way to protect copyright. In reality, there's no means of protecting copyrighted works. From a legal perspective, DRM is superfluous, as copyright infringement is already illegal. However, also from a legal perspective, the DMCA provides a means of effectively banning all varieties of DRM-cracking technology so long as there exists as least one copyrighted work protected by said DRM scheme. As such, the DMCA provides a very effective legal blockade to greatly hinder the open operation of technology that would allow people to perform le
Re:Missed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Please go study a bit of history. (You'll probably have to pay to do this, because you don't have the right to read it freely any more.)
JFMILLER
Re:Missed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
One new thing the DMCA and many similar laws introduced was a new "right" for the copyright holder, that of access. It is not really given as a new right, instead they are given the right to control the access but that is for the most part quite similar since it dissallows others the right to access. The right to access a work has not existed in most copyright laws before.
Re:Missed it. (Score:1, Insightful)
Most people are inherently good and will be happy to compensate people for their work if they feel the deal is fair. The idea behind copyright makes this obvious.
Many people seem to think that the power is in the hands of the artists and content creators. That's simply not true. Once you release something, it's out of your control. The public is doing you a favor by paying you for your work, because they want you to continue making more works. It's understood that any "control" you "have" is granted to you by the public.
Copyright term extensions, lobbied and paid for by the content creators or the people funding them, have changed the very essence of how copyright was intended to work. It's an unreasonable term and recent developments make this extremely obvious. The ideas behind copyright are good, the current incarnation in the USA is not.
You claim:
P1 Copyright is inherently good.
P2 DRM protects copyright.
C DRM is inherently good.
I disagree, and I will take issue with premise 2. 'DRM protects copyright'.
DRM does not protect copyright, and it never will. So long as our sensory organs are not some sort of digital input, all media and content will have to be converted to sound waves we can hear, or light we can see.
------------
Here, I will predict who will be affected by p2p:
Shitty Hollywood movies that are going to suck.
Shitty bands that can't play music live (lol!)
Oh noes, investors will have to be a bit more careful about what they put money into. This will raise the bar for bands/scripts to get corporate sponsorship.
Fortunately, technology also lowers the barrier to entry for independent works.
Ideally, you will see a decline in the quantity of corporate sponsored creative works. You will hopefully see a rise in the quality, and most importantly an emphasis on live performances with recordings being used to promote those shows. There will also be a rise in the quantity of indie works.
The sky is not falling. The industry is not dying. Record executives will still get rich. Bands will still get fucked on their record deals. You will continue to pay $30 after you buy the treats for you and your woman to go see a movie. After you pay $30, you will still be harassed by ads telling you not to "steal" from the poor guy making the ROCKY BALBOA set.
Re:If Money Were No Issue... (Score:1, Insightful)
If all the money disappeared (like Earth on Star Trek) do you think the world would be more creative? I think that if everyone could do what they wanted to do and still be able to live/eat/be healthy/have clothes/a home that life would be all good until the tasks that no one wanted to do would cause chaos. How many people really want to clean out the sewers or other necessary but not so pleasing/rewarding jobs?
Remember one thing. (Score:4, Insightful)
Now you can go back to playing with your Milton Friedman action figures.
Re:Missed it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Missed it. (Score:4, Insightful)
My wife is a best-selling author, and depends on copyright for her living, so believe me when I say that we understand the importance of protecting her work. However, the point of copyright is to encourage new creation, which was intended to become part of the public domain. The public basically grants a short-term monopoloy on duplication in exchange for the eventual use of the product. This deal was fair and mutually beneficial.
Big business has bought the government, and the deal is altered past all bounds of recognition or sanity. DRM is the icing on the cake, insuring that even when our current insane copyright terms finally allow ancient works to fall into the public domain, they'll be 'protected' by additional restrictions, assuming terms aren't extended indefinitely.
Even people who need copyright to make a living are shaking their heads and wondering what flavor of Kool-Aid is being passed around the government. Artists don't need 200-year monopolies and draconion punishment of their audience to make a living. I'm not sure who these provisions are supposed to benefit. . . the great-great-great grandchildren of famous movie-makers maybe? Why should the public commons be eliminated for their sakes? Something's not right.
Re:Missed it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Technological: Get rid of old modulation systems and come up with a digital system that makes it easy to broadcast without stepping on anyone else. The TV becomes more like the Internet.
I don't really know what this would solve. The only reason TV remains superior to the Internet, especially in the days of simple rich-media ability in the hands of most anyone, is that the high barrier to entry and the limited spectrum available makes fewer overwhelming choices for the viewer, and presents distinct definitive sources for information. Television already has become "like the Internet"-- in that people are putting broadcast-style media on the Internet already. However, there's still the MP3.com-style problem of an overwhelming crapflood, and no real central definitive "channels". In television, the small selection creates a social byproduct, as well, as the limited choice forces a common cultural ground of "what was on TV."