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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!
Most people don't realize that even certain VHS tapes had DRM -- or at least a basic form thereof. Many years ago, for a high school video project, I wanted to splice a little scene from "Return of the Jedi" into our project. (The scene with the Ewoks bowing and scraping to Threepio, as a metaphor for the Aztecs greeting Cortez.) But when I tried to record it onto the family VHS video camera for splicing and transfer (we were using our VCR and the camera to create a very basic editing system; this was 1996!), the camera would quit recording after a few seconds, saying something about a "protected" video or something.
I forget how I got around it, but it was a pain in the ass. All for less than thirty seconds of fair-use footage for a damn high school project!
Good poets borrow; great poets violate copyright, which is nothing like stealing!!!
The 'demise of VHS' is about as relevant to the erosion of "fair use" as the price of canvas was to the demise of sailing ships.
People are willing to sell away anything to get a lower initial price--they're willing to accept more restrictive use if it means saving a buck. It's not just media entertainment, but food, furniture, and almost anything that involves the exchange of money. They'll reserve the right to complain later, but the remedy of that complaint can NEVER be raising the prices to fix what consumers voluntarily sold off.
Yeah, we can sue McDonald's for making us fat, or we could stop thinking that paying $15 for a restaurant meal that won't kill you is some great injustice. We can complain all we want about outsourcing support jobs to wherever, but good god, don't charge us $20 more for our computers. We can balk at the several hundred dollar price of hardwood furniture and complain about deforestation, but IKEA still gets frowned upon for its "cheap" quality in comparison (when in fact, many of their products are surprisingly durable for being made of sawdust and paper).
Price is all-important, and anything that gets us a lower price is a good idea...until we realize that what we threw out the window to get there might actually have been important. Then we want it back, but we want someone else to eat the costs involved with bringing it back.
I still have an 8-track player and a whole collection of tunes on 8-track tape. And silly people kept saying 8-track was dying...
Marketplace isn't an NPR program; the show is produced and distributed by American Public Media. Though many public radio stations air programs from both NPR and APM (as well as other orgnizations like Public Radio International), the two are distinct entities.
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.
After all, it's impossible to control people who aren't criminals. You see it on Law & Order all the time: If someone isn't cooperating, they threaten to enforce some other law unless the guy does cooperate. As shit laws like these pile up, the state becomes fascist through no particular malice or evil intent. You being a thorn in their side? Well, I'd sure hate to take your entire DVD collection to make sure they weren't pirated. And you better have receipts, too.
Dead serious: Before any new law may be passed, the legal code shall be reviewed in it's entirety and thoroughly checked for existing laws serving the same purpose. If any such law shall exist, the proposed law may not be passed. If multiple laws serving the same purpose are found, they shall be reconciled into one non-self-contradictory law with the eldest law taking precedence. Not only will Congress be too preoccupied by this to do any more damage, but eventually the legal code will become understandable again. Imagine... justice returns as rich/well-funded criminals can no longer appeal their sentences for 25 years before they go to jail. To help initial implementation, I suggest forming a "council" of 1000 lawyers covering every legal field, and directing them to find contradictory and/or redundant laws.
The problem is that as the legal code grows, the most general search becomes O(N^2) because you need to compare every law with every other law. This needs to happen before N becomes so large that the only way to finish before the End of Time is to completely reboot. Queue arguments that we're already there...
No, we lost them -- go read the DMCA. All the copyright holder has to do is say "this was ROT13 encrypted twice" and you have no Fair Use rights anymore.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
Now do you see? Now do you understand why we have to get rid of this particular evil? This simply cannot be allowed to survive, because it is standing in the way of progress.
As long as we continue to have media outlets that are not owned by corporations, we will continue to have reports like this that fail to toe the corporatist line. Were it not for NPR, reports like this, critical of DRM, would be relegated to the backwater of Internet blogs and college-town weeklies. We have failed to completely destroy NPRs credibility as a media outlet despite our constant efforts. We must stamp it out altogether, or face continued non-corporate-approved reporting.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
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."
Only 8% comes from government funding.
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.
Likewise, I'd describe ambiguous inapplicable analogies with no supportive statements the same way that I would describe fruit.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
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?