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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."
BoingBoing linked to the sorrowful tale of a guy who's a big pro-lockdown guy on the web who got screwed when his portless DVR ate all the carefully recorded Spanish lessons he had saved for his children. He would've been within his rights to do an external backup, but those rights got trampeled by the fear of casual piracy. Whoops, too bad! I mean.... !no es bueno senor!
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Yeah, but try calling Adobe (for instance) and asking for a file to decrypt PDFs for educational (as in university) use. Sure there's an exeption in there, but nobody pays attention to it. They just claim it's a DMCA thing and hang up on you.
I read the internet for the articles.
It is definitly true that the DMCA has a whole bunch of really terrible unintended consequences. What is sad is that people don't understand that the same applies to any law. Every single law that the government makes, has similiar unintended consequences - because human behavior and society is so complex we can never truly predict how these things are going to work out.
Geeks tend to understand the terrible effects the DMCA, because that is what Geeks are knowledgable in. If you are an expert in this kind of thing (or at least knowledgable, as most Slashdot people are), you are going to be able to look at it with a more critical eye than the average American. This is our shit, so we know exactly what the deal is.
But remember, the same thing happens when the government makes a law about terrorism, or illegal drugs, or health care, or the enviornment, or anything else. You might not hear about the same effects the way you hear about the DMCA, but it happens. You support the anti-Terrorism bill, and you don't understand the effect it has on imigrants and their families, or the potential racial-profiling and discrimination it causes. You don't hear about the small family buisnesses that get shut down because they simply don't have the money to comply with some new enviornmental regulation you support. You don't hear about the guy who picks up a hitchhiker, and when they get pulled over by the police, the driver goes to jail for 20 years because the hitchhiker happens to be carrying drugs... you think that tough drug laws are only harming criminals. Or you don't hear about the people who dieing of cancer who can't get a potentially life saving treatment, because the government determines it is "too risky".
Laws are about a subtle as a sledgehammer. With maybe the exception of small local government, society is just too diverse and too complex to make a law that doesn't have serious side effects. A law is a like a prescription drug, we know it is going to have some negative side effect, but we think the problem is worse than the potential side effect. The DMCA isn't a bad law - it is a typical law. It has the same type of negative effects than any law has.
The next time you support some new law, remember the DMCA, and remember the same thing is going to happen with that law. That doesn't mean you won't support the law anyway, but it means that like a drug, you need to know what negative effects it might have in order to evaluate the risks.
But if you think you can make a law that doesn't have significant negative effects on society, you are totally fooling yourself.