DRM More Important Than Life or Security?

An anonymous reader writes "Ed Felten of Freedom to Tinker has an interesting writeup regarding how copyright holders are still having serious objections to the built in exceptions of the DMCA even when it might threaten lives or national security. From the article: 'One would have thought they'd make awfully sure that a DRM measure didn't threaten critical infrastructure or endanger lives, before they deployed that measure. But apparently they want to keep open the option of deploying DRM even when there are severe doubts about whether it threatens critical infrastructure and potentially endangers lives.'"

Comments

Re:"Copyright holders"

[kcbrown]

You're confusing individual copyright holders with the middlemen that some of them are tied to. Big difference.

No, I'm not. In the vast majority of cases, the copyright holder is the middleman. Most people who do creative work do so for someone else. The creator doesn't retain the copyright, the person they're doing the work for does.

And for most individual creative endeavors, the copyright isn't owned by the creator, it's owned by the publisher. The assignment of copyright to the publisher has become a condition of getting paid at all.

No, in the general case the copyright holder and the middleman are one and the same.

Re:The bottom line

[ozmanjusri]

Could you provide a reference for that?

Probably this one. Not exactly a law, but definitely god's will.

"And it came to pass, that at midnight the LORD smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle. And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead."

You'd be pissed of wouldn't you. It didn't matter how much goodness, love, charity or faith you'd demonstrated, if you were first out of that particular womb, you were cactus, even if you were a cow...