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More Unintended Consequences of the DMCA
BrianWCarver writes "In the seven years since Congress enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), examples of the law's impact on legitimate consumers, scientists, and competitors continue to mount. A new report released today from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), 'Unintended Consequences: Seven Years Under the DMCA,' (pdf) collects reports of the misuses of the DMCA -- chilling free expression and scientific research, jeopardizing fair use, impeding competition and innovation, and interfering with other laws on the books. The report updates a previous version issued by EFF in 2003, which Slashdot also covered."
The problems is (a) if you're a media or software company, you view these as "good" consequence (b) if you're a member of congress, you're routinely told America's financial health is dependant on the strong protection of IP, so you don't see any problem with this (c) hardly anybody has any direct consequence because of DMCA, so they don't see the problem.
So in the face of all that intertia, no one really cares about the extreme cases. I'm guessing the cutover to HDTV in the U.S. (a.k.a. "The Disaster") will generate a lot of problems and make cause a backlash, but right now, it's hard to see anyone in charge or in authority speaking out against the law, and there is almost zero groudswell against it.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
From the article: HP's Region-Coded, Expiring Printer Cartridges: Hewlett-Packard, one of the world's leading printer manufacturers, has embedded software in its printers and accompanying toner cartridges to enforce "region coding" restrictions that prevent cartridges purchased in one region from operating with printers purchased in another. This "feature" presumably is intended to support regional market segmentation and price discrimination.
The software embedded in HP printer cartridges also apparently causes them to "expire" after a set amount of time, forcing consumers to purchase new ink, even if the cartridge has not run dry.
Now that's damn evil. After I moved to England, I discovered the that my DVDs no longer worked. But I never knew that this was now in printers as well. How long before some jackass decides to regin-encode my whole laptop?
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
Jeopardizing fair use and impeding competition and innovation are not unintended consequences. They're major reasons some DMCA supporters wanted it passed.
Of course Nikon will happily license out those decryption routines so one has access to the RAW format; but there's no need to introduce encryption in the first place, or keep the file format non-disclosed, for that matter.
Assume, you're a pro photographer and therefore store your pictures in that very RAW format for maximum resolution. The pictures are *your* creative work, not Nikon's. Who says that they will still support that format in 5 years? Who guarantees you that their software will work with your PC of choice in 5 years?
You buy a camera for making pictures, and you probably want to use that very camera for a period which is usually way longer than what's currently supported by any software manufacturer. There are people who still use old Leicas or Rollei cameras... No pro photographer wants to change their equipment with every new OS generation.
With that licensing model -- Nikon creating an encrypted format which *they* own all rights to and *they* have the power to give and revoke licenses as they want -- they directly affect the photographer in accessing his own creative work.
It's like bringing out an analog camera where the photos are taken scrambled and you can view the photos only using a camera-manufacturer provided lens. Which is provided for a limited time only.
An outburst by a programmer who had too much coffee? Maybe you didn't have enough to see the implications of such artificial crippling of file formats...
Like nearly everyone else involved the EFF has an agenda and a spin.
You'd have an agenda if you had the Secret Service come to your place of business back in the day and take virtually every top-of-the-line computer you had sunk all your cash into, and then a few years later return those very same computers crushed into small tiny bits.
Does noone remember History? I remember Steve Jackson helping out the WorldCon in New Orleans by loaning us his computers so we could rewrite the dBase III code that their author/artist registration ran on, so we could actually hold the convention with panels.
A year later, he couldn't do that, because the Secret Service took his computers since he was writing a game about Hackers.
Maybe you like living in Soviet Russia, but I don't.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
That might be in part because good laws are written so as not to have negative unintended consequences. Good laws sometimes do have negative unintended consequences, but they are quickly revised to deal with them. For example, most people agree that laws against speeding are desirable. If such a law is formulated too broadly, it will make it illegal to speed even in emergencies where the risk from speeding is overshadowed by the emergency. The speeding law can be formulated carefully so as to except emergencies, and if it is written too broadly can be revised. The problem with bad laws like the DMCA is that their proponents either haven't formulated them carefully or do not see the negative consequences as negative and so are happy with the overbroad formulation.
However, with the Nikon approach you are either forced to go for a crippled format (and JPEG *is* crippled from a graphical point of view) or use their very own RAW format. It's not like the camera would support a gazillion of (especially competing) lossless formats by default.
And, sorry, but if Nikon wants their development costs back, then they should raise the price per camera, but not via licensing fees on their oh-so-holy *file format*. While the Kodakchrome process may (or may not) have been superior to other films, it never the less was based on true research. A *file format* for pictures definitely is not. It's a container for pixels and, in the case of digital camera, some color/hue/saturation coefficients derived automatically through a calibration process.
Btw, I'm no photographer. For this discussion it also shouldn't matter whether I am one or not. Exchange "Nikon RAW" with "Word DOC" or "Eagle SCH/PCB" if photographers are such a red flag for you. Maybe you'll then get the point.
At least by the corporate legal staffers who presumably actually wrote the bill.
The real problem here is that organizations like the EFF that are supposed to represent our interests are tax-exempt non-profits.
If we want the political power to do something about this, we need our own PAC, our equivalent of the NRA or AARP.
What's going on with telecomm legislation (you heard that the net neutrality bill got killed in committee?) is another example of why we've got to organize to buy our own politicians, not put up with what happens when major corporate interests who don't want real innovation and who don't want the public to find out what's really wrong with their products are the only ones with cash in hand.
We have the best politicians that money can buy, if we want to be represented, we have to ante up.
Tech Public Policy stuff