DRM Take II — Digital Personal Property

Diabolus Advocatus writes "Ars Technica has an article on a new form of DRM being considered by the IEEE. It's called Digital Personal Property and although it removes some of the drawbacks of conventional DRM it introduces new drawbacks of its own. From the article: 'Digital personal property (DPP) is an attempt to make consumers treat digital media like physical objects. For instance, you might loan your car to a friend, a family member, or a neighbor. You might do so on many different occasions and for different lengths of time. But you are unlikely to leave the car out front of your house with the keys in it and a sign on it saying, "Take me!" If you did, you might never see the vehicle again. It's that ability to lose control over property that is central to the DPP system. DPP files are encrypted. They can be freely copied and distributed to anyone, but here's the trick: anyone who can view your content can also "steal" it irrevocably. The simple addition of a way to lose content instantly leads consumers to set up a "circle of trust" that can be as wide as they like but will not extend to total strangers on the Internet.'"

Comments

Huh

[cpt kangarooski]

The study group's mission statement makes the same point, saying that it wants to give consumers true ownership of content while still "preserving business models based on the sale of private goods where the number of items in circulation equals the number sold and the number of users of each item is naturally, reasonably, and unavoidably limited."

Why would we want to preserve these business models? Given that it is everyone else who is being asked to shoulder the burden of propping them up, what good are they to us that they deserve it?

Copyright may be desirable under the right circumstances (i.e. a copyright law that produced social benefits greater than those produced by any alternative, or no copyright law at all), but at least it can be easily changed according to the needs of society, assuming the government is legitimate and not corrupt. DRM -- which is what this quite obviously is, just with a different name -- is too subject to the whims of creators and publishers, rather than the public, and too fixed once in place. Attempts to push DRM need to be strangled as soon as possible, although we must respect that free speech includes the right to use DRM.

So a better alternative would be a copyright law promulgated by a legitimate and non-corrupt government, which put the needs of the public first (i.e. the need for more works to be created and published so that the public can get access to them, and the need for such works to be as useful to the public as possible, which means uncopyrighted, or at worst, minimally copyrighted, in both scope of rights, and duration of term); where the grant of copyright on a work would be conditional on neither the copyright holder, nor anyone authorized by the copyright holder, applying any sort of DRM to copies, performances, or displays of the work made available to the public; where if DRM was so applied, the copyright would be revoked; and where the government would cooperate with the public to crack DRM systems and freely republish works which had been protected by DRM, and were therefore, in the public domain.

It'll take some work to accomplish this. Various treaties (WIPO, Berne, the UCC, etc.) set up minimum standards that interfere with meaningful reform efforts (e.g. legalizing the breaking of DRM, terms shorter than life+50, resurrecting formalities so that an author must opt-in to copyright for a particular work or else forgo it). We'll have to withdraw from these treaties, but to be honest, they're not really that important anyway; it is in the interests of each country to unilaterally offer national treatment (i.e. a country should not discriminate on the basis of nationality with regard to any aspect of copyright law), without minimum standards that compel two differently situated countries to enact the same laws as though they were perfectly alike.

Re:why do they keep trying?

[Kratisto]

Isn't it a bit ironic that we have this miraculous communication system which can transmit data all over the world at the speed of light, that we have encoded music and other media such that they can be copied and sent across this network at negligible cost, and that they're trying to indoctrinate us with the idea that none of this is true in order to continue an outdated business model?

There is a saying that for good people to do bad things, it takes religion. I'm beginning to suspect a corollary: For smart people to do stupid things, it takes capitalism.

lawyers, making up reasons for more lawyers

[circletimessquare]

we could of course go through life freely enjoying the cultural output of our artists and our artists enjoying free and easy advertising and exposure, to earn reams of cash from concerts, endorsements, ancillary revenue streams...

but why do that?

its obviously far better that every minor exchange of recording nuance involve 10 page contracts and a team of legal experts to accurately interpret and negotiate the proper legal status quo, right?

get a copy from a friend, make a duplicate backup, downsample to a lower bitrate, transfer to another device, convert to another file format, transfer to another media, transfer to someone in another country, play loudly and in public where other people can hear the recording "without authorization"... let's insert a lawyer into every scenario, right?

ip law is so fucking functionally defunct