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Canadian Government Subsidizes DRM
MikeOttawa writes "According to the Ministry of Canadian Heritage [Government of Canada] website, the Canadian Government has 'announced a total of $2,746,530 in funding for three organizations to develop online copyright management and licensing systems.'
Three companies are mentioned in the press release, Access Copyright, COPIBEC and RightsMarket Inc. Each are receiving close to $1,000,000 CDN to 'build invaluable databases that will facilitate the management of copyrights, improve copyright compliance, increase royalties to Canadian content creators, and promote the use of Canadian content throughout the world.' Does that scare everyone else as much as me. It makes me wonder why the Canadian Government is also increasing the subsidy [Slashdot.org] paid to content creators from the sale of digital media like CDs ..."
This doesn't frighten me at all. In the title: "Development of Online Copyright Management and Licensing Systems" the key word I read is 'Development'. And that is what has been missing with DRM from the beginning. I have always believed that a better answer to this problem is plain old-fashioned R&D -research and development. Yet the **AA have been very reluctant to do that. They prefer to do things the only way they have ever known, through aggressive lobbying and through the courts. That cannot be the answer, and I wish they would realize that already.
Their suggestions of DDos attacks and such, show how infantile their experience level is here. I can almost picture them at a meeting - "What can we do?", some 2-bit programmer yells out "we have this system where you can slow their bandwidth down so much that they won't be able to get music anymore". "Wow! Ok, that sounds good lets do it!".
Real R&D takes a ton of money and possibly years before coming to the table with something useable. Along the way there are many flops and failures, and tiny successes of which to grow on. **AA doesn't seem to understand this process. They just want to churn out the next pop artist and keep their baseline solid.
When I first heard of DRM, I thought finally, they are going to fight fire with fire. They will develop some slick way of tracking their material. Similar to how we fight viri with antivirus software. If software and lack of public understanding is the problem, then software and education of the public has got to be the answer. But I have yet to see one educational commercial on this, all I see is Rip/Burn from the computer side. And their software proposals are both laughable and frightening at best.
Of course the suggestion of DRM quickly got out of hand, turned into a major invasion of piracy and sleazy proposals to undermine the legitimate customer. Who expected the **AA to pull the same sleaze tactics on the customer that they pull on the artists they supposedly represent? I know so much more about them now, all negative, that I was completely clueless about before. Here in the US we have that millionaire that donated 1mill to a law school to try and fix the problem. That is R&D money. That the Canadian govt is doing this I think is a good thing. It is both a national and international problem. When a problem affects so many people, then the governments should fund the research. The **AA has pretty well proven that they would rather keep their lawyers employed. They only thing I see funky about this is they keep using the word "database" as if a database is the answer. I am not sure if a database is the answer. I think that is the key here. Nobody knows the answer. That is why the problem hasn't been fixed yet. There are things in our future that we haven't even imagined yet.