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Consumer Technology Bill of Rights?
thrilliams writes "The WSJ's Walt Mossberg has a story about DigitalConsumer.org, a new lobbying group that's pressing for a Consumer Technology Bill of Rights. It would aim to protect the right to time shift and space shift media, make backups, allow for platform independence and translation between formats. Given the current DCMA/SSSCA climate, even these basic rights seem ambitious, but check them out and do what you can to support this nascent effort." There's also an NYT article on the SSSCA debate, with an unintentionally humorous quote from the head of News Corporation (which owns 20th Century Fox): "without copyright protection we will change our business models".
All this bill of rights needs is some support from artists. If you get top name musicians and movie makers to support this then it's all good.
But there is one problem this still doesn't fix. For years and years the music industry has purposely not put out high quality recordings. CD quality is damn good, yes, but remember DAT? Know about DVD Audio? what's gonna be?
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From the story...
/. community seems to be, it is insignificant to the people pushing and passing the new laws. Everyone needs to know, everyone needs to complain. We are the ones who know, we are the ones who need to shout from the rooftops.
If you want to preserve both the music and movies we enjoy, and your rights to use them freely, there are several things you can do. First, stop stealing music online, and stop condoning the practice. Second, boycott copy-protected CDs. Third, start paying attention to the coming fight over copy-protection, and speak up for your rights as a consumer.
These are all well and good but the fact is, a vast majority of consumers aren't even aware of the problem or the proposed solutions working their way through Congress. They won't know a thing about this until the mad rush is on to purchase the last few non-DRM protected PC's.
So, I would add - Fourth, Tell everyone else about these three steps! Tell your parents, your siblings, your cow-orkers, the people in line next to you at the store, and so on. Put blurbs on your web pages and yak it up the other customers at the video/music stores.
As large as the
Someone with a lot of literary skills needs to come up with some sort of alert that claims that those bastard liberal media companies and those liberals in Congress (I said sensationalist) are trying to take a way your right to record your TV shows by mandating that all future electronic devices contain copy protections to allow people who make shows to disable your ability to record them without paying for them. Include refs to digitalconsumer.org too. Then put the ole "We need to stop this right away, send this to all of your friends" line, details about the bill, and urge people to contact their congressman.
...so that you only get to release things if they're approved.
But this is true. Those other things aren't. There's no need to be sensational. You just have to tell the truth: they want total control of all you see and hear so that they can make you pay-per-use and so they can control new entrants into the marketplace.
I especially enjoyed the part (from the NYT article) where CAMCORDERS will have to recognize digital watermarks. You see, they aren't concerned about piracy...they're concerned about COMPETITION and they want to have control over what you produce with your own camcorders/microphones/cameras
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7. The rights previously mentioned cannot be hampered by technology.
There's an old addage from the newspaper business which is very applicable here: Only a fool would start a publicity fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.
If you want the media companies back in line, unplug your television and start talking to people about something other than SouthPark for a change.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Of course the major reason all of this is happening is piracy. I submit that piracy isn't the cause of the problem, but a reaction to the fact that content simnply costs too much. We all know what happens when you are a content producer (e.g. musician, writer, software producer): to get your product distributed, you have to sign a contract with a distributor that grants them exclusive rights and lets them have the lion's share of the revenue. Distributors all consider this standard, and they also know that content producers have no choice but to to acquiesce. Anyone following the Bioware/Interplay fiasco knows what the game software industry is like--about the only way for a content producer to make any money anymore is to find a buyer for their company. It's the same with books and music. Ultimately the problem is that distributors with exclusive agreements are local monopolies, with the ability to charge a price far above where the supply and demand curves meet. The result is either abstention from buying their products or piracy. If music CDs cost $100 a piece, let's face it--NO ONE would buy them legitimately. At $22 a piece the effect is the same, just not as severe. My suggestion is to CHANGE CONTRACT LAW. Exclusive distribution arrangements and incentives should be classified as anti-competitive and make illegal. The incentive, from a content producer's standpoint, should always be in the direction of more distributors. Smaller distributors should be able to cut costs and undercut their competition by offering a producer's product to the consumer at a better price, thus garnering greater sales and revenue for the producer and themselves. Some distributors will survive, but the ones that don't suddenly start paying attention to their cost-revenue curves won't--just like in any other industry. The only real danger would be if distributors tacitly agreed not to "go after" each other's clients, but I feel that any distributor that didn't take every aggressive measure to undercut its competitors would quickly find itself sued by its stockholders. Greed will always be there, the trick is to make it work FOR the consumer instead of against it.
Individual people are smart. Its when you start trying to comunicate to them in large groups that that informing them becomes a problem. In this situation we need to use some sensationalism to inform them that there rights are being taken away. That being said how could we do this with most of the major media outlets under the thumb of the Corporations.
I usually listen to music in the car. Between road noise, wind noise (especially in summer when the windows are down), and engine noise the sound quality is never going to be that good anyway.
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Rights are waved all the time in agreements.
The British system is better, consumers are not allowed to give up their statutory rights even if they sign an agreement, if it is to their detriment. e.g. If you have to sign a contract stating you will not rip a cd to mp3 after purchasing it the company couldn't sue you if you did as you have the right to back up digital media for personel use. Its actually more likely the record company would be investigated for monopoly/anti-trust practices. But then we limit the amount of money politicians can spend and recieve. 1 UK National election costs less than a single Senate seat. it
would be ignored just like the fact that it is illegal to *require* a person to give you their SSN
This would also be illegal in the UK under the data protection act, the only people who can request it are employers (since we generally pay tax at source rather than have to do our own accounts). Businesses here can only get the mimimum data they need and you can refuse to divulge anything else e.g. travel passes can include address detail in case they are lost (and the company likes you to fill this in for a variety of reasons); however, you don't have to even supply the companys with your real name providing you pay upfront rather than in arrears.
And because Windows XP is the heart of Microsofts business model, Microsoft has obviously devised a way to completely stop piracy of their operating system.
And as you can see today, they've been completely successful.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Start paying attention.
According to the SSSCA, a PC is an interactive digital device, and as such, it must be neutered according to government-created specifications. If an SSSCA-like law is introduced and passed, there will be NO technology available to enable you to exercise your rights.
I think this is Consumer Technology Bill of Rights is an excellent idea.
Get of your collective asses, join this group and the EFF, and contact you congress(wo)man.
Sitting here making witty, stupid "first post", or other "insightful" posts does no good at all. Email your friends and family. Discuss this with your coworkers or fellow students. Get up and get moving.
BC
But Mr. Chernin of the News Corporation suggested that matters might be different if the tables were turned. "Let's say I decide to broadcast on my network the code for how to make Intel chips or Microsoft software," he said. "I think they'd find a way to stop it."
It's called a "lawsuit." That is, you sue whoever leaks proprietary code when they do it. It doesn't mean you cripple your hardware or software on the off-chance that somebody could do it.
I swear to God, these media types must blow their noses by committee.
--- Work, worry, consume, die. It's a wonderful life. -- Bill Griffith
I know that the congressional staffers don't pay too much attention to boilerplate messages, so I rewrote mine to say the following, posted here as just another perspective:
I'm upset that the Fair Use rights of citizens and consumers of copyrighted information are under steady and increasing attack by profit-maximizing and liberty-minimizing corporations.
It'd be nice if some representatives such as yourself stood up for the average Joe's 'pursuit of happiness'.
Specifically, I would appreciate if Congress would grant the right for consumers to 'time-shift' and 'space-shift' our use of legitimately purchased (or licensed) copyrighted materials for personal use. I would like to add my voice to DigitalConsumer.org in calling for a "consumer technology bill of rights" in an attempt to preserve our Fair Use rights. I'm sure you've read their boilerplate, I won't repeat it.
I have a bunch of old cassette tapes. And I have a bunch of CDs. And I listen to a lot of my music and audio on the computer nowdays. And over time my cassettes (and even CDs) degrade for reasons of physics and cheap electronics.
As a software developer who respects intellectual property rights, I have never used Napster (or similar services) to download music I have not purchased. But I dang well *would* like the clear legal right to download MP3s of casettes I purchased 15 years ago, or CDs in my collection, so I don't have to go through the hassle of upgrading my tape deck and connecting it to my computer to try to move songs around. (To be fair to record companies, I would not demand the right to download CD-quality copies of my old cassettes, but CD-quality copies of CDs or low-medium-grade MP3 copies of casettes should be 'fair'.)
I've slowed and stopped purchasing much additional music until the industry comes up with a consumer-friendly way for me to purchase it; something which allows me to recognize a song on the radio, say "hey, I like that song and would like it in my permanent collection" and allows me to download it and play it for the rest of my life, like a book on my shelf.
The record industry wants me to purchase a 'license' to listen to the song when I am online, being tracked, or wants me to purchase a copy on some physical piece of media that they will obsolesce in 15 years.
I don't mind if they attempt to convince the public to do that, but I resent that they are enhancing their ability through highly suspect oligopolistic practices, through high-paid lawyers in the courts, through high-paid lobbiests trying to convince you, my representative.
Copyright was designed by our founders not as a license to print money (although that is a nice side effect when a work is popular). Copyright should be an incentive to create new, great works.
Wouldn't the world be a better place if they focused their massive resources on identifying new, good music? And not on trying to reduce the public's Fair Use rights in an attempt to create pseudo-mandatory upgrades for consumers who just want to listen to the Beatles songs of their youth, 20, 40, and 60 years later without paying copyright holders at every step along the way?
I focus on the music industry because that is closest to my heart, but there are very similar issues with movies, the electronic books of tomorrow, and other media products.
Thank you very much for your attention to this important matter.
--LP (no, I signed it with my real name and address in hopes they'd pay more attention)
Possibly the biggest difficulty in this fight is that the media industries have an ace up their sleeve. Namely, they are the media. They can run warm fuzzy stories about Sen. Hollings standing up for the rights of "artists" in the face of Internet criminals. And any Congress-critter who opposes them better not have any upset interns for the media to dig up. Whether or not it would work is one thing. But I bet that media lobbyists can make very effective use of the threat.
Amazingly, Newsweek seems to have spent a lot of effort to rag on the music industry in a recent issue. About three pages blaming their lagging sales on too much bad formula music and too-high prices. It also discussed the successes of "O Brother Where Art Thou" at the Grammy's as evidence that even the folks who work in the music industry know that most of the stuff they are shoveling out the door is crap. Another one page article about Hollings and the SSSCA making it quite clear that that the proposed law would impinge on legal copying as well as pointing out that the Internet can probably do for media industries what the VCR did for the movie industry, namely make them a shitload of money if they would just stop trying to make it illegal.
I don't know, but it seems that print media is much more willing to actually run stories on the issues involved. Maybe it's because they are an older industry. Maybe they just see it as a way to kick a competitor. Maybe it's the fact that I don't have cable and never watch broadcast news. Has anybody ever seen any coverage of this issue in the broadcast media? How biased did it seem?
"Any person or company which manufactures a technological device which grants a user access to intellectual property content, must include functionality allowing the user to perform upon that content, any and all actions which may be legal."
You need to rethink this a bit. Your proposal as written would make it illegal to produce a playback device that didn't include a full range of copying and editing functions.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Ack! It should be protect the right -- this is not asking to ge given something, this is insisting that Congress cease and desist from violating our traditional rights.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
You already have copyright protection, so I must conclude that you're happy with what the status quo was before 1998.
And if copyright protection is what you're concerned about, why do you keep asking for something else -- copy protection?
Take all that money you're spending on congress bribes, and hire some private detectives and lawyers to prosecute infringers instead. Make an expensive example out of some Morpheus or Gnutella user, and maybe things will get back in line.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
'Is it the responsibility of the world at large to protect an industry whose business model is facing a strategic challenge?" he said in an interview. "Or is it up to the entertainment industry to adapt to a new technical reality and a new set of consumers who want to take advantage of it?"'
It's about time somebody said this! A company's inability to stay ahead of customer demand is not the fault of the consumer . Don't punish them for saying "we have more things we want to do with your product."
"Derp de derp."
They are sheep if they go where they are led. Unless they make an actual effort to become educated, they are sheep.
Like it or not, spinning it "PC" doesn't make it any less true.
Fact is, most people are quite happy to take the spoon full they get from TV and newspapers, reguardless of the source; which is sometimes hidden or obscured.
It has nothing to do with it, of course. Sorry, subtle joke on my part. The best way to manipulate the weak is to claim them liberals are out to get you, control you, and ruin your life.
It just gets my knickers in a twist when conservatives blame everything on liberals, and then make excuses for republicans. Truth be, they are all (both Republicans and Democrats) big-spending ready-bought politicians. The only difference is who they take money from and where they like to spend it.