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DRM Critique Airs On National Public Radio
An anonymous reader writes to point out that a critique of Digital Rights Management made it onto the mainstream media this morning. NPR's Marketplace Morning Report ran a piece noting that with the demise of the VHS format we risk losing fair-use rights since we now have only digital media. From the article: "As our country moves forward to regulate digital copying, I urge us all to bear in mind T. S. Eliot's famous saying. 'Good poets borrow; great poets steal.'"
If you have a right, but are prevented from using it, you really *don't* have that right anymore. Just being written down somewhere doesn't make a right a right. The written form is just the description of the right. A right is only a right when it can actually be exercised. Regarding the topic at hand, the corporations have actually taken away (violated) our right to fair use.
The flaw in your argument, as I see it, is the implicit assumption that only the government can take away or grant rights. In reality, it's those with power that grant or take away rights. It just so happens that usually it's the state that has ultimate power, but if the state leaves things to their own devices (ie: free market fundamentalism), all they have done is given the crown of ultimate power over to the next in line, which in the case of America, is the corporations (in other countries, the next in line might be corporations, organized crime organizations, warlords, etc).
Your argument, while it does make the corporations look bad, also absolves them of any legal (which for some, equates to moral) wrong-doing, and undermines efforts to have the government step in to protect our rights.
With all the talk about 'theft' and 'piracy' it's easy to lose track of who the real thieves are here. It's the global media corporations who stole the public domain by bribing the politicians to implement a permanent extension of copyright.
Suppose that you buy a car on 'time' and agree to make five years worth of monthly payments. After five years (if you don't miss payments) then the car is yours. Suppose that after four years and six months, the finance company bribes the local legislature to extend the amount of time that you have to make payments for another five years. Emmimently fair for them; a rip-off for you. If you refuse to make another payment after the initial five years of payments have come to completion, they call you a thief and get the local law to take your car at gunpoint and put you in jail.
Copyright works the same way. Agreement is made to make payments for an agreed time period for the use of the films, books, or recordings. After that period is up, the films, books, and recordings are paid for and can be used by the public freely. The material enters the public domain.
Paying off politicians to extend this period is theft: it is theft of the public domain. The global media companies have relentlessly and successfully lobbied and bribed for 'extensions' of the copyright period in individual countries throughout the world. They keep extending the time period that the public must pay them in total violation of the spirit of the balance between copyright and public domain. They are the real thieves here, not someone burning a CD or downloading a movie. Never forget this.
Criminals don't get to chose which laws are enforced for all the rest of us. Nor do we have to pay serious attention to the justifications that they use to legitimize their criminal behavior.
Being that Eliot *actually* said, "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different."
Where, exactly, did the right to distribute other people's work originate?
God, apparently. That right is part of the right of free speech and press, which is inherent in humanity. Copyright is an infringement on this right, as it is a right by an author, not to create works (which he already had) but to deny other people their equally inherent right to copy them. It is an acceptable infringement under the right circumstances, but its true nature should not be forgotten. And under the wrong circumstances (i.e. bad, overexpansive copyright law) the artificial right of copyright is not an acceptable infringement on our natural rights.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Hooray. Commercial, one-way media of all kinds deserve to die, or at the very least stop multiplying like virii.
Some random thoughts on this topic:
Money encourages production, not creativity.
What is owned cannot be culture. For me that's an axiom.
Own it if you want, but don't pretend that its got anything to do with culture. If I have to ask someone's permission to use it, it isn't culture. Culture *is* that which can be freely shared.
If you pay me to say it, I'll eventually end up lying.
Money encourages production, but it often encourages the production of crap. The "market" doesn't impose any standard of quality on what gets produced.
The reason we give people a monopoly on copying is so that eventually we have lots of free stuff. Unless you can show that the benefit of increased production outweighs the harm of restricting freedom, don't dare talk about extending copyright in time or space. In fact, we should reduce the term and reach of copyright to the minimum level required to encourage production. *That* makes sense to me. The idea that all this shrink-wrapped blather is someone or other's private property seems to me to be a parlour game gone bad.
Creativity can be encouraged in many ways. In Canada, parents are paid to spend time (a year or something) with their newly born child. Why couldn't individuals be given sabbatical to produce something of cultural importance? If you don't produce, your time off is repaid from source deductions.
He said "book", not "copyrighted book". Further, his main point was that "fair use" becoming a widely available option to people, with the availability of digital content, was counteracted by the DMCA and DRM blocking the ability to legally (at least, questionably legally) exercise such "fair use".
Not exactly. Copyright came about precisely because it was so easy for publishers to print up "pirated" copies of works. In the American colonies, there were enough printing presses that a large share of the populace read daily newspapers. The fact that computers are now their own printing press certainly has greatly magnified that initial problem, but even today it's possible to track down the source of copyright infringement in many cases. The real problem is that there are so many infringers and that they don't have any direct commercial gain (even if it were merely the cost of the supplies to make the copies), that there's very little motivation to go after every last outfit that's mass copying works.
The DMCA is inherently evil because its vague wording could be taken to make computers illegal. More generally, it makes it illegal to use the key included with content or the hardware to use said content, except in a narrow scope of exceptions. Further, it is illegal to provide information to others the information to find or use said key, even if they use it only under the narrow scope of legal exceptions. Together, this greatly hinders the ability to speak and effectively cuts off the ability of a vast majority of people to fair use, as they are too computer illiterate to discover on their own the techniques necessary to exercise their rights, and it's not possible to directly teach them the information to take advantage of their rights.
From a practical standpoint, the DMCA isn't an effective way to protect the integrity of DRM as the same means that allows copyright infringement which DRM is meant to stop can be used to either (a) disseminate the cracked DRM-protected content or (b) disseminate the information to crack the DRM-protected content. From a legal standpoint, it provides further basis to punish copyright infringers as well as a stronger legal basis to shut down organizations that collaborate to break DRM schemes. From a technical standpoint, DRM is technologically flawed because it includes the key with the lock.
As stated, DRM is not an effective way to protect copyright. In reality, there's no means of protecting copyrighted works. From a legal perspective, DRM is superfluous, as copyright infringement is already illegal. However, also from a legal perspective, the DMCA provides a means of effectively banning all varieties of DRM-cracking technology so long as there exists as least one copyrighted work protected by said DRM scheme. As such, the DMCA provides a very effective legal blockade to greatly hinder the open operation of technology that would allow people to perform le
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Wrong Question. Throughout most of recorded history it has been accepted that the replication of information was not only permissible but encouraged. There are at least a couple saints whose claim to the title rests in their prolific ability to copy not only the bible but scholarly books as well. The value of a late medieval musician was in his ability to remember the words and tune to a song after only a single hearing. It has only been in the past 200 years where copying has become a sin. It comes from the industrialization of creativity. Instead of paying people to create we are now paying for the commodity of the created work. Notice that it is the commodity whole saler (RIAA,MPAA) and not the creator that are spending the most effort to protect the commodity market. Copyrights are artificial monopolies granted by the government to encourage commodity production. Lets write this again copying is the historical universal human right, copyrights are the limiting of those rights.
Please go study a bit of history. (You'll probably have to pay to do this, because you don't have the right to read it freely any more.)
JFMILLER
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
>Why is the DMCA inherently evil?
One new thing the DMCA and many similar laws introduced was a new "right" for the copyright holder, that of access. It is not really given as a new right, instead they are given the right to control the access but that is for the most part quite similar since it dissallows others the right to access. The right to access a work has not existed in most copyright laws before.