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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!
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.
One thing to remember here is that the standard conservative position is that it's desireable for the Supreme Court judges to read letters such as the one you reference to help determine the framer's original intent. It's the standard liberal position that the constitution is a living document - for text book liberals, that doesn't mean the court shouldn't refer to intent, but that intent doesn't always govern.
There are some very ignorant (or possibly just plain malicious) people who have started attacking the liberal viewpoint over the living document position - I say ignorant not because the 'original intent' position is necessarily wrong, but because they have opposed it by making original intent something the court should guess at in a near vacuum. Only certain other documents are supposed to be relevant to helping determine intent, and often judges who refer to other documents, such as the letter you mention, are falsely characterized as liberal activist judges who are not sticking with original intent at all.
So you've given a very good arguement for the user's right to copy being a natural right, and creator copyright for a limited term being a gift of social law. It's actually an old style conservative arguement. At this point, it's not conservative enough for the 'right wing', and half the Fox comentators would call you a liberal. Now for the 64 dollar question. How do we fix the copyright system, if we let someone re-define the centrist position so that it's to the right of practically every poster to this thread.
Who is John Cabal?