Slashdot Mirror
CATO Institute Releases Paper Criticizing DMCA
flanksteak writes "The CATO institute has published a paper criticizing the DMCA entitled 'The Perverse Consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.' From the article: 'The DMCA is anti-competitive. It gives copyright holders--and the technology companies that distribute their content--the legal power to create closed technology platforms and exclude competitors from interoperating with them. Worst of all, DRM technologies are clumsy and ineffective; they inconvenience legitimate users but do little to stop pirates.'" A report worth taking a look at that puts into words what most of us know already.
I wish people would stop calling people who share software, pirates.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
translation:
I'm glad you can't sell content for my box! Oh, wait...You mean I can't sell content for your box either?
If you hold cordial discourse and publish papers, those in power will be more inclined to listen to you, especially if those in power have agreed with you in the past. If you arm yourself and demonstrate in the streets, you're branded a nut and hauled off to jail for weapons violations, and noone pays any attention to you.
The important thing with this story here is that we have a significant victory. We, the DMCA opposing people of the country, have succeeded in convincing an organization with considerable influence with those who disagree with us that we're right. Now, this gives our lobbiests, such as the EFF and FSF, some significant ammuntion when trying to convince congress that the DMCA is a bad thing. Maybe there's some hope after all.
Looks like this is going to come around to a very interesting game of bedfellow swapping:
I'll get the beer if you bring the pretzels -- this should be fun to watch going into an off-year election. Wonder if any of our Ruling Class are going to make a campaign issue of it?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
A two-dimensional model is not perfect, but it's much better than a one-dimensional scale. A few examples...
There are "anarcho-capitalists" who are economically on the right, but quite libertarian. The Libertarian Party in the USA is not as libertarian as I'd like, but it's better than the Republicans and Democrats on that score. It definitely falls on the right, and probably somewhere just into the libertarian half of the space. There are members of the Libertarian Party who are truly libertarian, and would fall further down into the bottom-right quadrant (on the Political Compass's scale, authoritarian is "up" and libertarian is "down"). But they are all pretty far from right-wing authoritarians like Pinochet and, yes, the Republican Party under George W. Bush. Pinochet and Bush would fall way up in the upper-right quadrant. The Democrats probably closer to the axis on the left-right scale, but still on the right side (in the US, Bill Clinton is considered a wild leftist. Anywhere else in the world, he'd be seen as a center-rightist), and in the authoritarian side too.
Stalin would be on the "left" side of things economically, but so would Gandhi, or the anarcho-syndicalists of Spain in the 1930s that Orwell came to admire. The difference is that Gandhi falls somewhere just into the libertarian-left (lower-left) quadrant, the anarcho-syndicalists fall way down inthe lower-left quadrant, and Stalin, with his authoritarianism, would come up somewhere in the upper-left quadrant.
The Political Compass site is interesting. It has a test you can take that places you on their scale. I've taken it several times, and my scores vary, but the overall conclusion is the same. I fall very safely into the same quadrant every time, and with my libertarian-authoritarian absolute value larger than my left-right absolute value. That seems just about right to me.
The cool thing about Political Compass's two-dimensional model is that it exposes as nonsense the assertions by lassez-faire capitalists (like the US Libertarian Party) that leftism is inherently authoritarian (the anarcho-syndicalists of Spain being a great counterexample), as well as the assertions of lefty types that capitalism is automatically authoritarian. Neither left nor right has a monopoly on authoritarianism, nor on libertarianism, and the Political Compass's model shows that and shows where real-world people would appear on their scales.
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
Don't underestimate the political pull of the Cato Institute and other lobbying institutions founded by the Koch family. They are very influential to the other business-friendly, anti-regulation political think-tanks including those followed by more Republican than Liberatarian politicians. In addition, the David Koch donates an awful lot of money to Republicans. If his think tank gets involved against the DMCA, we might see to chance of progress here.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Libertarianism and Communism both suffer from the same problem: they expect people to behave.
Communism fails because it expects people to work without much incentive. Libertarianism fails because it expects people not to do harm to each other. Both are unrealistic expectations and cause both extremist philosophies to lack credibility.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Back before the previous Canadian government was defeated and Bill C-60 (Canada's DMCA) was pending, I wrote a fairly in-depth article along this line (i.e., the likes of the DMCA being mostly useful for anti-competitive behavior) and sent it to the various cabinet ministers and MPs. A lot of the responses I got back seemed to be hung up on the need for academic access to copyrighted works. I'm guessing that was because I identified myself as coming from a University in the cover letter, and that was about as far as several of the MPs bothered to read.
In any event, it will all be coming around again. Bill-C60 has gone down the tubes with previous government, but the industry is still lobbying, and the WPPT and WCT treaties require the Canadian government to do something. On a positive note, from what I've heard, it sounds like Bev Oda (the new Canadian Heritage Minister) has connections on both sides of the plate and could very well be interested in trying to strike a balance. She certainly wrote me back an informed response to my article. Here's hoping there will at least be a clause requiring actual copyright infringement to award damages.
For the interested, the paper and another on the CRIA can be found here. At the time, I tried a couple of times to get it posted to Slashdot, but the powers that be must have not felt it to be sufficiently interesting/relevant.
Has that exception ever successfuly been used? If I remember correctly, the DeCSS case argued exactly that, that the program fell into that exception. And look what happened -- it was deemed illegal even to link to the code, much less distribute it yourself.
Possibly because if you read the wording you quote, it permits circumventions by a person who has lawfully obtained a right to the work in question. Therefore, you are right, Joe Sixpack could claim that he is fully within his right to circumvent such protection to put his favourite DVD movie onto his video iPod, or put his iTMS purchases onto his Creative MP3 player.
That is all well and good, but Joe Sixpack has no idea how to do this from scratch -- and here's the problem -- there is no provision in the DMCA for distributing the tools for circumvention, for any reason. Thus, DeCSS is illegal, Microsoft cannot make an iTMS compatible player, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
$3TRILLION a year Federal budget. $45TRILLION of committed US debt, largely to enemies like China.
The Republican transformation of government according to "Conservative" ideology: the least effective government at any price.
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make install -not war
You slept through the Economics 101 class where they explained "supply and demand", right?
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Count me as a libertarian that agrees with your statements re: corporations - I've made these very same points here on /. before. If you want to remove limits on corporate regulation, fine, but you should also be willing to forgo the corresponding protections offered by the government. I don't know whether it would be practical to hold individual shareholders responsible, but it would certainly be possible to hold at least the board members personally liable.
Also, the threat of losing the corporate charter and by extension the right to do business should be something tangible, instead of ineffectual fines that are often just accepted as a cost of doing business and simply passed down to the customer.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I note that France's National assembly recently adopted a bill that balanced criminal and civil penalties for circumventing systems deemed to implement DRMs with a clause saying that publishers of DRM systems should be ready to give out specifications of these DRMs to anybody willing to implement a compatible player.
This move was derided in the US as some "anti-iPod law".
Well, the motivation for this was that the criminal and civil penalties initially envisioned by the DADVSI law would have de facto created a new kind of intellectual property around DRMs, with DRM companies potentially being able to prosecute competitors for making compatible players (which can be easily construed as facilitating the weakening of the protection).
The law was then balanced so as to avoid this.
You don't understand what committed debt is. It's the amount of debt that current budgets, in law, commit the US to.
The highly Conservative, and often machiavellian supporter of Bush, American Enterprise Institute produced a study of the "fiscal imbalance" to which we're committed for Paul O'Neill, then Secretary of the Treasury. That got O'Neill fired by Bush because it revealed the depths of catastrophe to which Bush has condemned us. Bush has since created only more debt.
$45 TRILLION in committed debt. $45 TRILLION. $45 TRILLION.
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make install -not war