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Senate Soliciting Comments on SSSCA
jayed_99 writes: "The US Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing today about the issues surrounding DRM and the SSSCA. They have a link on their front page that requests comments. Here's a bit of the relevant text: 'If you have comments on these issues that you wish to share with the Committee and with other stakeholders, please email usercomments@judiciary.senate.gov We ask that comments not be sent anonymously, so that if we need to edit comments for public display or request clarification, we are able to contact the author. In addition, for obvious reasons, we request that e-mail submissions themselves avoid copyright infringement, defamation, or other unlawful content.' (You people from Wisconsin, pay attention! Both of your Senators are on the committee)."
This should really be on the slashdot main page! Here are my comments.
To: senate.gov
I'm currently a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University and a computer
science researcher. I'm writing to express my dismay that the Senate is
considering passing a law that would require DRM technologies to be built
into hardware and software systems.
Honestly, I cannot imagine doing computer research in a country where
computers and the software that runs them are built with tamper-proof
components to implement DRM. We often need access to the internals of the
computer, and we almost always work on consumer-level commodity hardware.
Forcing us to purchase special hardware would dramatically increase our
research costs and reduce the relevance of our research to real-world
systems.
Several of my hobbies involve creating content: music, typefaces, and
software that would likely to be subject to DRM. As a content developer,
I am worried that mandated DRM will inhibit my ability to freely
distribute content that I own the copyright for, by placing restrictions
on content formats or requiring certificates from an external authority.
As a consumer, of course I dislike the increasing insistence of copyright
holders to control the use of content that I "license" from them. I also
would resent having to pay for the extra hardware and development overhead
to include DRM in my electronic devices!
Copyright infringement will remain illegal whether or not DRM is legally
mandated. But in a world with mandatory DRM, we lose the ability to
exercise some rights we historically have enjoyed, such as fair use and
the first sale doctrine. We also face the very strong possibility that our
technology industries and research communities will be stifled. Mandated
DRM is a bad choice on all counts!
Sincerely,
Tom Murphy