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Intellectual Property Manifesto for the UK
feepcreature writes "Ars Technica is reporting that the British Library has published a Manifesto calling for a balance in Intellectual Property rights between the interests of users, creators and publishers. There are 6 key recommendations, including: DRM should not override users' statutory rights; analogue rights should apply to digital media; and copyright terms should not be extended without evidence that this would be good for society. There is also part of the debate on the UK Government's Gowers review of Intellectual Property, due to report in the Autumn."
According to this cost breakdown, the production and marketing costs of a £12.99 CD total about £1.60. The retailer and wholesaler between them take £5.97. I couldn't find figures for a DVD but I should think they would be similar.
On a million units, that would be nearly £6 million delivery costs. I can't believe that distribution via (say) bittorrent would be only one order of magnitude cheaper then this.
Libraries have many roles, but almost none of those roles are exclusive. The three most important ones are collecting, sharing, and archiving for posterity, but these roles are also performed within society as a whole
The british library is a national library, and also a legal deposit library (one of only six) under the 2003 Act, and its job is to perform those roles. Others may perform the roles, but it isn't their stated purpose enshrined in law to do so.
This does make them exceptional. There is a huge difference between saying "DRM is stopping me doing Y" and saying "DRM is stopping me doing Y, which I am required to do by law".
Well, hold on a sec. Microsoft has a vision for its Windows system as a home media platform - not a home computing platform. Each new version of Windows angles straight for this goal - to remove the open nature of computing, in favour of a trustworthy media consumption platform. Now, if the studios were happy to trust MS in this regard, DRM would never have happened. MS have no incentive to develop and maintain a mathematical impossibility. But the content producers will simply not produce for computer platforms unless a sufficiently robust anti copying technology is present in the system. Hence MS have no option but to invest in DRM. And since the obnoxiousness of the DMCA and EUCD came to pass, the odious nature of DRM has multiplied.
Now, as for TC related activity - there's a lot of nonsense talked about this, and I don't have time to go into it right now. TPMs are neither good nor bad. They are simply a way for the owner of the platform to measure the integrity of his/her platform, and to attest that integrity to a remote verifier. That's all it can do. The key here is the word "owner". Vista and friends are very much interested in separating the role of computer and platform owner into that of computer owner and platform licensee. As a licensee, you end up surrendering some ownership rights to MS. But fundamentally, if you control the hardware, you also control the mechanism for verifying any result. A Linux machine running with a TPM has several advantages over one which doesn't - and the TPM won't enforce one damn bit of DRM unless the platform owner wants it to.
BTW, I can't believe I inadvertently backed Microsoft in a /. post. I'll go and flay some skin from my back by way of mea culpa
--Ng
If you're running Windows, your no longer the owner of the system.
TPM could be a good thing in the hands of, say, a Linux or *BSD developer. That would be nice on a server.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
Whoah indeed. There are plenty of reasons not involving Microsoft for manufacturers to want DRM, and they've done it with non-Microsoft related technologies. I don't mean to cast it all on Microsoft.
But the nature of the Trusted Computing reflects a very clear plan to use it for DRM: Microsft wants it both for protecting their own software from being used in pirate copies, and to mate Windows software to other Windows software that blocks competing products from accessing them. This is particularly true for streaming media: by locking multimedia files and media to specifically, "Trusted Computing" software that has to be authorized by the mother ship, they gain the ability to prevent Putting "Trusted Computing" software on a Linux box does no good for this. Trusted Computing's approach is much more limiting than a standard DVD player: the media can be registered to a specific copy of the media, with a specific software viewer, on a specific host, andn simply refuse to allow viewing it under any software not specifically supported by the media vendor. It may be possible to do screen capture of the output, but that's about it.
Such capabilities can also be integrated, and are clearly to be integrated, in hardware. This seems reasonable for VPN identification keys or biometrics. But it's obviusly planned as well for CD and DVD burners, to force the duplicator to use authorized software to read the files, and to permit only mothership authorized software to write with that specific burner.
It's also aimed squarely at the boot system: a Trusted Computing enabled chipset on the motherboard can prevent the booting of any kernel, or bootable device, without an appropriate vendor signature. You'd better believe Microsoft wants this to prevent "Trusted Computing" hardware from booting non-authorized operating systems. It's understandable for security reasons in a corporate environment, but it's deadly for home users or experimenters who may want to install operating systems without the capital to buy and manage Trusted Computing keys.
But you can't compare copyright to a brick-and-mortar business - as there are specific laws that govern each of those. Copyright was explicitly codified such that works would go into the public domain - copyright holders knew this going in, but managed to get it extended. Originally, at least in the US, copyright was supposed to last a maximum of 28 years - one 14-year term and one 14-year extension. This was known going in, so I see it from the other direction - copyright owners who attempt to extend this term to ludicrous lengths (such as we have today) are effectively stealing from every single person in the country.
If you want your heirs to benefit after you die, it's your place to provide for that. Why should the government have an interest in making sure your heirs benefit?
FC Closer