Copyright Comments Redux

Andy Oram of CPSR has has a nice reply comment to the Copyright Office's Anti-Circumvention Rulemaking. As slashdot has discussed before, the Copyright Office has a mandate to examine a part of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and decide whether and how to implement it. If you haven't commented, today is your last chance - see the notice for the requirements for filing, and mark your submission as a reply to, say, Time Warner's comment. I just read an article noting that Stephen King would be in violation of this provision of the DMCA if he read his own e-book.

Comments

I'm sick of you geeks

[finkployd]

The unfairly moded poster got it right, you asked for this yourselves. I'm suprised you have been tolerated as long as you have by the law.

You have the audicity to claim that you should have some kind of "fair use" nonsense. Let me explain something, these media companies work their arses off to provide you with top notch, affordable entertainment. If they want to limit how you view their media, then by golly they have that right. Just because you geeks have can't accept a "real" OS and need some kind of command line only junk doesn't mean you have to right to break laws. you don't "own" a DVD you buy, you just get to listen to it. The only people who would want to make copies are criminals, and DeCSS is ONLY GOOD FOR MAKING COPIES.

I read somewhere on ZDnet that all you guys do is break encryption laws and pirate MP3's anyway, it makes me wonder if Linux even has legimate uses! I hope the DMCA gets you all for this kind of ungrateful, illegal, nonsence.

Finkployd

http://earnestdesigns.com/dvd

Some responses to Time Warner's comment....

[WhiskeyJack]

I've just been browsing Time-Warner's comment, and I'm appalled at the flawed thinking in this document!

For example, Mr. Carson writes:

For one thing, Section 1201(a)(1) prohibits circumvention of technological measures that effective control access to copyrighted works. The Copyright Office, in its summary of the DNCA, said the the section "...does not prohibit the act of circumventing a technological protection measure that prevents copying. By contrast, since the fair use doctrine is not a defense to the act of gaining unauthorized access to a work, the act of circumventing a technological measure in order to gain access is prohibited". To put it in less technical terms, a fair use defense might allow a user to quote a passage from a book but it does not follow that the user is allowed to break into a bookstore and steal a book.

The problem here is that when I buy a DVD (for instance) I am buying the right to access the material stored on it, as well as the media it is stored on. This means that I am by and large entitled to do anything I want to it, whether it be to copy that DVD for my own personal use or to just toss it into the microwave and watch the pretty sparks. To use Mr. Carson's analogy above, I have for all intents and purposes bought the bookstore the book resides in, and therefore I am within my rights to smash the locks and get inside any time I darn well please, and if someone else happens to have a decent crowbar I can use (DeCSS), all the better.

Mr. Carson goes on to argue that such access controls don't hinder anyone's ability to access the controlled work, as they "need only follow the same steps as [they] would in the absence of technological protections...". Unfortunately, those steps currently force me to buy a product that I don't want in order to gain access to content that I've bought the right to view. This is like saying "Okay, you've paid me for this nice hotel room, but you can't actually get in to use it until you go buy one of our special keys from George over there"; ridiculous! Afterall, I've already bought the access rights, but I'm not allow to excercise them until I pay for them twice.

Mr. Carson further argues that since there are alternative means of distributing content other than DVDs, I as a consumer can freely choose to use the non-access controlled media if I disapprove of the restrictions DVDs might impose on me in order to view them. Admittedly, he has a point here....for now. The problem arises that these alternatives aren't guaranteed to be around in the future (in fact, I strongly suspect that if the current model of access control holds up in court, VHS and other freely accessible media will quickly disappear). Since access controlled media is inherently more profitable (you get the money paid for the access rights plus the licensing for the media reader; on top of that, if the current model holds, then it's only a tiny step to impose a pay-per-view model ala Divex, which we wouldn't be able to do a thing to legally circumvent), the media publishers will have every reason to embrace strong access controls if the DMCA actually holds up.

-- WhiskeyJack, too disgusted to continue.

Copyright and Ex Post Facto

[Anonymous Coward]

The original point of patents and copyrights was to promote the common good by giving intellectual property rights to the holder for a limited time period.

However the greedy powers that be have bribed our congress. Copyrights have been retroactively ammended twice, once in the 1970s and again in the late 1990s. This is unconstitutional.

When the shylocks who run the media companies realized that many popular albeit older movies, music,and books were going to fall into the public domain, they bribed your congressman to extend the copyrights retroactively. This is wrong. The copyright contract is a contract between the government, the holder of the copyright, and the People. That contract goes into effect when the copyright is granted. Like any other contract, those terms are fixed at the time of the contract. Can you imagine if the terms of your house mortgage were changed without your permission after the contract had been signed?

One of the basic principles of American law is the Ex Post Facto, which means that no individual can be guilty of retroactive violations of the law. For example, if a law is passed saying drinking in public is illegal, you can not be charged with violating that law if it was not in effect at the time you had a drink in public. Retroactive laws are unconstitutional. Likewise, if a copyright is granted, then the length of that copyright should be that in effect when the copyright was granted. At present (2000), copyrights granted prior to 1925 should be expiring. But because of the illegal copyright extension, all works after 1923 are granted an extension, in violation of Ex Post Facto.

Re:I don't plan on replying.

[cpt kangarooski]

Books and music existed before the notion of copyrights. Suprisingly enough, they were quite popular. I suspect that if movies and software had been around at that time too, they would have also been commonplace forms of expression.

Furthermore, you are shortsighted in your appraisal of copyrights/patents in general.

Copyrights and patents DO NOT exist with the intention that the creators of given work or invention will make money. That's entirely secondary. The point, as you'd know just by looking in the relevant part of the Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8) is to increase the amount of works that enter into the public domain.

In order to encourage the creation of works which are not controlled in their use, Congress can grant monopolies of limited time to the creator. But the intent is clearly not in favor of the creator, and there must be a time limit which additionally favors the public over the creator.

Well suprisingly enough, virtually no copyrighted material has entered the public domain in recent years. This clearly indicates a breakdown in the existing copyright law.

Is there such a thing as a free lunch? YES. Thoughts are not chattel. Any minute amount of 'intellectual property' is not only not real property, but it is not natural in the least. For millenia there have been no significant restrictions on people's abilities to think or create (aside from cultural clashes - religion being a biggie, but that's a whole different kettle of fish)

Given as how a lot of great works were created in times when there were no protections, I sincerely doubt that you're correct in believing that in the absence of copyright the media would dry up. I think that it would just get bigger.

By your standard it is unfair for Disney to make a movie version (a bad one too) of Hans Christian Anderson's "The Little Mermaid."

By your standard it is unfair for Microsoft to make mice and keyboards without paying the creators of those devices, who you must think ought to still hold the patents on them.

By your standard it is unfair for the RIAA to be associated with a recording of "The Star Spangled Banner" seeing as how Francis Scott Key's descendants didn't get a penny.

Or for Mattel to make jigsaw puzzles that weren't licensed from the original creator. Or use games involving dice, which they didn't invent either.

So are you getting the picture? All of the companies involved in extending copyright and hiding behind it are both:
*Unable to compete on a level playing field
*Themselves guilty of building upon other people's works.

Strikes me that things are generally improved when you have the freedom to use other people's ideas. I'd be in favor of limiting copyrights and patents to somewhere between 10-20 years and never extending them. The lack of a never-ending supply of money actually gives people MORE incentive to create. The current system lets creators coast on one or two works, and is itself plainly defeating the purpose for which it exists.

Yikes! "Designated viewer technology" only!

[orpheus]

Yikes, the implications of the 'our viewer only' rulings (e.g. DeCSS/DVD and the Glassbook cited in the Stephen King article) can effectively control the distribution of thought (especially when combined with the UCITA 'retroactive license change' provision.)

There's just one generalizable example of the half dozen broad abuses that just occurred to me in five minute's thought: word processors (and other output producing programs like studio, graphics, or databases). Until now, the 'work product' has always separate from the software that made it. However now MS could decide (retroactively) that documents produced with MS-Word could only be viewed with MS-Word, and that conversion to other formats (including printed output for use by anyone except the licensed user) is a 'circumvention of their access control', They could also revoke the license to their public viewers, like Wordpad.

Rrsult: Better hope you had a straight text copy of your Great American Novel and Monday's Big Presentation. Or your company database. Because the word Processor could steal some very major rights to your use of your own work. You wouldn't be able to send your word-processed novel to the publisher, even in hardcopy (e.g. King w/ Glassbook) etc. or allow public access to your previously accessible database-generated data without a specific negotiated license from the publisher. Who cares if you bought the word processor or database to specifically do these things and that you've been doing them for decades? Read your Shrinkwrap licence: the program is not guaranteed to be suitable for any specific purpose. You knew it. Everyone knew it. We all laughed at it. It's been in the SWL for decades. No excuses.

This is not outlandish. This exact thing happened with many medical office administration programs in the 70's/80's/90's. Physicians could not access their own office/billing data or their patient medical info unless they renewed their contract with the original software company. [And a court ruled that booting a proprietary program to erase it or to retrieve/convert the data was unauthorize d access. Fortunately, you *could* remove the hard drive and have a programmer read/convert it on his system. Under DMCA, even this would be illegal!)

There are many similar, more public examples of brazen corporate greed: the sudden demand for licensing fees for usage of GIFs is a very recent one. In short, when they figure out they can do this, the only thing that would stop them would be fear of angering enough people to cause a change in the law -- and even then, they might decide to draw a year or two of profit, since if they didn't risk overturning the apple cart, they'd be left out in the cold when some other company overturned the apple cart. [i.e. MS would 'seize control' of all MS-Word docs, though a new laws would surely be passed in a year or so, because if MS didn't, they'd lose the rights in a year or two anyway, when WordPerfect or Star triggered the backlash]

I don't know how I could have missed this implication (I was deeply involved in physician data issue on a high level many years ago), but I guess we'll be stumbling across unintended consequnces for years

[or is it actually 'unintended'? Whether this specific strategy is planned or not, there's no question that the industry would like nothing more than full control on a pay-per-view basis of all media. Should we be surprised that disparate elements directed at a common end can combine to further that end in unexpected ways? ]

Unfortunately, there is no safe way to change intellectual laws quickly. We'd have to institute a moratorum so that each major change (e.g. DMCA) could be understood and explored in the coursts before the next change (e.g. UCITA) was passed.

And I'd have to admit, in that case, justice defered would be justice denied.

__________