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RIAA Lawyer Complains DMCA May Need Revamp
the simurgh writes "The DMCA is just not providing the kind of protection against online piracy that Congress intended, RIAA lawyer Jennifer Pariser says. The judge in Universal Music Group's copyright suit against Veoh as well as the judge in EMI vs. MP3tunes.com issued similar findings. The courts have now determined the burden of policing the web for infringing materials is on the content owner and not the service provider. Content companies think it is unfair for them to be required to spend resources on scouring the Web when their pirated work helps service providers make money. What they complain about almost as much is that after they notify a service provider of an infringing song or movie clip and they're removed, new copies appear almost immediately. Basically they are complaining the the DMCA makes them responsible for policing their own content at their expense."
They do that in the US, too.
Because of this, you can borrow CDs from your friends or a library, and copy them for yourself, and it's all perfectly legal. 17 USC, Chapter 10, Subchapter A, Section 1008 specifically states:
Section 1001 defines a "digital audio recording medium" to be:
In more common language, this refers to audio/music CD-R discs, which are made to work in digital audio recorders (it also covers cassette tapes, FWIW). These discs are different from the more common data CD-Rs, in that they contain special digital markings (standard data CD-Rs won't work in digital audio recorders). In addition, by law a royalty has been paid on this blank media. These royalty payments are in turn distributed to copyright holders (see Section 1006 of the law cited above). They usually cost slightly more than data CD-R discs, but they can be found for less than $0.25 each.
The law which allows this was enacted at the urging of the RIAA, so thanks go to them for all the CDs I got for a quarter instead of $15.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
A few million in lobbying money thrown around over the years has bought a LOT of US government enforcement of their copyrights for them.
They would like to continue this trend, as recently they've found out they don't like the expense and public backlash of enforcing themselves.
Shoplifting is a misdemeanor because public order is not achieved through civil torts alone. Infringement via filesharing has become the petty offense of the 21st century. Sooner or later it will need the same treatment.
The trouble is that shoplifting is still primarily enforced by the shop owner. The state does not pay a police officer to stand in every shop and watch for shoplifters, because it isn't cost-effective. And so it is with copyright infringement -- the cost to detect and prosecute an infringement far exceeds the harm it causes.
That is really why copyright for entertainment is failing. People blame the internet, but it isn't the internet. It's the availability of storage devices that cost $0.20/GB. You can pay $100 for a portable hard drive that will hold every song released by all the major labels in the last decade and be left with a fair chunk of free space.
Right now infringement is detected because people share with strangers, so the industry becomes one of the strangers and gets the IP address of the other side of the connection. Never mind that though. Remember six degrees of separation? Even if they somehow stop all infringement on the internet -- which is obviously impossible, but let's make the assumption -- in person sharing is still just as bad. Soon enough you'll be able to get a hard drive that can hold every song ever recorded. Then someone will buy one and put every song ever recorded on it. That person's friends will want a copy, and six degrees of separation later everybody has got it. New releases follow the same path and as time goes on the process becomes more efficient as the people involved improve it. Nobody will care about "filling up their hard drive" and someone will create a piece of software that allows you to mark files as "send to friends" and people you designate as friends will automatically get them the next time your any of your devices is in wireless range of theirs. Then their friends will get them, etc.
Notice that it doesn't matter whatsoever that the copies are made over the internet rather than in person. It doesn't matter whether the number of copies made by each person is small or large, because making each recipient a distributor results in exponential growth that makes the number of generations before everyone has it small regardless of the number of distributions made by each person. And there is no good opportunity for detection because no one is distributing to anyone who they don't trust.
That is the future we have to design copyright around. A future in which zero-cost redistribution is widespread and undetectable. That doesn't mean we should give up the idea of creating a government incentive for authorship, but it does mean that we probably have to give up trying to prohibit the thing we can't effectively prohibit.