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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
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
Fair Use Under Siege "Fair use" is a crucial element in American copyright law-the principle that the public is entitled, without having to ask permission, to use copyrighted works in ways that do not unduly interfere with the copyright owner's market for a work. Fair uses include personal, noncommercial uses, such as using a VCR to record a television program for later viewing. Fair use also includes activities undertaken for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research. Unfortunately, the DMCA throws out the baby of fair use with the bathwater of digital piracy. By employing technical protection measures to control access to and use of copyrighted works, and using the DMCA against anyone who tampers with those measures, copyright owners can unilaterally eliminate fair use, re-writing the copyright bargain developed by Congress and the courts over more than a century.
What bothers me is that things like this cause people to think that there is no such thing as fair use. I work as a teacher and I make a bunch of presentations for my classes. It's school policy that we can't use copyrighted images for any purposes -- even this clear cut case of non-comercial, educational use. This policy is just one of the many in place to eliminate even the possibility that someone may sue for any reason, no matter how in the right we may be. I'd use creative commons images anyway, but this is very frustrating.
-CGP
As much as we write and complain about the idiots in government creating legislation that is bad for technology and innovation we have yet to solve the problem. I think given the power of /. we could unite a movement to elect someone with an IQ higher than 3 and not in the back pockets of those abusing the DMCA. Viva la Revolution! Think about it. We could form a new political party where rank comes from ability, not tenure. We could take over the world!
...well, after I blog about it...
then there is my L.U.G. meeting...
and the sites I need to code...
No animals were harmed in the making of this sig.
Well, there was that one puppy, but he is all better now.
Use a firewall, go to jail
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
I thought I'd pop in a quick comment to beat the rush.. I've barely scanned through the document, but I've already noticed obvious and glaring errors.
For example, they cite the case of Adobe's claim that Nikon prevented them from decrypting their RAW format files. The facts as the EFF documents explains them, are just plain wrong. There was a brief outcry from some overwrought programmers at Adobe over this issue, but it turned out Nikon was always willing to license their proprietary code to developers like Adobe, even before this little dust-up. Nothing to see here, move along, it was just another testy outburst from a programmer who had too much coffee and didn't want to wait for his managers to finish negotiations with Nikon.
I'll go through the document in more detail, and I'm sure I'll find more deliberate misstatements of facts. The EFF always trumps up charges to inflate its case. Perhaps someday they will learn that this tactic undermines their efforts.
Like nearly everyone else involved the EFF has an agenda and a spin. Once example of EFF FUD'ing may be the reference to scientific research. A while ago I read a *government* summary of the DMCA and I believe there is an *exemption for research*. Scientific research and various other activities are inherently exempt.
Jeopardizing fair use and impeding competition and innovation are not unintended consequences. They're major reasons some DMCA supporters wanted it passed.
Every law passed by the State with the honest and sincere intention of being for the public good turns out *in practise* to be to the (sometimes enourmous) public harm, while hugely benefitting a very small number of people.
An interesting consequence of increased entertainment media costs has been more piracy an poorer sales, an even more interesting one is that in the top 100 hundred (music and video) lists, the big studios and their formula products have failed to knock off the independents, who due to increased airplay have never had it so good. Even better real artists have real fans who prefer genuine products rather than pirated copies. Make you wonder who been stealing from who all these years.
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.
I always thought that there was a legal right to be able to make a copy of a dvd for your own use
IANAL but I have heard that, yes, we do have this right in the US. The problem is it is legal for us to make a backup copy yet illegal to bypass the encryption of the DVD which of course is needed to be done first to make the legal backup copy. I prefer to make backups and then put the originals away in case something happens to the backup and it is a shame that it is illegal to do that. The only way I will stop making backups is if they come up with a way to make that impossible for me to do and/or if they work out a system that allows damaged discs to be returned for new working copies (which I highly doubt would ever happen). Trading in a damaged disc actually should be something they would agree with since we only buy a license for the content right? I would even be willing to pay a buck or two to cover the cost of making and shipping the disc, of course they would much rather have us repay the full price everytime we lose/damage the discs though which is insane if we aren't allowed to make backups.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
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.
seems this obomination of an act is doing exactly what it was meant to do.
stifle speech -check
ensure massive litigation -check
confuse everyone -check
bad for consumers -check
so what's the problem?
All you have to do to copyright your blog postings is put a claim of copyright and terms of distribution notice at the bottom of your page, then if someone rips your work off, without crediting you, sue their ass. You can even say under what circumstances the work is free to use, and when people would have to pay you.
All this is in existing copyright law. No need for the DMCA whatsoever.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
The region coding is an issue that deserves to be held up to scrutiny but the part about expiry is rather misleading. Very few of HP's ink cartridges have an expiry mechanism but the article seems to suggest that they all do.
Just because someone sued it does not automatically mean that the claim has any merit. I am very disappointed that EFF has used such a weak example here, and to make it worse, they go on to say that DMCA has not been used in this case.
There are plenty of good examples to show the bad effects of DMCA, adding these weak and poorly researched cases just gives ammunition to the other side.
Before the DMCA (and in fact even after the DMCA, it is just that the DMCA broadened the terms) to have the full protection of copyright law, you either had to file for a copyright with the copyright office, or the work had to be published with the markings you mention (which pre-DMCA did not specifically include the Internet, or any electronic form, but rather published in the sense of having to go through a printing press, and be distributed), in order to be considered a copyrighted piece of work. If you just had some piece of artwork, or a photo, or a script, and were just showing it around your local coffee shop, or had it up on your personal webpage, then you had no guaranteed legal recourse under copyright law, since you could not prove publication, no matter how many little ©s you had on the piece. If you played a little ditty you came up with while sitting at the park, anyone who heard it could steal it, unless you had published sheet music for it. That changed with the DMCA. Copyright was changed to take effect at the moment of creation, not at the moment of publication, and the web and digital files were now considered to be a form of publication as well.
All of these are huge changes that pretty much made the viability of commercial web pages a reality, and made the situation much better for the proverbial starving artist. Of course, most people talking about the evils of the DMCA aren't professional artists, and so haven't had to deal with the pre-DMCA world where a client could end up owning your work, just because they were the one who paid for the ad where it was first published. In fact, most people railing against the DMCA don't know the first thing about copyright law, because they have never had to deal with it in the slightest. They just know that it is that evil thing that makes your printer cartridges more expensive, and that keeps you from being able to copy your friends software and movies for free.
The reason I find the bloggers more humorous than everyone else, is because they just take it as a given that everything scribble on their page is their's to do whatever they want with, and don't realize that the only reason they don't have to constantly worry about copyright law, is because the DMCA they hate so much made it so much easier to deal with copyright.
they're laughing at YOU!
D-M-C-A It's fun to get stuck with some D-M-C-A....
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.
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