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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.'"
RealMedia, barf. How appropriate that a commentary on the restrictive nature of digital media should be distributed in that format.
I think they are looking at the past through rose-colored glasses a bit here. The owners of copyright material have always made efforts to restrict duplication, even in the not-so-good-ol-days of analog tape. Drop a quick "VHS copy protection" into Google and you will see countless references of the restrictive nature of that media, both on the audio and video tracks. Analog audio tapes included a pleasnt high-pitched screeching boobytrap (spoiler signal) for would-be copiers.
It is not the death of the analog media that represents the end of part of our culture--and the risk of lost rights--as the commentary claims. It is the lack of spine in our leaders to stand up for what is right. It is the lack of foresight and hindsight on the part of the copyright owners and the consumers that patronize them. Make some noise about that, NPR.
I would also like to point out the self-destructive nature of the analog media they are pining over. About one third of the VHS tapes that remain in my collection are playable. The first DVD I ever bought does not skip once.
FairTax baby!
People say "steal" because it is one syllable, as opposed to the six for "violate copyright". No, it's not synonymous with armed robbery, but it is stealing. Get a dictionary and look it up! If copyright is a property, then copyright violation can indeed be stealing. If copyright isn't a property, then stop according property rights to your creative works (such as using the GPL).
Last week I went to a wedding. While there I stole a kiss from the bride. So why can I steal a kiss but I can't steal a poem?
I for one, am praising T.S. Eliot!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Not really. First off, double-ROT13 doesn't "effectively control access to a work", and it'd be trivial to prove that in court - but you were joking about that, right?
Seriously, though, you still have fair use rights. The DMCA blocks one possible avenue of exercising those rights, but there are others. You can't crack the encryption on a DVD to extract a clip for your review, but you can still connect the DVD player's analog output to a capture card, or point a camcorder at the screen.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Not quite. The cost of DRM itself is minimal and a predictable consequence of digital media--not a necessary restriction on fair use rights. People are willing to do anything to drive down the cost of purchasing music, including accepting narrower usage.
The fewer rights you transfer from the owner, the lower the sale price of the artwork. Media price isn't tied to production costs (if it were, small indie artists would be much more expensive, because their relative costs per unit would be way higher than the "big" pop artists). Instead, it's tied to the level of the licensing. Copies for renting out or public performance are substantially more expensive than the "home use" versions (even dating back to VHS and vinyl), even though they contain the exact same product. Likewise, digital files contain the same content (ignoring the low quality currently offered) for a lower price because they are transfers of fewer rights. This isn't to say that the labels' pricing for mp3s isn't greedy; that's a separate issue, but the point is that the price is lower, and by enough that it's starting to make a difference.
It's not solely about materials cost, and it isn't in other markets, either. The ingredients McDonald's purchases aren't the big reason why the food's bad for you--it's the method. Same reason why good furniture is expensive: the wood is expensive, but so is the craftsmanship and the process.
Have you heard of a lawspeaker? Here's a good article:
I'm inclined to agree with you; our laws are the legal equivalent of spaghetti code. They're poorly crafted - too permissive in places, too restrictive in others, too complicated altogether. When most citizens break laws during the course of a normal day, something's wrong with the laws.
Yes. Yes, it does. And before this degenerates into a 'yes it does, no it doesn't' slapfest, it might be best to analyze the underpinnings of the two sides.
The 'no' side is predicated upon the basic (and I believe ultimately erroneous) assumption that some rights are 'inherent'; that is, they literally inhere to (i.e. dwell within) certain classes of beings by virtue of those beings merely existing. This is the only way that one could argue that an unexerciseable right is still a right; it ontologically exists but is 'suppressed' in a manner of speaking by prevailing local conditions. It is certainly *possible* that this view is correct, but I think it problematic because it requires a large degree of epistemic faith, that is, that certain things exist of which we have absolutely no detectable evidence and yet are firmly believed must still exist. Such claims are always rooted in metaphysical arrogance and basically cash out as follows: "the world *must* work this way (despite lack of evidence that it does) because if it didn't, my word-view would collapse!" American society, and world-view, is predicated upon the inherency of certain rights, some of which are listed explicitly in black-and-white in the Declaration of Independence, and others are implied strongly in the Bill of Rights.
The 'yes' side posits the epistemologically more reasonable position that rights adhere to their subjects, and are created, maintained, divested, and destroyed by some agency independent of mere existence. That is, either the agent or some agency on behalf of the agent must use force (take action in any form) to guarantee that the 'right' adheres to the agent and has functional substance. Absent that force, the right dissipates. This seems much more in keeping with evidence observable through the course of human history.
Rights are only such if they can be cashed out into reality. Otherwise, they are just pretty words on paper. I agree with you on the very limited point that rights don't depend on just government, and so your statement "If your government doesn't protect your rights, it doesn't mean you don't still have them." is quite true. There are other means to project force to secure the practical adherence of a right beyond the reliance upon a government, and in fact it would be foolish in many cases to depend on the government to secure some of those rights. But, it does not then logically follow that, as you state, "everyone has rights". There are some people who do not use force and for whom no force is expended to adhere rights to them. Victims of genocide come to mind as the easiest example. They are deprived of rights; literally, they do not possess any.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Yet another thing that Congress made illegal and which law enforcement makes no meaningful attempt to enforce. Which means it will go the same way as most of the rest of the US legal code: Never actually enforced until the cops (or the ones holding their leash) really, REALLY want to get someone (for reasons good or for bad); Then a careful search of the legal code is all but gauranteed to reveal something that makes you a criminal.
For more information on this, there is a fantastic Cato Book Forum on this subject.
Here's a great quote from FDR's attorney general, Robert Jackson (mentioned in the video):
With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm--in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.
Keep in mind, he made that speech, the body of federal criminal law was less than half the size it is today.
Latewire
I always say that if it is property, then there should be a property tax on it. Let the copyright holder declare the value of their "intellectual property". If they set the value at $100, then they can only sue for $100. If the set the value at $100,000,000 then they can sue for $100,000,000, but they also have to pay property taxes on $100,000,000 worth of property. Of course they should be able to abdicate their ownership at any time both relieving them of copyright and tax liability.
This would limit copyright holders from hording just for the sake of hording, as they would have to pay for it. We would see large numbers of works currently under copyright, pushed out to the public domain as a tax savings. It would not prevent anyone that is currently making a profit from their works from continuing to do so as they would be encourage to declare a fair market value for their works to properly balance protection and tax liability. It would limit the outrageous lawsuits as the value of the work would be pre-determined.
I bought Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle trilogy in Adobe ebook format from Amazon a couple of years ago (I bought each book as it came available, actually). Well, that all started 3 laptops and 2 Palm PDAs ago. I got the urge to read the trilogy again last month, and found that I could no longer activate my Adobe ebooks. Seems that I'd accessed them on too many devices. Adobe tech support basically told me to go fuck myself. So I bought the dead tree versions of the books. I then emailed Adobe copies of the Amazon invoices for the ebooks and the subsequent hardcover purchases, along with a note explaining that I'd bought my last ebook. No surprise that I haven't heard back, but I'm sure they'll get the point when more and more of their paying customers have a problem with their legally purchased books being stolen from them by Adobe. Anyway, I'm praying that things change, and the sooner the better.
I am not left-handed, either!
I have to question you on this one. There are two main theories of where "intellectual property" comes from, and the debate over patent/copyright is contentious enough that law professors can't even agree on whether to refer to the Constitution's "IP Clause" or "Copyright Clause" or "Progress Clause." (I favor the latter.) Jefferson compared knowledge to a lighted taper [candle], that can be spread with no harm to the original holder; Franklin was a printer of pirated books. The actual wording that made it into the Constitution is ambiguous: patent/copyright law exists to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts," which suggests that ownership rights in ideas are not fundamental rights, but ones established through the government as a form of subsidy for creativity. The fact that these rights are "for a limited time" supports this notion. The other theory emphasizes the wording about "securing rights" as though people did have innate rights to exclusive control over their work. In either case, it's not "God" creating the rights but a social contract/natural law.
And in either case, you apparently do not have a Constitutionally protected right to copy media even under the First Amendment, because the Progress Clause grants "the exclusive right" to the creators. So, does the First Amendment override and destroy the Progress Clause? Or did the Founders understand the First Amendment to not cover copyright (which means there was a large hole knocked in it from the beginning)? I don't know the answer here, but there's troubling ambiguity even just from trying to figure out the original intent of the Constitution.
Revive the Constitution.
Would you say, then, that the Progress Clause (or whatever we should call it) has always been a dead letter, overridden completely by the First Amendment? It's a legally plausible position, as you'd be saying that the Amendment (which came after the Clause) eliminates and blocks all restrictions on freedom of the press, therefore canceling the authority that the Clause gives Congress to grant exclusive reproduction rights to media. But if that's so, then all copyrights are unconstitutional, and possibly even patents.
A letter by Jefferson presented his idea that "the exclusive right to invention [is] given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society." He wrote that "natural law" or "universal law" or "nature" was the source of our rights. He distinguished between those rights "derived from nature" and those from "the gift of social law," putting patent/copyright firmly in the latter category and questioning its practical worth even in that capacity.
Revive the Constitution.
And yet providing an exclusive right to a subset of that information (creative works) for a limited time seems to benefit the whole more than it costs them.
Exactly.
You know what the problem with a religion is? It's not that the advice it gives is good or bad, it's that the absence of the consideration of why it's good or bad that goes with wholesale acceptance of it leads people to not realize when the world has changed and the good advice is no longer good advice.
As a way to administer who in a population you entice to create, it's not an entirely bad idea. But it has limits on its effectiveness and costs that must be considered, and it must be allowed to become obsolete and die as a cultural meme if we are going to grow and progress.
The time is fast approaching where you could fit the sum of all human creativity into a small cheap piece of material with a reader no more sophisticated than a cheap electronic toy and put one in the hands of every man, woman and child on earth. Copyright law would make this impossible. That's a pretty big cost to pay. Particularly in consideration that copyright isn't what supports those artists, but rather one possible mechanism to determine who we collectively support.
We need to create a practical mechansim that would allow for humanity to support creativity in people in a fair and sustainable fashion that doesn't carry the necessity to deprive humanity of access to the majority of works, as the current system does.
To choose to do otherwise is to needlessly transform (maintain?) our neighbours into (as) ignorant, dependent and uneducated peasants that, rather than participating in mutually beneficial civilized exchange out of enlightened self-interest, instead attack their oppressors in an attempt to break free of a structure that separates them from culture, education and the capacity for more intelligent behavior, again, out of enlightened self-interest.
If he gives you fishes but refuses to teach you to fish and refuses to let you try and teach yourself, the enlightened person will gather their neighbours, stab him spears, pillage his hut for his equipment, then try to muddle it out for themselves and enable everyone in the village to be empowered.
Progress occurs when they finally succeed.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth