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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.
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.
Jeopardizing fair use and impeding competition and innovation are not unintended consequences. They're major reasons some DMCA supporters wanted it passed.
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.
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.
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.
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