MPAA Committed To Fair Use and DRM

Doctor Jay writes "At a LexisNexis Conference on DRM this week, MPAA's Dan Glickman announced that the MPAA was fine with consumers ripping DVDs for portable video players and home media servers. 'In his speech to industry insiders at the posh Beverly Hills Four Seasons hotel, Glickman repeatedly stressed that DRM must be made to work without constricting consumers. The goal, he said, was "to make things simpler for the consumer," and he added that the movie studios were open to "a technology summit" featuring academics, IT companies, and content producers to work on the issues involved.'"

Comments

We'll believe it when we see it.

[faedle]

It's a shame that Sony's use of copy protection (that breaks even playback on standard licensed DVD players) means that at least one significant MPAA member disagrees... .. not to mention the recent actions against YouTube.

Oh Really?

[rudy_wayne]

"MPAA's Dan Glickman announced that the MPAA was fine with consumers ripping DVDs for portable video players and home media servers."

Really? In order to rip DVDs you must use software that by-passes the DVD copy protection. That is a violation of the DMCA -- a law that was pushed thru by the MPAA -- and anyone who has attempted to sell this sort of software (DVD Xcopy, etc) has been sued into oblivion by the MPAA.

Re:Oh Really?

[HTH NE1]

That's an easy question, and has nothing to do with the DMCA. Copyright law as it stands has never allowed you to make copies of a protected work in your possession just to keep around.

Drop the word "protected" or replace it with "copyrighted". And it has long been legal before the DMCA to make a copy of a work in your permanent possession, such as making a single archive copy for backup purposes. It was even legal to remove copy protections in order to achieve functional copies. (See "Copy ][ Plus" and related software, which was even legally distributed with title-specific protection cracks, be they custom parameters for reading unusual disk structures or even modifying object code.)

It's the same law that's always applied when you check out a book from the library -- feel free to read it as much as you want while you have it, and place-shift/format-shift all day, but keeping a copy after you've turned the book back in isn't remotely close to fair use.

Which is why people with eidetic memory have to be registered and are barred from utilizing any library services, and why photocopiers are also barred from being installed on library property, and why possession of a hand-held print scanner is illegal.

Oh wait, that's right: they aren't.

Some people will go on about time-shifting of broadcast works, but that area of law has never applied to physically-distributed works.

Never hyphenate with an adverb.

Only because it is a natural extension of the time shifting right. What makes broadcast (or cable, including premium cable) so different that the rights deemed fair with them are not deemed fair with anything else?

Granted retaining a library of broadcast television indefinitely is outside the approved time-shifting fair use, as it would be for any borrowed or rented work. But then, if people didn't do it anyway, some broadcast works would have completely ceased to exist. As would have many printed works if not for the efforts of monastic scribes reproducing entire ancient texts with painstaken exactness.

It's called "lip service"

[debest]

Unless there has been a tremendous upheaval and changes within the MPAA that we haven't heard about, there is *no way* that they genuinely want this. It is obvious that the media industry's desire is for control of the consumers' viewing and listening habits, and permitting "fair use" in the manner described is not what they have in mind. All evidence of their actions for the past 20 years or more points to the contrary.

I think that this is just a feel-good press release statement to publicly demonstrate that they are the good guys, but in the end they will act in their own best interests, not their customers'.

Many (or "all so far") != All

[nick_davison]

Isn't the point of DRM to constrict customers? The only way not to do so is to not have DRM.

Since its well known that DRM does not prevent piracy then the only purpose DRM can possibly have is restricting customers. The point of the purest concept of DRM is, "To constrict users to their legal uses."

Admittedly, every implementation so far has been a poor one, overstepping from constricting to legal rights in to outright diminishing those rights. But just because every implementation so far has been bad, that doesn't mean the core concept is exclusively bad.

Take moulds. Prior to the 1920s, most people would have said, "It is well known mould does nothing for us. The only purpose mould can possibly have is making us sick." Then along comes Fleming who shows the right mould can be used to kill all kinds of bacteria. The same has been said of viruses - which we're learning to harness now, and even bacteria.

Even more ironically, the MPAA and RIAA were some of the first to condemn P2P because "Its well known that P2P does not promote legal fair use. The only purpose P2P can possibly have is piracy." We laugh at them for their narrowmindedness on Slashdot, we lament how they can attempt to destroy a technology simply because many or most of its users do bad things with it, we scoff at how they don't really understand the full picture, then we turn around and do exactly the same thing.

Re:If the MPAA sold fruit

[utopianfiat]

same way some guy owns the copyright to happy birthday.

Re:Fair use

[voice_of_all_reason]

Not our problem.

What money did Da Vinci need to raise in order to create the Mona Lisa? Who funded the statue-carvers of Easter Island? How much of an advance did JK Rowling get in order to start Harry Potter (hint: zero).

Creative works made with only profit as a motive are not culturally fundamental. We'll live without them.

It is not a crime.

[twitter]

One of my many fans misses the point, as usual:

making a copy of something and selling 50,000 copies of it (or putting it on a P2P network for 5 million people to download) is a crime.

Selling 50,000 coppies of someone else's work is civil not a criminal violation. The neither the person's work or reputation is destroyed by your actions, nor is the public harmed. You may have cost the author money and they can sue you for it, but this is not a crime.

Sharing something is even less of a crime. Only publication is properly banned by copyright and you will have a hard time convincing anyone that one or two coppies is a publication. If sharing was a crime or outraged the public, we would have no public libraries, so think very hard before you advocate digital restrictions that are more severe than those that have always existed for physical coppies.

The point of copyright law is to spread knowledge and advance the state of the art. When the law thwarts those things, the law is out of line and needs to be fixed.

Re:Contradiction in terms

[jimicus]

"DRM must be made to work without constricting consumers"

Isn't the point of DRM to constrict customers? The only way not to do so is to not have DRM.

Technically correct. But this is the MPAA and they've got an answer to everything.

In this case, their answer is for every fair-use they consider "reasonable", they'll license a product which can do it. Such as a licensed DVD-ripping box which allows you to rip your DVDs but stores the movies in some encrypted form so you can watch them fine but copying them back onto another DVD is made awkward by things like Macrovision (if you try recording through analogue) or encryption (if you try dumping the digital data directly).

The minor issue with this is that fair-use by definition is a use for the media, not the mechanism to enable such use. "Fair Use" which can only be exercised by buying another licensed piece of equipment isn't really fair use at all - it's "fair use provided we don't lose control", which strictly speaking isn't fair use at all. But it's probably close enough that anyone trying the "Your honour, I was exercising my right to fair use" argument can be shot down with "Why didn't you use a licensed product to do so?"