Slashdot Mirror
Libraries Say DRM May Harm Their Services
Ernest Adams writes "The BBC is reporting that the British Library is concerned about DRM's effect on its ability to make materials available to the public. Libraries have a legal right to distribute materials under the Fair Use provisions of the copyright law, but DRM systems may block this. Furthermore, they point out that DRM systems don't automatically switch themselves off when a work goes out of copyright. DRM systems may allow copyright holders to retain control over their material longer than they are legally entitled to. Worse yet, if the software no longer exists to unlock a DRM-protected file, its contents may be lost forever -- exactly the thing libraries are intended to prevent." We've discussed stories like this before.
On top of that, non-slashdotters don't know and even care less than we.
Finally: even if everybody would boycott DRM enabled media, the distributors will blame piracy. It's a lose-lose situation in all cases.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Reaction to the article provided by the "Public outrage that should happen, but doesn't" Department.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
In the long term, the restrictions would not expire when a work went out of copyright, it said, and it may be impossible to trace the rights holders by that time.
"It is probable that no key would still exist to unlock the DRMs," Laca said. "For libraries this is serious.
So copyright law be damned. Slap some DRM on your work and it's yours for perpetuity, even after the copyright expires, simply by "losing" the key. Convenient.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Do your bit for information freedom.
DRM stands for Digital Restrictions Management.
What, you heard it was Digital Rights Management? No, no, no. The purpose of the technology is to take away rights, like the fair use right to copy to an ipod or a mix tape, and to impose restrictions, like how if your subscription to Napster lapses then all your music stops working. It's Digital Restrictions Management.
Use the phrase in your posts, in conversation with non-techies, on IRC. Whenever the subject arises. Spread the meme. Subvert the language. It's Digital Restrictions Management, because they want to Restrict you. They care nothing for your rights.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
In recent years, I've read a number of comments from people in the publishing industry that mention a statistic: The average published book is read by four people. The contexts of the quote is usually that this is considered a problem, and Something Should Be Done About It.
;-)
One way to understand this is to think of the books that you own. How many of your books have been read by three or more other people? Probably none, right? So where does this supposed average of four come from? Right again - libraries. The publishing industry generally considers libraries to be a serious problem. Libraries pay for a book only once, and then they let anyone read the book. All those readers should have bought their own copy. If publishers can make this happen, they think it will quadruple their income.
One of the things going on with DRM is that publishers see a solution to their problem, in the form of software that will prevent anyone other than the purchaser from reading a book. The intent is to prevent public libraries from doing what they're doing. They're also looking at the possibility of making you pay a second time if you want to reread a book.
Most publishers aren't in business to educate their readers or to contribute to our culture. They are in business to make money. If they can't make money from a book, they have no reason to let you read it. They certainly don't want you to read a book for free.
So if you think libraries are an important part of our culture, you should also be thinking about ways to preserve public access to their content. Publishers think they will soon be able to end such public access. They'll probably succeed, unless steps are taken to preserve access.
(Of course, here in the US, most of the population hasn't been inside a library in years.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
It's not obvious at all. DRM systems don't turn themselves off upon copyright expiry, but they could do so. They could be legally required to do so, and it could be illegal to use any DRM system that continued to prevent copying beyond the copyright expiry date, if our legislatures weren't in the pockets of the big media companies.
I don't see any compelling reason to believe that any work created since the term "DRM" was invented will ever go out of copyright.
One of the problems with fair use in the United States is that it's generally not considered a "right" per se. Most choose to look at it as an affirmative defense- that is, something brought up when you're accused of copyright infringement. It's all about the framing used to determine who has the burden of proof. If it's a right, then the people who are trying to affect your rights have the burden of proof. If it's a defense, then you have to prove that you weren't infringing copyright. The law itself mentions neither rights nor defenses- it just says that fair use is not an infringement of copyright.
Librarians are great allies to intellectual freedom issues, including those involving DRM. Look at the briefs that the American Library Association has filed with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Many librarians are also quite knowledgable about technology-related issues, as well as fun subjects like copyright.
Libraries have it rough with the increasing prevalence of electronic journals and DRM technologies. Even with material that is accessed online, there's a good chance that once the library stops paying for access, the patrons lose access to that materials- something that never happened with print journals. DRM and licensing are currently putting libraries between a rock and a hard place.
How? That might be worse than the DRM itself.
You could have the MP3 package check the system time every time you try to play it, and if the year is 20XX + 95, it allows playback. But, as anyone who's played Rise of the Triads knows, it takes only a simple DOS command to make I.P. Freely and the others play with santa hats on.
Of course, if the content providers decided to go through with this, they would insist on having each file "phone home" to an unimpeachable server to check on an official time before authorizing the unlock. But don't worry, I'm sure a backround process logging each and every DRM'd file you've opened on your PC won't end up being sold to recoup the costs of the system.
A better question might be, fifty years from now, will anyone have the technology to even access the works? Think how hard it is to play an eight-track, or even an old 45. If it's copy restricted, will anyone remember how it works? I'll bet no one is playing old WMAs in 2050.
This might be a huge problem if these copy restriction schemes fade into obscurity, people forget about the works and suddenly, decades later, they want to access them again. But then again, by then it might be easy to reverse-engineer these schemes.
Penny - plain text accounting
I got my degree at the University of Texas at Austin. At the time, I received an MLIS from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Since then, the name of the degree has changed (Master of Science in Information Studies) and the name of the school has changed (School of Information). The change wasn't intended to be a slight on libraries, but an acknowledgement that graduates of the school were doing many varied things- libraries, archives, conservation, preservation, information architecture, usability, records management, databases, programming, knowledge management, video editing, etc.
It doesn't have to be done in a privacy-invading manner (although I agree that it probably would be). For example, the DRM chip on the motherboard could contain its own clock, with clock skew being corrected on a weekly basis using signed updates from a network of time servers. You can also get a time signal anonymously from GPS, and there's a land-based radio time signal in the UK.
DRM systems don't automatically switch themselves off when a work goes out of copyright. DRM systems may allow copyright holders to retain control over their material longer than they are legally entitled to. Worse yet, if the software no longer exists to unlock a DRM-protected file, its contents may be lost forever -- exactly the thing libraries are intended to prevent.
Of course, it seems unlikely that there is anything out there - or likely to be - that couldn't be cracked. But here's a question: something only exists as a DRM protected file. Its copyright expires. The DMCA is still as it is today. Is it still illegal to crack the DRM on this file?
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
If this was the case why not send his remarks (as you recollect) to a local news media. At the very least you may be doing a good thing by trying to help bring these back door coersions to light. At best it gets picked up by the media (local then national) so even more people then those addicted to /. become aware of how much we/thary are losing by those who are meant to represent them.
Every now and then I read these types of comments on this site and I wonder why those who are upset by what they hear do not do something with the information. Yes, for the record, I would try to report something like this to some media group (tv/paper/radio) in the hopes the word is spread.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
Furthermore, they point out that DRM systems don't automatically switch themselves off when a work goes out of copyright.
That's not much of a problem. As Disney has so carefully demonstrated, that will never, ever happen for any copyrighted work that has been published since 1928. The real problem however:
Worse yet, if the software no longer exists to unlock a DRM-protected file, its contents may be lost forever -- exactly the thing libraries are intended to prevent
This will happen a lot sooner than the copyright will expire. Like in maybe 10 or 20 years. And not just that the software might not support old DRM formats (remember, they'll be producing new ones every 6 months because hackers will always find a way around them), but what about the hardware? Will it work in 15 years? Will someone be there to make replacement parts in 15 years? DRM is all about tying one electronic copy to one device at a time, whether it's a PDA-style book reader or a PC. But the whole point of electronic formats is reproducability so that you can prevent data loss (among other things).
The Disneys and Sonys of the world don't give a rat's ass about whether a historian can understand our culture (and by extension, their own) in a hundred or six hundred years. They care only whether or not they can make money this year.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
They could be legally required to do so, and it could be illegal to use any DRM system that continued to prevent copying beyond the copyright expiry date, if our legislatures weren't in the pockets of the big media companies.
And it could be made illegal to use DRM at all, as I believe it should. If you want legal Copyright protection then your content should be copyable, otherwise it is like asking for a patent but keeping how your invention works a secret. Unrestrained DRM sacrifices our legitamite right to copy other peoples work.
The problem with that, of course, is that something that can be "digitized and easily disseminated" is effectively free to distribute -- once it exists. For a long time, distribution was hard, and only a select group was willing to put the effort into doing it. Over an extended period of time, that particular method of distribution became the only way of doing business, and authors/artists/inventors got into some really bad habits in regards to their business methods. In particular, they started to assume that they could control the price of the end product (a physical copy of a book, for example) to make up for the work that they were effectively doing at a loss (actually writing the book). That worked (for the most part) as long as publication was limited to "insiders" who stood to benefit from the system, but now that anyone can be a distributor that system is breaking down.
Those who possess the ability to create valuable "content" have nothing to worry about, really. After all, they're not the ones facing this new competition; we have yet to learn how to create unique content without them. As long as that remains true, authors, artists, and inventors will continue to profit from their work. The methods by which they are paid will certainly change, but only the distributors are facing extinction.
As for the methods themselves, there are numerous workable proposals. My personal favorite is the collective-patronage system, which differs from traditional patronage only in that an organization or group replaces the individual patron. The organization would probably set the scope of the content -- the general topic, audience, medium, etc. -- and then hire promising authors, artists, and/or inventors willing to work within those limits. Some groups would, of course, be more free-form than others, but ultimately the parameters of the group would be dictated by its paying members. Members would have numerous advantages over non-members, including contact with the patronees, first-run editions of the resulting works, shareholder rights in the group's decisions, discounted merchandise, etc. The membership fees would fund the production of new stories, movies, and/or inventions. Nearly all of the income would go directly to the artists, and the system would be self-sustaining without relying on copyrights or patents at all.
Ultimately, I think that the content creators would be much better off under this system than the current one, since overall consumer spending on creative media is not likely to decrease much, while a much larger percentage goes directly to the creators rather than the distributors.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
I just wrote my congressman:
Mr. Tierney,
The battle over intellectual property laws has brought to light many issues of inequality in our society. Big corporate entities account for vast swaths of ownership of intellectual property, creating a dynamic of ever increasing inequality of information, where the interests of the individual are put at an inferior position to the interests of the corporation.
One thing that could be done to stop the spread of this inequality is to pass a law prohibiting the use of DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology on works that receive legal copyright protection. Analogously this is already the case with patent law which requires a patent seeker to disclose full information about the method or device they wish to patent. Otherwise it is considered a trade secret where the people retain their legal right to reverse engineer the method or device. Likewise by making the method of copying a secret by means of DRM, content producers erect a barrier to fair use of the content. With DRM, Libraries are prevented from archiving published works in an easily reproducible form, threatening the loss of an entire generation's productive work to the ravages of time. And DRM prevents individuals from copying the content which is their right after the expiration of the copyright under law. By preventing these and other fair uses under copyright law, DRM has broken the bargain that copyright laws have traditionally struck.
Digital technology certainly allows much more than was ever foreseen by preceding generations. But the principle of copyright remains one of give and take; society gives content creators the protection of our laws for a period of time, and after that period of time has ellapsed the content creators then have given their work to society for its perpetual use, or forever long we see value in its reproduction. With DRM content creators are attempting to have their cake and eat it too.
By preventing legitimate copying, use of DRM should forfeit a content producer's right to legally prevent others from copying. If content is protected by technology, then it should receive no benefit of protection by laws.
Therefore, certain provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act should be repealed and new legislation should make it clear that if you use DRM, then you do not have a copyright.
Thank You,
So the whole "what about when copyright expires" spiel is a read herring (pun intended).