Is Copy Protection Needed or Futile?

Hugh Pickens writes "Columnist Saul Hansell is hosting a debate about copyright issues and technology on his blog at the New York Times . On one side Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal, says that anyone who is intellectually honest must 'acknowledge, confront and speak to the tidal wave of unlawful, wholesale reproduction and distribution of copyrighted content that is currently occurring in the digital world' and that we should be 'identify workable, flexible and effective approaches that reduce piracy without being intrusive and that fully respect other interests such as privacy and fair use.' Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, responds that 'locks will be broken, and so a business model that depends on locking is very vulnerable' adding that locks may form a part of certain successful business models but 'too much reliance on locking can seriously backfire.' Wu and Cotton will respond to each other and to comments by readers today." As for the man on the street, Panaqqa wrote us with word that the Question Copyright site has posted an interesting video of ordinary people explaining why they think copyright exists. It's pretty clear that most people don't understand it at all.

Comments

Irony?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the text:

Monday's Question

Should creators insist on technology that will restrict the copying and transmission of copyrighted works? Any lock can eventually be picked. Do these restrictions provide speed bumps to help keep honest people honest? Or do they create a permanent war between creators and users that may hurt everyone?
Rick Cotton

Rick Cotton: Given our experience to date, it is clear that technology can be and needs to be part of the answer in many areas to protecting copyrighted works on-line. But this can be done flexibly, avoiding "war" between creators and users while respecting privacy, fair use and other reasonable concerns that too frequently are raised not as concerns to be addressed, but as excuses seeking to block any action at all.

It's hard, if not impossible, to have a meaningful discussion on this issue unless we can agree on the following premise: the broadband, digital world is awash in a tidal wave of unlawful, wholesale reproduction and distribution of copyrighted content. As to the question at hand, it is entirely reasonable to explore technological solutions. A few key building blocks:

1. There may not be a single answer to this question. It may vary by medium, by technological environment and by groups of creators. Some media may be more susceptible to flexible, effective and commercially reasonable technology protections than others. Some groups of creators may have different preferences than others. Some tech environments may be easier to address first than others.

2. Many creators devote huge amounts of time, creative energy, and -- in commercial settings -- monetary investment to produce copyrighted works. Media companies, including NBC Universal, have made major commitments to utilize technology to deliver great content to fans in many new ways and to build new business models. Both fairness and the law (firmly rooted in the U.S. Constitution) support creators' right to control the use of their work and to be compensated for these efforts (if that is what they want). " In today's digital world, that includes taking steps to protect their works from indiscriminate, wholesale theft on the internet.

3. Those who suggest that technological protections are not needed must, if they are intellectually honest, acknowledge, confront and speak to the tidal wave of unlawful, wholesale reproduction and distribution of copyrighted content that is currently occurring in the digital world on the broadband internet. This indefensible massive trafficking simply must be reduced in any kind of law abiding society. We should be working collaboratively and cooperatively to identify workable, flexible and effective approaches that reduce piracy without being intrusive and that fully respect other interests such as privacy and fair use.

4. Another feature of this debate that should change is technologists disingenuously trashing technology. Too often, the same people who enthusiastically and unreservedly sing the praises of the infinite and wondrous capabilities of digital technology in virtually every other respect pretend that technology has nothing to offer and no ability to reduce the massive trafficking in wholesale infringements of entire works (certainly in the area of video, film, TV, games and software). It is categorically and demonstratively untrue and unworthy of tech champions. Current filtering technology, for example, now being deployed on video sharing sites such as MySpace, Microsoft's Soapbox, and even soon on YouTube work with a high degree of technical effectiveness, stopping unauthorized copyrighted material from being uploaded while permitting authorized material to be posted. There remain obvious challenges. But the tech community has demonstrated its capability to solve similar challenges in multiple other arenas. There is no reason to think that the challenges of content protection technology are any different.

5. The imperfect protection offered by anti-piracy technologies - "Every lock can be picked" - is no

Re:Irony?

[maeka]

5. The imperfect protection offered by anti-piracy technologies - "Every lock can be picked" - is no reason to give up on them. Despite the existence of lock picks, identity thieves, and hackers, cars and homes still have locks, e-mail accounts have passwords, and computers have firewalls.

Car locks, home locks, e-mail accounts, and computer firewalls all differ greatly from media DRM in (at least) one important way:
Not one of the security models used in his analogy depends on giving the key to the potential attacker. With media DRM you are given a restricted format and an obscured key to unlock it. This is its weakness, and has no corollary with the examples he gave.

Two - in the case of car and home locks - deterrence is enough. I don't need to secure my house against a perfect thief, unless I have the Hope diamond in my bedroom. I only need to secure my home better than my neighbor does. Even securing my house well enough to change the risk:reward or difficulty:reward balance is enough to greatly reduce the chances of a break-in.

Re:Irony?

[AKAImBatman]

That's not ironic. It's stupid and contrarian. This is how you add to a discussion:

Those who suggest that technological protections are not needed must, if they are intellectually honest, acknowledge, confront and speak to the tidal wave of unlawful, wholesale reproduction and distribution of copyrighted content that is currently occurring in the digital world on the broadband internet.

If we are truly to be intellectually honest, then we must address the problem of supply versus demand. Rampant piracy suggests that the demand for content delivered over the Internet is obvious. Yet digital content has traditionally been held hostage by physical media. In many of the instances that content is provided digitally, it is further held hostage behind walls of incompatibilities, digital restrictions, overpricing, poor terms of services, and other devaluing options. All in the name of "protecting" digital content.

The preciously few times that digital content is loosed upon the populace at a fair price and fair terms, it blooms and propers. Which (if we are to be "intellectually honest") means that the failure to prevent copyright infringement is a failure to provide what the average consumer wants. When the content producers fail, many consumers take matters into their own hands.

My dear Warner Bros., why has the DVD of 300 been available for over 6 months, yet it is impossible to purchase or rent online? BBC, why are you not catering to your international audience by providing quality shows like Doctor Who on services like iTunes? NBC, thank you for your website. We very much enjoy the television content you provide. Now why are you backing out of the lucrative iTunes deal? You don't need exclusivity in this business. Viacom, CBS makes a killing on promoting their Late Late Show on YouTube. Why are you cutting off promotion of your excellent Comedy Central series rather than embracing it? (And thereby having some modicum of control over it.)

No. If we are to be "intellectually honest", we must face the fact that content producers are afraid. The world has changed, yet content producers cling to any false sense of control they can find. Each of these walls crumble under the might of economic demand, for which content producers only call for a bigger wall. Your customer is not your enemy. As with the barbarians at the gates of Rome who only wanted the land and crops originally promised to them by the emperor, your customers only want easy access to the content you promise them. No one has proven that they are not willing to pay for that privilege.

Re:Irony?

[snl2587]

I only need to secure my home better than my neighbor does.

Or be considerably poorer than your neighbor. Either works, really.

Re:Irony?

[Anonymous Coward]

I only need to secure my home better than my neighbor does. Even securing my house well enough to change the risk:reward or difficulty:reward balance is enough to greatly reduce the chances of a break-in.
  Hmm, that gives me an idea for helping secure my home: A burglar is probably gonna have a quick look under the mat or pots at the front of your house for a key. Why not put a front door key under one of those pots, but not your front door key. And label the key with the address that it is for (probably best the key doesn't actually work at that address). A burglar would no doubt try the key in my front door, find it doesn't work, but be tempted by the address, so might then piss-off and stop trying to enter my house?

Re:Irony?

[russotto]

Car locks, home locks, e-mail accounts, and computer firewalls all differ greatly from media DRM in (at least) one important way:
Not one of the security models used in his analogy depends on giving the key to the potential attacker.

Here's a second critical difference: Breaking the lock on one physical item nets you one physical item. Breaking the protection on a copy-protected work nets you as many copies of that work as you care to make.

And a third difference: Sometimes breaking the copy-protection on a work allows you to copy many other works as well.

If breaking one auto lock gave a thief access to every car of that model, and perhaps every car of that model year, they'd be pretty useless. Such is copy protection.

Re:Irony?

[nine-times]

You're right to bring up the idea of deterrence. Anyone security expert worth their salt will tell you that security is really all about deterrence. You can't make something impossible to access, and even if you could, the only way to completely secure it is to disallow all access, even to the owner. Otherwise, the owner could inadvertently give access to someone else.

So the purpose of security measures is to make it difficult to get unauthorized access, risky to attempt to gain unauthorized access, and very likely to get caught if you do gain unauthorized access. That's all. However, a good DRM scheme has to be transparent to the authorized user, meaning it has to be simple to get access, without risk to gain access, and unlikely to suffer bad consequences from getting access. Therefore it's just incompatible with the idea of security. You don't secure things against authorized access.

Re:Irony?

[UbuntuDupe]

I don't believe you have cited differences.

Not one of the security models used in his analogy depends on giving the key to the potential attacker. With media DRM you are given a restricted format and an obscured key to unlock it. This is its weakness, and has no corollary with the examples he gave.

The listed examples (car locks, home locks ...) actually are alike in this respect. When you lock your door, you "give" the thief the key in an obscured way. Ask any locksmith. The information contained in a physical lock, by itself, suffices to create a tool that can bypass that lock and other similar ones.

Two - in the case of car and home locks - deterrence is enough. I don't need to secure my house against a perfect thief, unless I have the Hope diamond in my bedroom. I only need to secure my home better than my neighbor does. Even securing my house well enough to change the risk:reward or difficulty:reward balance is enough to greatly reduce the chances of a break-in.

Copy protection is the exact same way. It only needs to be strong enough so that for most people, their utility is maximized by doing something *other* than copying the work. The person adding the copy protection is, just like you, trying to manipulate the risk:reward ratio of copying.

Re:Irony?

[Belial6]

There is a bigger difference. With the other items you listed, the person who has paid for the item, owns the lock. When I have a car, home lock, email account and computer firewall, I get to control the lock on my stuff. I can even unlock them and let anyone or everyone have access to them. DRM is the only lock where someone else gets is trying to lock up my stuff, and telling me who I can give access to, or even how I access my stuff.

Re:Irony?

[maeka]

Copy protection is the exact same way. It only needs to be strong enough so that for most people, their utility is maximized by doing something *other* than copying the work. The person adding the copy protection is, just like you, trying to manipulate the risk:reward ratio of copying.

Except, as has been mentioned by others elsewhere in this thread, for the fact that picking my home's lock does not give you access to my neighbor's home.

Also, to pick my Honda's lock you need physical access to my home. This limits greatly the number of people able to work on picking the lock. To break the security on a DRM'd file - any (easy to make) copy will suffice.

Re:Irony?

[Maxo-Texas]

You are also ignoring the fact that other grossly overpriced items invite theft and law abuse.

There is such a glut of entertainment that there is no reason that Tom Cruise gets $20 million for a $100 million movie when a movie (and a host of people involved with the movie also get 7 figure and 6 figure salaries as well).

The fact is that a movie -- the hard technology of it, the writing, the editing, can be done at a 10th the cost it is currently done at (probably 1/100th).

Sane people do not pirate $6 dvd's. However $89 DVD is something different. Especially for a movie that made it's profits years ago and is in the "all gravy" phase.

Do people have a *right* to infringe (steal) creator's works? No.
But to think they will not when they can easily do so for $1 and two hours of their time is insane.

Also... I used to write software which was used to earn my company 8 billion dollars. Why are movie and television writers so special that they get paid for the rest of their life when they write yet another boilerplate television script?

Actors... writers... everyone in hollywood is in for a wakeup call. Multi-million dollar salaries are going to be unsupportable very soon. Already, I spend 30% of my entertainment time on free things like Star Wreck, Fan Movies, and so on. A huge chunk of my time goes to Mmorg's at $15 a month (maybe 50 cents per hour). And then DVD's of series like Mission impossible and Heroes run me about $1 per hour for entertainment. Why does a movie justify $15 per hour? It doesn't.

The compensation in the entertainment industry is grossly inflated.

Re:Irony?

[maeka]

Unless a design defect is discovered in a line of locks, picking one (or creating a specialized pick) does not grant all would-be attackers instant access. The best it can do is lower the barrier to entry, it can make the task easier. Physical access, time, and a certain level of skill are still required of the attacker.

This is very different from current media DRM schemes. Once a file is broken there is no longer a barrier at all. Anyone can use the broken file, without physical access, without spending time "picking the lock", and without any skill.

If a design defect is discovered in a line of physical locks, the locks can be changed. Until no media is delivered on physical media such recalls are impossible for the subjects of the original argument.

Re:Irony?

[tilandal]

DRM in no way alters the risk of copying. It only alters the difficulty of copying. A thief trying to break into a car that is locked takes on inherently more risk then a car that is unlocked because he is more likely to be seen. Copying a DRMed song from itunes is no more risky then copying a song from a CD.

Re:Irony?

[Anonymous Coward]

Use the address of the local police station.

Re:Irony?

[Maxo-Texas]

One problem...
Make the lock as strong as you want it. But if one person.. anywhere in the world breaks it, then it is broken for everyone.

It would be like if one person figured out how to jimmy a chevy in london and all chevy locks throughout the world unlocked.

Re:Irony?

[AndersOSU]

The point I would like to see Rick Cotton address is how his mythical "workable, flexible and effective approaches that reduce piracy without being intrusive" addresses the problem that copy protection only needs to be broken once to show up on the file sharing networks. After that any copy protection only serves to burden the rightful owner.

"Workable, flexible and effective approaches that reduce piracy without being intrusive" only stops the casual pirate from uploading their file. It does nothing from stopping the casual pirate from downloading a cracked file that a serious pirate uploaded.

If the content producers are dead set on controlling the flow of their material given the realities of broadband, what they're looking for is digital watermarks, not digital locks. At least in that case you can track down whoever it was that originally purchased the file. No it doesn't work with any content that was ever given away freely (I'm still not sure why you'd want to protect that anyway) and no it isn't perfect. Yes, it is also a bit of closing the barn door after the horses are out, but it at least has some deterrent value.

Re:Irony?

[FireFury03]

shouldn't they be able to deploy a wide range of ever-changing DRM systems?

This is significantly dangerous for the consumer since it means that the consumer's right to access their legally purchased content may be revoked at any time. For example - if the DRM server becomes inaccessible you really don't want all your content to be revoked (if the rights holder has gone bankrupt, for example, they aren't going to care that none of their customers can access their content any more).

Sadly many of the public who I have talked with about DRM seem to think this is a problem. Usually they say something along the lines of "I don't care if I lose access to my music in 10 years, after all it's 10 years old so not important" - I don't know about anyone else, but I still listen to music I purchased well over 10 years ago.

Re:Irony?

[CodeBuster]

With such a model the ability to contain a single security breech to a small number of files should be possible. Indeed, that was their intention with the Blu-Ray format or at least in part by allowing part of the decryption algorithm to be dynamically loaded from the disc. The model was still flawed in that the dynamically loaded code was subject to analysis, but the designers probably hoped that the extra effort involved in analyzing dozens or even hundreds of variations all different on different disks would be enough of a deterrent to discourage copying. Obviously they are wrong, for the reasons pointed above, but it was the first time that the DRM pushers took a slightly more dynamic approach to the problem (unsolvable IMHO).

The only way that their copy protection scheme would work is if they had complete end-to-end control of all hardware devices that might capture either the data or the sounds and images which is not only ridiculous but impossible. I have long thought that a different course should be pursued and it is as follows:

First, the music industry should discontinue their lawsuits and refund all money and reasonable legal expenses that they have inflicted upon average citizens of modest means in their lawsuit campaign. Second, they should apologize to both the artists and the fans for years of skullduggery, ripoffs, and other assorted nastiness. Third, they should charge reasonable prices for downloads of music in the format chosen by the user (ogg, mp3, aac, or whatever the customer wants). Finally, after all of these steps have been taken, they should make the case against wholesale copyright infringement by taking the moral high ground and appealing to peoples' sense of decency and fairness. Most people are reasonable and would be swayed by such an argument. They would not infringe copyright wholesale for the same reasons that they don't empty the cardboard change box (i.e. the one with no lock or other security) of the charity candy stand. The honor system works, and works at least as well as treating everyone like a thief. There will always be wholesale copyright infringers no matter what the industry does. However, the problem can be minimized for minimal cost and expense by taking the high road and appealing to peoples' noble side rather than taking the low road with lawsuits and injustice for all.

Re:Irony?

[AKAImBatman]

Because they're wary of things that would facilitate illegal distribution [...] Because if they "rented" it online, they'd have to have really powerful DRM.

That's a silly argument. It's pitifully easy to rip a DVD and share it online. I know for a fact that I could go and download 300 off of Pirate Bay if I wanted. But I don't want to. I *want* to do the right thing. I *want* to purchase the movie legally from the content owner. I *want* MovieLink to have a better selection than when I was using it. I *want* iTunes to carry more blockbusters other than just Disney movies.

As a consumer, I want those things and have a track record of being willing to pay for them. The infrastructure exists in the form of MovieLink, iTunes, Vongo, etc., and are no more dangerous than a DVD. (In fact, it's quite a bit easier to rip from a DVD.) In most cases, they also generate the same revenue per copy. Yet studios are blind to these simple facts.

Punishing your PAYING customers

[sheepofblue]

DRM tends to punish your paying customers as much (or more) than those stealing it. When your business model punishes your customer the result will be decline and eventually failure.

Re:Punishing your PAYING customers

[sm62704]

What's more, if I can buy a new, loaded Caddilac for $2000 or a stripped, used Yugo for $50,000, why in the world would I choose the Yugo?

This is the choice faced by someone wanting digital content: get full rights for free, or pay for a product crippled by Dumb Restricted Media.

The fact is that DRM doesn't work, PERIOD.

DRM tends to punish your paying customers as much (or more) than those stealing it

Copyright infringement is not thieft. For one thing, the penalties for copyright infringement are far, far greater than the penalties for thieft, to the point that if you get caught, you're better off shoplifting a CD or DVD than infringing copyright on it.

Stop confusing potsmoking with murder.

Re:Punishing your PAYING customers

[goldspider]

There was a "feature" on the disc that would export the music to her hard drive. The end result was a bunch of protected WMA files.

iTunes was unable to import the CD directly; it didn't see it as a music CD. I'm curious now to see if that CD would even play in a regular CD player.

Re:Punishing your PAYING customers

[internewt]

It probably would have played in a normal CD player. The way this copy protection works, I think, is the WMAs are on a second session, with the music in the disks first session. I think they then purposefully corrupt the info on the CD about the session layout.... in a normal CD player the error correction corrects the session info, and finds the music. But a computer CDROM sees only the second session, so the user can only find the data: horrible low quality DRM'd WMAs.

I think the way around it is with software that can find that first session. Exact Audio Copy under windows has an feature to do this: action menu, detect TOC manually. Then you can rip the audio to WAV files or MP3s and ignore the data session at the end of the disk.

Re:Punishing your PAYING customers

[suggsjc]

The fact is that DRM doesn't work on slashdotters, PERIOD.

There, fixed it for you. While I do agree with you to a certain extent, you are distorted by your own technical knowledge. I'm going to use my parents as examples (despite the fact that I would attempt to inform them of how to not get burned). If either of my parents purchased music through iTunes (and did not have me as a resource) then they would in fact be 100% constrained to any and all of the DRM for the tracks. My mom has dabbled with trying to learn/understand P2P, but in the end she actually prefers the convenience and intuitive interface of iTunes and some of the other on-line music stores. The only thing that she cares about is being able to either burn a CD or use it on her mp3 player.

There are so many things that we think are "easy" like things as trivial to putting attachments on emails or burning CDs, but to some they don't know how and they don't know where to turn. For those people, they just accept the DRM and its restrictions as part of the whole "computer experience." If they can't listen to their music on any/all of their devices (but be honest, those people probably have an iPod anyway), then they don't feel cheated...maybe a little frustrated, but for the most part it is just all part of the game.

Again, just because you are clever to avoid any/all DRM doesn't mean that it is completely ineffective.

Re:Punishing your PAYING customers

[sm62704]

Copyright infringement is enough like stealing that it can reasonably be called "stealing"

If I shoplift a CD, the proprietor no longer has that CD. If I infringe your copyright you still have both the work and its copyright. The difference is if you're caught you have a small criminal fine with stealing but a large civil penalty with copyright infringement.

If you go into a theatre without paying that is also described as "stealing" the movie, and similarly if you take a ride on a train without a ticket.

No, that's "tresspass" and if you're caught you will be charged not with thieft, but tresspass.

It's basically NewSpeak under a different agenda.

Calling copyright infringement "stealing" is the newspeak. Cats are cats, dogs are dogs, copyright infringement is copyright infrienement, stealing is stealing and small furry animals from Alpha Centauti are small furry animals from Alpha Centauti. And that last bit was plagairism, not copyright infriengement.

"Newspeak" is calling a spade a "pointy shovel" as you are doing when you confuse copyright infringement with stealing.

Re:Punishing your PAYING customers

[ajs318]

You can now get record / CD players that can record MP3s directly to SD/MMC memory cards or USB mass storage devices, straight from CD or LP, without the use of a computer. Check out one of those catalogues that fall out of the Radio Times while you are browsing in the newsagent's.

Re:Punishing your PAYING customers

[Jabrwock]

If either of my parents purchased music through iTunes (and did not have me as a resource) then they would in fact be 100% constrained to any and all of the DRM for the tracks. My mom has dabbled with trying to learn/understand P2P, but in the end she actually prefers the convenience and intuitive interface of iTunes and some of the other on-line music stores. The only thing that she cares about is being able to either burn a CD or use it on her mp3 player.

And if she cannot burn a CD, or use it on her mp3 player, I'll assume she turns to you to "fix it", correct? Regular consumers don't think of DRM in terms of "protecting" anything either. While not technical enough to bypass them, they too see them as limitations on the product they bought, and will find ways (or find someone who knows ways) to get around them.

My friend can't figure out how to rip a DVD. But she wants to play them on her new video iPod. If she was told she was doing something illegal, she'd think you were nuts. She bought the DVD. She owns the iPod. She's not copying it to someone else. But the DRM punishes her equally, because it prevents her from using her possessions in a way she wants. So she turns to me to do it for her.

This is a fundamental difference between the lock on the house and the lock on the media. Media owners see it as a "licence" to use, not ownership. So while you can do in your own house whatever you bloody well please once you get in the door, because it's your house, the media lock is more a key to a friends house you were lent with a strict set of rules of conduct attached. Just strict enough, and you can enjoy yourself, but your friend's house is still protected from damage. But imagine if the use of the key forbid the use of the bathroom, or something equally silly. Would you be annoyed? Yep. Does the restriction help protect the house? Not unless you've got some kind of medical disorder. Why impair the use of the house when used in what would seem to be a normal and natural function? Especially since you've already been given permission to enter.

How often would you go to that friend's house if all you were allowed to do was walk on very narrow plastic to the couch, weren't allowed to sit, and could only watch the shopping channel unless it was Sunday, at which point you *might* be able to watch sports, but only if you held your arms out at the right angle? How often would you to there, if your other friend had non-stop sports channels, a great couch, and actually let you sit down?

It keeps being said

[FredFredrickson]

Price the content based on quality, and make it convenient. People prefer convenience.

People won't bother to steal if there's a quality, low-cost solution they could just pay for.

For example- I pay $15/month to subscribe to Yahoo Music with my MP3 player, because it's just easier than stealing. The catch? I don't even keep my music if I stop paying. But I don't care! I'm paying for convenience.

Re:It keeps being said

[Aladrin]

That's not exactly true. I believe -most- people would pay (if they could) rather than steal/pirate/infringe/whatever. There will always be those who get a kick out of not paying and will do it just for that little thrill.

As for pricing on quality, the 'quality' of all music on iTunes is the same, and all the songs cost the same... But I sense that isn't what you're talking about. I think you mean 'value', and that's a subjective thing. My value of any given song is probably lower than Random Joe's because I'm not that into music. It doesn't excite me.

I suscribed to Rhapsody for a few months for the same reason you subscribe to Yahoo Music... It's just easier. Then I realized that I mostly listened to internet radio and I could do that for free, legally. imeem.com also provides a way for me to sample songs I think I might like, find more like it, and listen to classics that I just want to hear again right now.

I think Amazon is doing a great job with pricing and convenience right now... Many songs are cheaper than iTunes, all are DRM-free, and it's pretty easy to download the songs. I still think AllOfMP3.com had more convenience (I'm ignoring the ridiculously low prices), but they didn't have any rules they had to play by.

Re:It keeps being said

[Andy Dodd]

The music industry completely screwed up with allofmp3 - It's a classic example of a dying industry trying to hold on with legislation instead of competing.

Rather than complain and moan about it, the RIAA should've figured out why allofmp3 was doing so well. It wasn't just the prices.

1) Selection as good as, or in many cases even better than many existing stores. About the only online store that does better is ITMS in my opinion.
2) NO DRM. Makes selection variety a bit less important, as there's less incentive to stick with a single store. (In some ways bad for a store if it's easier to go to someone else, but if your selection stinks and/or is niche, you're going to find that no one chooses you if you've got DRM.)
3) Not overpriced. Admittedly too cheap, but the RIAA could've made a store at twice the prices and still have been wildly successful. (Why? Legality = convenience, as far as "ease of payment", and twice Allofmp3's prices would have still been far below current RIAA-sanctioned stores.)

The RIAA wants to hang on to high per-track prices, but they should be thinking about sacrificing per-track profits to drastically increase volume. For example, if someone hears a track they really like on the radio or elsewhere, they're likely to buy the entire album at $3. But at $10+ for the entire album, they'll probably just buy only that track at $1, given the tendency for albums to have a lot of "filler crap".

Are the two options mutually-exclusive?

[Blakey Rat]

Are the two options mutually-exclusive? Ask the PC Games industry whether copy protection is needed or futile. It's needed because retailers/publishers won't sell the game without it. It's mostly futile for the obvious reason (although I'm sure it snags some casual copiers.)

A more interesting question would be to ask a PC game maker if they'd release their game with no copyright, if their publishers/retailers allowed them to. Right now, they have no choice-- given the choice, which would they make?

Re:Are the two options mutually-exclusive?

[m50d]

I thought you were about to mention a quite common practice in the PC games industry - initially release with copy protection, then disable it in a later patch. This strikes me as a very good compromise - the copy protection is as effective as it can ever be, and makes the difference when it matters - namely immediately after release - while customers aren't inconvenienced for very long.

You can't lock a tent

[vtcodger]

*** 'locks will be broken, and so a business model that depends on locking is very vulnerable'***

'very vulnerable' isn't the half of it. You can't lock a tent . If your business model depends on end users not copying your product, you might as well save everyone a lot of trouble and move on to another project. Copyright/Patent/Trademark may protect you a bit against some commercial competition. But you can't do much about end users violating them. And maybe not against mega-corporations with brigades of lawyers either.

Charge for the Media, or the License. Not Both.

[Alzheimers]

The problem with DRM is that the copyright holders want it to be a magic bullet to control exactly how a product is used by the consumer. Unfortunately for them, the consumer usually has a different idea of what they want to do with their own legitimately purchased products.

The Media companies need to understand that what they really need to focus on is getting customers to pay for the song. How they get it should be device agnostic -- a download, a CD, recorded off the air, etc. Once the "license" for that song is acquired, the consumer should be legally entitled to do whatever they want with it, including (but not limited to) space shifting, time shifting, remixing (for non-commercial use), transcoding, and demonstration.

While I don't agree with "file sharing" in a general case as a legitimate practice anymore (I think enough legal alternatives exist) the litigation-happy companies going after every last dime because someone ripped a legally purchased song into an MP3 that's on their iPod, desktop PC, Laptop PC, car CD changer, digital picture frame, gaming console, playing in the background of a youtube video of their kids, and their cellphone ringtone. Technology has made media accessible EVERYWHERE, and the rights of the consumer to use it as such should outweigh the nickle-and-dime dreams of the RIAA.

Re:Charge for the Media, or the License. Not Both.

[Fnord666]

While I don't agree with "file sharing" in a general case as a legitimate practice anymore...

What many people fail to understand is that "file sharing" (bittorrent, etc.) is a tool, just like a photocopier is a tool. Both have many legitimate uses in addition to illegitimate ones. Photocopying an entire book remains a violation of copyright, whereas copying a single page for fair use is not. The same standard should apply to audio recordings, and in fact it has until now. It was only with the introduction of digital audio and the ability to make "perfect" copies that the copyright owners began to take exception. The fact that it is a digital recording also allows them to introduce some FUD into the mix and try to claim that it is somehow different. It's not. Technology made it easier to violate copyright, but it doesn't change the nature of the act. People need to understand the difference.

Re:Charge for the Media, or the License. Not Both.

[sm62704]

Licenses are for publishers, not end users. You don't "license a work" to me, you license the content to the publisher, who sells me the media containing the work. This is how it's worked since Gutenberg.

Now that the printing press has been invented, all the scribes will be out of business and nobody will write any more books!

Just like Gutenberg changed media, the internet changed media. The world is not as it was in the 20th century and never will be again. This is no more the time to invest in media companies than 1900 was the time to be investing in carraiges. Like that business then, the future paradigm is completely unlnown. What is known is that DRM doesn't work and cannot work. As has been said countless times before, making bits uncopyable is like making water not wet.

It's futile and everybody loses

[CaptainZapp]

Just assum that they indeed can figure out the super-duper-ultra-secure path

Let's also assume that they hand the secret crypto keys to Carol (the attacker) in an utterly unbreakable meanner

It's still totally futile. Let's take music as an example:

There comes that point, no matter how secure the path, they keys, the algoritm, etc where a digital signal must be transformed into an analog, human "readable" signal. That signal can be re-captured and re-digitalized (and with the right equipment in good quality too)

Thaat's also referred to as the analog hole and no amount of DRM will ever get around that.

If it doesn't play at all its's pointless

[edwardpickman]

The trend is to cripple them so videos can't play on computers. I've found Disney started doing this with DVDs and most Blu-Ray disks don't seem to play on computer drives. I live in my home office and the room is full of hardware but I don't have a DVD player in the room so I normally play them in one of my computers, the Mac mostly because it's wide screen and often available. If I can't play videos on my machines I won't buy or rent them period. I had planned to buy a stack of Blu-Ray disks but since it's a crap shoot if they'll play on my drive I'm not buying any. Bricking the disks so they can't be played is costing them sales. It definitely cost them a bundle with me because I've been wanting to get into a HiDef format and I have a brand new Blu-Ray drive and a nice big 24" screen that can play at 1080P res but the catch-22 is the disks won't play. I used to be a fanatic over Laser disk and I still prefer them to DVDs so I was hoping Blu-Ray or HD would be the next format to dive into. I currently have no plans to buy a dedicated player for either format so they definitely shot themselves in the foot with one customer. I don't care if they block copying but to block playing entirely is insane.

copyright is defunct

[circletimessquare]

its unenforceable

i mean, you can also outlaw alcohol. but people will still drink, you just wind up rewarding is the mafia

people will copy files and share them. before the internet, that was a work intensive and very localized effort. anyone remember bootleg cassette tapes of concerts?

nowadays, the effort involved in sharing files is practically zero. and so a major shift has developed. people will copy files and share them. with ease. nothing you say or do will stop that

as for morality, what is moral or immoral about sharing files? someone "owns" them? oh really? their "ownership", unlike say, their ownership of a house or a car, is an abstract legal notion, derived from a business model that is now defunct in the age of the internet

there is nothing immoral or dishonest about sharing files. except among those minds who can't adapt and shift to a new paradigm about how media will be consumed in this world

new business models will develop. and they surely won't be as lucrative. again, is that a bad thing? not at all. music is about community, a passion for art. it's not about the passage of filthy lucre

so deal with change. or don't, and remain defunct. your choice, but copyright is dead

There has always been piracy...

[Gybrwe666]

No matter what the medium, service, or object, there has always been piracy, and always been people who will copy anything.

Counterfeiting is big business. As are knock-offs of Gucci and Chanel.

I've been using computers for nearly 30 years now, and since the day I started programming, I've seen piracy. In fact, I'm having a hard time coming up with an example of any protection scheme that hasn't failed. From early software anti-copying measures, to serial numbers, to DRM, to DVD encryption, its all failed miserably to stop the determined.

I've often wondered what the actual cost of these measures truly is to the companies that use them. If they create them internally, there's the development cost. If they license them, they end up paying per-use, I would guess. Either way, it seems to me that this is one of the ultimate excersizes in futility. I've often wondered if this was due to stubborness or simply stupidity. Either way, it ends up being a burden to the legitimate user, and hasn't, as far as I can tell, stopped the illegitimate users.

Take copy protection. When I was a 13 year old using an Apple IIe, everyone I knew was pirating software. We did it because there was no way we could afford to buy it, for the most part. While I acknowledge it was stealing, at the end of the day, it wasn't a loss, because we wouldn't have done it if we could a) afford it, or b) live without it.

So what did copy protection accomplish? It simply stopped people who bought it from making backups of legitimately purchased software. I remember once when I school I went to had a bad drive, and through stupidity ended up destroying multiple copies of AppleWorks trying to get it working on a machine. A "friend" of mine attempted to make duplicates of legitimate software so they had enough to go around for classes. Because of the copy protection, he ended up using cracked software to make copies so they could teach class for the two weeks it took to get Apple to acknowledge they owned the software and to ship it out to them.

As far as my own personal views, I can see the motivation for someone who is young and poor to make illegitimate copies of digital property. Mainly because you can't afford it. I know a few years ago, $20 made a differenc between eating or not. I sure didn't have it to spend on (software, CD's, etc.).

Now, however, I buy what I need to use. When I could afford it, I went and bought CD's to replace all the cassette copies of my favorite bands. I can afford it, and I recognize that if my favorite (artist, author, software company) doesn't sell their work, they won't make more for me to enjoy. Could I suck down my favorite albums off a Torrent? Sure. But I don't have a single desire to do so. I want that struggling band to sell enough CD's that they'll make the next one.

So, does any sort of copy protection benfit anyone at all? Maybe the guys who write/license it.

But everyone else loses, in the end.

Hopefully the negative feedback inherent in this system will rip it apart. One can only hope.

Bill

Shops and bars

[jaweekes]

Shops and bars take the cost of stolen goods into account when they price stuff, as they know that glasses will be stolen, things will break, etc. Why can't the entertainment industry realize the same thing? It will be more profitable for them to sell digital music with or without DRM and cost it with "wastage" included and expect piracy, then to hinder it continuously with law suites and such.

I also realize that they should go after the people sharing 1,000's of music / movie files, just as they go after the thief who steals from stores (I know, piracy != theft).

Re:To be honest...

[Goffee71]

Since the music companies are gradually dropping DRM, I think the argument is already over. Movies will go online (leaving BluRay and HD owners screwed) over the next few years and still have certain protections, but nothing that can't be broken as has been proven time and time again.

Here's one for you

[MikeRT]

How about proposals that don't destroy our physical property rights? Stop telling people what they can do with their DVD players and computers, and we'll have more respect for your copyrights. Our physical property rights are the result of centuries of common law and culture. They should get primacy over intellectual property rights because they are a tradition that has been with us, and worked for us, for far longer than intellectual property has been around.

DRM will fail always.

[LWATCDR]

It really will always fail but at the same time I am sick of the pirates as well.
Pirate's Bay is making money off of other peoples work. They Sell ads on their website they are not the good guys. I don't like the RIAA or the MPAA going after grandmothers, little kids, and college students and they are also not the good guys for sure.
As I said it seems that we are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.
You have two groups of people that seem to think they are entitled to rule the world.
You have the media companies that think that they should have the right to control how you watch and or listen to their media. If they could do figure out how they would charge you for every person that you let listen to your music. Don't put that CD on at a party and heaven forbid you play while tailgating at a football game! Don't forget that broadcast flag! They must sell you that show on DVD when they get around to selling it.
And then you have the people that think they are entitled to take any media that they can! You can tell them by their matting call. "I it isn't my responsibility to make your business model work!"
I really don't mind paying for my music. I don't mind buying or renting DVDs. Heck I don't even rip the DVDs I get from NetFlix. But I want to record shows off my TV for my own use and I want to put my DVDs on my hard drive and my iPod. Oh and I don't want to pay bunch for my digital music. Even $.99 for a song is a bit silly folks.

Inform but do not block

[davidwr]

You need to tell people what rights they don't have so they don't violate the law without being put on notice.

However, copy protection is wrong if for no other reason that you may interfere with a person's lawful right to copy.

Books do this quite well: They have a notice inside that says "copyright... all rights reserved." Most books can be copied with a regular photocopier.

One thing books do not do right:
Many do not alert you that you do have certain fair use and other rights.

Understanding of the "man on the street"

[The Empiricist]

As for the man on the street, Panaqqa wrote us with word that the Question Copyright site has posted an interesting video of ordinary people explaining why they think copyright exists. It's pretty clear that most people don't understand it at all.

I disagree. The people in this video get some concepts mixed up (e.g., patents versus copyrights, economic rights versus moral rights). But, they seem to get the gist of what intellectual property rights are supposed to protect.

People definitely seems to struggle with their ideal view of copyright protection and their desire for convenience and low cost. Some of the people seemed to go to some lengths to rationalize copyright infringement.

One of the arguments given is that the artists do not see much of a profit from their works. That is, because the content creator has a bad deal with the content distributor, the consumer can legitimately chip away at the content distributor's profits.

This is poor rationalization. The ability of content creators to make reasonable deals with content distributors is a result of supply versus demand. Content creators that are good at controlling supply (e.g., programmers, who control supply simply by not having an overwhelmingly large population, members of the writers guild, who control supply through unionizing, or established artists, who have managed to survive the fickle markets) are in a better position to establish favorable deals than content creators who do not control supply very well (e.g., new musicians, who seem to grow on trees).

Copyright plays an important role in controlling supply. If there was no copyright, new musicians would have to avoid playing their songs in public or otherwise distributing their songs. Recording studios could troll for good songs, take them without any compensation, and hire their own musicians or established stars to take the songs to the big time. The marketing power of the content distributors would be much more important than it is today.

Copyright transferability plays an important role in stimulating demand. If the copyrights were completely non-transferable, then the risk of investing in content would become very high, reducing the demand from content distributors. Again, the marketing power of the content distributors would be much more important than it is today.

What is the effect of widespread infringement by consumers? The effect is that the risk of investing increases, again reducing the demand from content distributors.

Content producers can try to cut content distributors out of the loop, but that only works if consumers purchase from the content producers. Infringing on the copyrights of works that are in the hands of content distributors does nothing for content producers.

Remember, that even if content producers get no royalties for their works (something that is common with programmers), content distributors have to meet some threshold of reward to get content providers to assign their copyrights over the the content producers. The more risk there is in investing in a content producer (e.g., because of widespread copyright infringement), the less demand there is from content distributors, and thus the worse the deals are for content producers.

When the cost of production reaches zero

[kevinbr]

People no longer see the value in buying a record from 1968 as digital format at a high price. The digital cost has effectively gone to zero.

What copyright holders refuse to accept is perhaps with the consumer aware of the value, that they simply not prepared to but the music at the price asked.

I am an example, I travel all the time, and in my earlier life I spend thousands of dollars on movies. Now I cannot see movies ( I live in France and most DVD's seem to be in French Dutch and German etc) because I travel and frankly having invested lots of money in kids's DVD that get scratched, I am fed up with the price and the infexibility of delivery.

Now I download a digital files because I can. I would pay 5 Euros a film - no interest in Blue ray etc. No one will offer me a site where I can download a film and pay.

Please don't blah blah stealing to me. I am willing to pay. If they are so inflexible that they refuse in a capable world to sell me their product how I want it, and I can get it for free, well I can and will do this.

When they bother to ask me, perhaps they might learn there are many different ways people will pay.

When the cost of duplication is zero, be careful in how you price your product.

They have no clue.

copy protection doesn't work (and may hurt you)

[Vellmont]

I've recently been recovering data from some 20+ year old Commodore 64/128 disks (mostly interested in old papers). They were written using the word processors of the time, and can't really be recovered without them. I still have the old disks, and for the most part the data is still fully readable. I legally purchased the word processor many years ago, and still have the disks. My methodology was to recover the data to a modern PC running linux to an image file, and then run the word processor off an image file using an emulator.

Of course, I was thwarted by the copy protection on the disks. I couldn't get a proper image of them because of it. I wound up having to find a cracked copy of the word processor on some website (which took me all of 20 minutes to find using Google), and can recover my old papers perfectly.

It's very amusing to me that the CRACKED version of the software is actually more valuable to me than the non-cracked version. Re-buying the software (even if it was available) is useless to me, as I can't run it on an emulator, and thus transfer the data to somewhere useful.

This may seem like a special case.. but I don't think so. Even 20+ years later I can STILL get the cracked, pirated version of the software. The software was cracked many years ago, so it didn't really prevent much of anyone from getting it if they wanted to. I suspect if I had used a proper C64 copy utility I'd have been able to copy the disk anyway. The only thing it prevented was ME, the guy who bought the software from using the product as intended.

One Sided

[headkase]

I'm going to quote myself from the comment I made there yesterday (comment 54):
The only reason copyright law was enacted in the first place was to "promote the useful arts". So tell me, how does locking up and extracting maximum profit from a work for up to 150 years "promote the useful arts"? Currently I can't build on by remixing or being too closely inspired by current works until long after I'm dead? Disney would never have had their Snow White if the Grimm Brothers had been able to exercise this level of control. It's an ironic situation.

Now with that said, if copyright was actually set to a sane level I'd have a lot more respect for it. Like 14 years - that's more than enough time to make a reasonable profit off of your work. And none of this eternity DRM. If your restrictions scheme doesn't have an expiry mechanism it should be outright illegal.

Copy protection, in an absolute sense,

[DavidTC]

is needed for copyright to work at all. There must be some barrier to copying, or copyright vanishes magically into thin air. Barriers to copying, as is pointed out by many comments here, are like locks, keep 'your friends' from copying, even if they don't stop your enemies.

The problem is, of course, at a certain point, it doesn't matter. If people can infinitely copy the work with the lock broken, copyrighted works do not have a barrier to copying beyond a trivial investment of time. (And the tools can be near-completely automated.)

And, without this barrier to copying, copyright does not exist. I don't mean in a moral sense, or a legal sense, I mean in a practical sense. There is no such thing, in society, right now, as copyrights on music. The laws involving them might still exist, but the concept itself exists more in absence.

As DVD copying gets more practical, there will soon be no such things as copyrights on DVDs. Right now it's at the edge, and has been delayed by the lack of a Napster designed to share DVDs to launch the idea into the public mind, enough bandwidth, and the fact you'd have to burn them, on double-density DVDs even. I give it another five years.

Note to people who are about to argue why we, morally or practically, need copyright: I didn't say this was a good thing. I'm just stating facts.

So, 'copy protection', as in, actual difficulty in copying, is needed for copyright. OTOH, all 'copy protection' and DRM schemes on computers, do not actually provide that, so they are rather pointless.

Re:Copy protection, in an absolute sense,NOT CORRE

[Nom du Keyboard]

As DVD copying gets more practical, there will soon be no such things as copyrights on DVDs.

This is not correct. Copyrights don't disappear just because copying is easy. Copyrights never prevented copying. From the very beginning, you could copy by hand any copyrighted book. What copyrights allow is to seek damages against those who violate them. Only the copyright holder may freely sell their work for money in the open market. Others who try with unauthorized copies face civil penalties. So just because you can copy something doesn't mean that the idea of copyright has suddenly vanished.

Impossible and Impractical

[mlwmohawk]

The problem with copy protection is that it is totally misunderstood by those attempting to use it. It is 100% perfectly reasonable and possible to prevent a 3rd party from decoding your data. It is 100% unreasonable and impossible to simultaneously allow access to your data and expect it to be impossible to copy. People who use your DVD or music MUST be able to access the data in order to use it. Once you allow access, it is impossible to prevent copying. The mere act of "using" data, at the OS level, is copying the data. Basically, if it can be used, it can be copied.

The impractical part is that this a classic impossible problem but the record and movie companies fail to grasp the simple limitations that facts dictate. It is a classic entropy problem, copying digital data requires almost no resources, therefor it is going to happen. Controlling the copying requires exerting energy and resources. The amount of entropy (copying) if greater than the big companies, even with their considerable resources, can fight.

They need to realize that they can't control copying. They have been trying since the first cassette recorders came out decades ago. Hell, they've been trying since printing presses came out. The trend is, and always has been, to make copying and production easier and cheaper.

The trick is to figure out a new business model. Duh! I'm pretty sure oil lantern produces were fighting tooth and nail against that horrible intellectual property destroying light bulb thing, but that's progress!

Lets just be honest, shall we?

[Richard.g.k]

Contrary to what a few people like to say, the overwhelming majority of people downloading music off bit torrent/p2p are NOT doing it for 'convenience' and wouldnt pay for the music on ITunes even if it didnt have DRM. Most of the people downloading music are doing it specifically because it means they get it for free.

Re:Apple TV, my spouse, and DRM

[slim]

Last night I showed my wife the beauty of Apple TV - she thought the Movie trailers were a really cool feature.

Then she asked "why can't we download these movies right now"?

The movie and music industries need to realize that restricting content only shrinks the market for your products. With every instance of artificial restrictions, I can easily name many situations where the distributor of that content lost a potential sale:

Movies released to theaters - OLD model good for teens, not good for parents with young kids, a home theater and high speed internet. I would love to see new releases, but we can't really get to the theater (and we hate going there anyway). Why not let me "rent" the movie at my house? (I have digital cable with on-demand movies, but the list of movies is not current with new releases.) The practice of staging release times (in general, theatre, then aeroplanes, then rental, then buy-to-own media) is pretty well established, and I'm pretty sure the justification is that it maximises profits. At each stage in the chain, the later release would take away sales from the earlier one, if they'd come out at the same time, and not vice versa. e.g. People watch a movie in the theatre (because they're keen to see it and there's no other way), then later buy the DVD. With a simultaneous release, they'd just buy the DVD and stop there. I'm sure the studios are bright enough to stop this as soon as it becomes profitable to do so.

So the answer to your wife is -- 'because they think they can make more money by making us wait'.

DVD region coding is a slightly different thing, in that it's about distributors setting prices based on specific markets, and being able to stagger publicity campaigns (to spread spending over time, and to utilise resources that can't be duplicated, like actors for personal appearances and interviews). For a while it looked as if DVD region encoding was dead in the water, since it felt as if everyone (in Europe at least) had a hacked player -- but now that DVD is mainstream, the vast majority of consumers play the game -- while those who care and can be bothered (I like importing Japanese DVDs), can work around it and not get hurt. Actually it's worked out quite well.

Note to Rick Cotton: copyright is a bargain

[Russ Nelson]

Copyright is a bargain, not an actual "right". A "right" is something you could stop other people from doing to you. Since you can't stop Alice from copying to Betty, nor Betty copying to Cynthia, you have no "right" to prevent copying. No, copyright is a *bargain*. The public gives up something (the right to copy) for a LIMITED period of time as an incentive for creators to create. Creators have unilaterally abandoned their end of the bargain by seeking to control copying forever. The public is, IN RESPONSE TO THE ACTIONS OF CREATORS, taking back its right to copy.

Don't like that? Uphold your end of the bargain and see what happens.

çopy protection does work ...

[AHumbleOpinion]

Two - in the case of car and home locks - deterrence is enough.

This works amazingly well with software as well. I witnessed the sale of a chemistry app at a university bookstore. The app was required and low cost (under $20 IIRC). The first quarter it had no copy protection and the ratio of books to apps was about 15:1. The next quarter it had copy protection and the ratio was nearly 1:1. Many people will pirate if they can do so easily. The conventional wisdom that low prices will deter piracy are wrong. Hacks were quickly developed to remove the copy protection, it was an off the shelf solution used by other commercial products, but the sales remained near 1:1 in subsequent quarters.

The slightest roadblock to piracy, making a normal disk copy fail, will deter many and sufficiently incentivize them to buy a low cost product. Hacks to remove the copy protection don't change this.

Re:Myth: Fair pricing prevents piracy

[AKAImBatman]

overpricing

I think you'll find that it is customary to use brackets around an inferred term if it does not appear in the source material. In this particular case, I think you'll also find that I never stated nor inferred that overpricing was the problem. I stated that high price in concert with unfair terms lead to a devaluing of the product that made it undesirable to the consumer.

iTunes was successful despite its DRM. Part of the key to its success was that the DRM was not intrusive and thus not devaluing to the product.

At the risk of sounding cliche, all you have done is produce a strawman argument and then successfully knock it down.

Intellectually Honest

[localman]

anyone who is intellectually honest must "acknowledge, confront and speak to the tidal wave of unlawful, wholesale reproduction and distribution of copyrighted content..."

I will agree wholeheartedly with that. But at the same time anyone who is intellectually honest should acknowledge, confront and speak to the absurdity of infinite copyright extension, the industry's use of exploitative contracts, and the generally abusive tack they take with honest customers.

No, two wrongs don't make a right. And most of the people who steal the stuff aren't doing it on any kind of crusade. But the big copyright players have been and continue to be such dick heads for so long that citizens who might otherwise look on copyright violation as a type of theft don't really give a shit about it any more. And that includes me.

Also, when you make completely brain-dead innovative content that panders to the lowest common denominator, dumbing down our culture instead of rising to the occasion and doing something great, perhaps even important, with all that power... well, you end up with a bunch of brain-dead customers who don't give a shit about anything anyways.

You pissed in your bed, now sleep in it.

Cheers.

used to be in the buiz...

[micromuncher]

...and back in the mid 90 we had lots of research to show that the cost of copy protection rises geometrically where the cost to remove copy protection rises linearly. Restated; the more effort we put in to protection cost us much, much more than the cost (and time) to break. This was software copy protection, but the parallels to DRM and such are the same. Anything protected can be unprotected - and when you couple it with studies that show protection doesn't impact (or negatively impacts) consumer choice... it isn't economically viable. People who buy, buy. People who try, buy. Those that steal will steal regardless.

Re:Why is copyright suddenly unfair?

[skeeto]

Every 20 years, copyright is extended by another 20 years, so copyrights have been getting worse. This is why I said "no longer".

Why is copyright any more or less unfair now that goods are digital in nature rather than physical?

First of all, copyright exists to promote the arts and sciences, not to make anyone money. It is a tradeoff made by the public, where they give up some rights (being able to copy works) in order to encourage authors to make works. After a short term, those works would then fall into the public domain, where anyone could use them to derive more creative works. A big, full public domain of free material then gets built up.

Now to answer the question. Originally, copyright had no effect on individuals. No one had the ability to make mass reproductions. To copy a book, an individual had to hand copy it, since individuals didn't own printing presses. Copying two books took twice as long as copying one book. It wasn't worth it. When it came to copyrights, the public wasn't actually losing anything, since they didn't have the ability to excersise those rights in the first place. Copyright was an industrial limitation, to keep publishers from publishing books before the author got a chance to make some profit.

This is different in the digital age. We all have printing presses now. Copyright needs to be reevaluated.

Demand for software decreases, supply will decrease.

Thanks to the digital age we have, the software supply is infinite. Really, copyright creates an artificial cap on this infinite supply. Another way to look at this, I guess, is that there is a limited supply of unique software. But why does demand go down? People won't stop needing software if copyright law changed. I am not sure that the supply-demand curve applies well to creative works, anyway.

Copyright encourages authors to not only create works, by providing a profit motive, but needs to also allow works to fall into public domain so that they can be used to create even more works. Copyright fails the second part, along with the unreasonable restrictions on personal freedoms. The public is the important side of the deal, and should be getting the bargain. Copyright law is backwards right now.

I don't want to plagairize, but I read this article: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/reevaluating-copyright.html a couple years ago, and I was using things I remebered from it in writing this.

False Premises

[pdq332]

Unfortunately, the premises of the argument as described in the article are wrong. The question of copyright should not revolve around the axis of "lock up all the pirates" versus "gee, can't really stop those darned pirates". The question of copyright revolves around how far we as a society are willing to limit our own rights in order to provide a fair incentive to creators of content (music, movies, books, etc) to be creative. Copyright law does not exist in order to make mega-millionaires out of marginal talent or their producers. Nor does copyright law exist in order to fund a whole cottage industry whose sole existence is to defend copyright law. The question should rather be asked of NBC Universal and other entertainment industry heavyweights: Do you recognize the tidal wave of violations of fair use rights of citizens around the world by giant corporations, the wholesale trampling of our privacy rights by pervasive industry electronic monitoring, and the perversion of our very legal systems to the service of picking the pockets of presumed (but never proven) copyright "violators"? People are fed up, and think it is about time the law swung back over to our side. And if that means fewer mass produced media mediocrities, so be it.

Internet Analogies

[PMBjornerud]

I know we all love the car analogies, but it seems to me that to really make people understand this, you have to go even simpler:

Digital products, by definition, are represented by 1s and 0s. Because of this, it is no longer a physical product. It has become information.

By nature, information can be transferred. Also, you cannot prevent me from transfering some specific information unless you monitor all the information I send out. This means monitoring my mail, monitoring my holiday pictures, monitoring the video I took of my family during christmas. Unless you monitor ALL information, I will be able to transfer illegal information.

And pray that nobody ever finds a way to monitor and prevent ALL illegal information. If that ever happens, free speech will become illegal, and all your information is already monitored.

Good old paper mail is the best analogy still. You cannot prevent people from mailing song texts to eachother unless you monitor ALL their mail. This does not happen. (But don't tell the record companies, or they will get fuming over such a loophole...)

Re:Internet Analogies

[init100]

This means monitoring my mail, monitoring my holiday pictures, monitoring the video I took of my family during christmas. Unless you monitor ALL information, I will be able to transfer illegal information.

And you didn't even mention steganography, which would use legitimate content, such as your personal home videos, to hide copyrighted information that you are not allowed to share. An exchange of files would look like you and your friend is exchanging home videos, but it might really be copyrighted music tracks that is the real payload.

People that demand that we filter the internet for unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works really have no idea what they are talking about. It cannot be done.

Re:this argument applies elsewhere as well...

[Todd Knarr]

No, but it makes me the owner of that CD. When I buy a book I don't own the copyright on the story but I do own that copy of the book. When I buy a car I don't own the trademark on the car or the design or anything but I do own that car. Same thing. And that is exactly the point: I have certain rights regarding what I can do with my property (that specific copy of the CD), and DRM is designed and intended to interfere with those rights to the benefit of a third party who is not the owner of that copy anymore.

Makes no sense

[Nerdposeur]

Usually they say something along the lines of "I don't care if I lose access to my music in 10 years, after all it's 10 years old so not important"

If you lose access to your music 10 years from now, unless you stop buying music today, it won't ALL be 10 years old. Some of it might be a week old. And if you DO still want it, you'd have to buy it again. You bought it. It should be yours.