Disney Suggests Mandating DRM On All Media

Ethan Butterfield writes "Cory Doctorow posted this on his blog this morning. Essentially, Disney wants the FCC to regulate all devices capable of recording from any audio broadcasting medium or from the Internet."

Comments

In other news....

[josh3736]

Disney also suggests copyright be extended to an indefinite amount of time.

Because, as we all know, once something falls into the public domain, no one will want to keep it around anymore and it will forever be lost.

Re:In other news....

[adjuster]

Disney also suggests copyright be extended to an indefinite amount of time.

It's this kind of stuff that should make all of us look up and see what's going on. We are facing a serious cultural dilemma, as a people. Our "intellectual property" system is creating a climate that allows works to disappear forever, and creates no legal alternative.

Corporations "own" the works, and the works remain "protected" by copyright. Meanwhile, works that are not economically viable to be "sold" by the "owners" simply become unavailable, however the "protection" of copyright makes it illegal for individuals to simply reproduce these works themselves. Today it's acetate films rotting in vaults, and books that have "fallen out of print" on acidic paper. Tomorrow it will be video and audio "locked up" in encryption algorithms that may well be trivilly easy to break, but are legally protected.

Corporations are doing what corporations are supposed to do-- returning value for shareholders. We can debate globaliation and corporatization and the like all day long-- but not here. The change needs to come by way of changes to "intellectual property" law. Laws are made for the good of society, not for the good of corporations, per se. As a society, we all need to become informed about these issues and work to address them. It may not be glamorous, but it's necessary.

I know there are people who agree with me, but I have no idea how to get the idea out to the public, where the real changes can happen.

Licensing your own work with trendy licenses like Creative Commons or GPL isn't the answer. Violating current "intellectual property" law to show "civil disobedience" isn't the answer. Doing nothing most certainly isn't the answer. The answer is to get the average person involved.

I fear that most people are already too far gone. Most poor bastards don't have enough independent thought left to even think that it's possible to question a notion like "A creator should receive economic compensation every time their work is copied". People simply think that the current system is "just the way it is", and their hobbled minds aren't flexible enough to even comprehend that things could be different.

The message I'd love to get out to the street is this: When you download an MP3 or a movie, you're not hurting the artists or creators-- you're hurting their PUBLISHER. When you buy a CD or software, you're not helping the artists or creators, you're helping the PUBLISHER. Publishers are a scourge upon us-- a plague of leeches. If we can get the public behind new models of economic compensation (or old ones-- live music has been around for millenia), we can break the publisher's grip on our "intellectual property" system, and start to have a reasonable hope of preserving a record of our culture.

Re:Only a matter of time before it happens

[dTaylorSingletary]

> Buy prison stock now.

Isn't that voting with your dollars? Profiting from heinous acts is nearly as bad as commiting them.

I find Disney's copyright stance highyly ironic

[Infonaut]

given that their best work is usually their most derivative work.

From Lessig's book Free Culture:

"Indeed, the catalog of Disney work drawing upon the work of others is astonishing when set together: Snow White (1937), Fantasia (1940), Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), /Song of the South (1946), Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), /Robin Hood (1952), Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), Mulan (1998), Sleeping Beauty (1959), 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Sword in the Stone (1963), and The Jungle Book (1967)--not to mention a recent example that we should perhaps quickly forget, Treasure Planet (2003). In all of these cases, Disney (or Disney, Inc.) ripped creativity from the culture around him, mixed that creativity with his own extraordinary talent, and then burned that mix into the soul of his culture. Rip, mix, and burn."

How about we add DRM to paper?

[A nonymous Coward]

Then Disney wouldn't have been able to steal also many movie plots from Rudyard Kipling and the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Anderson.