They say you tell when the conversation deteriorates by the ration of quoting vs. original material. I'll take one more shot at it, to clear up the misunderstandings of what I'm saying (as opposed to the spots where we just disagree).
If by "very few" you mean "none at all," I'm in complete agreement.
I gave several examples of "positive rights", including "time-shifting", and DHRA copying (although the DHRA primarily works by providing exceptions, there are elements of the bill that imply an reciprocal responsibility, as I mentioned earlier this has not been tested in the courts). There are also some formalized rights in the 1976 bill, such as the "first sale doctrine" (which first arose through the courts).
The fact that you disagree with the law's interpretation...
Sorry if you got confused here - I was talking ethics, not law. My point was that if you approach copyrights as though they were forms of property (like owning land), your ethical and moral conclusions will be incorrectly biased.
Briefs in the Eldritch case arguing against copyright extensions were judged by the Supreme Court to amount to a hill of beans.
I was suggesting the briefs in Eldritch because of their analysis of what losses and gains occurred because of copyright term extensions. They provide insightful reading. The merits of the case were actually decided on other factors (congressional power primarily), and does nothing to diminish the educational value of some of the Eldritch briefs.
So unless Congress somehow finds a way to keep a work out of the public domain forever and ever, the phrase "steals from the public domain" is just so much hogwash.
Works that were supposed to go into the public domain were delayed by 20 years (this time). This amounts to a multi-billion dollar gift to the current copyright holders. It also means the approx. 98% of the work that is not currently published (presumably because it is not valuable enough to make money) is also unavailable. The undisputed analysis of this is contained within the Eldritch briefs, which is why I recommended them.
I did not say that copyrighted items were never going into the public domain (although in the past I have postulated that additional delays may occur if congress continues without countervailing input). The retroactive delays are costing society money, some of which goes directly to the copyright holders. The material created in the 1920 is now protected an additional 60 years or so, compared to law when they were created. I think you can rightly argue the exact term, but almost everyone agrees we are past a point that is justified. This includes the Supreme Court in the Eldritch case; even the assenting opinion said that congress's actions might be unwise, but there was not enough grounds to overturn the law just because it was unwise.
I just love how you keep talking about how not getting access to other people's work amounts to theft. That's the postwar culture of entitlement for you.
The fact you call using ideas from other copyrighted works "theft" clearly shows your lack of knowledge of the creative process. Perhaps you really do believe that ideas, as well as expressions of those ideas, are created completely without regards to culture and society (hint: those categories include material that is currently copyrighted).
Regardless of what you believe, copyright law was written to protect expression, not ideas. The reason copyright laws have expanded to protect ideas is because they were largely written by copyright owners (and congress mostly rubber-stamped them), who had a vested interest in reducing competition through a government granted monopoly. I'd recommend Digital Copyright by Jessica Litman for a through explanation of how copyright laws have been produced in the last 100 years (I am not exaggerating in my statement about copyright holders writing the laws).
Friend, if you use "characters and even dialogue" from somebody else's work, then your own work is not original.
Again, the distinction is between expression and ideas. My real point here (not the one you pretend to believe) is that all people, and especially successful creators, are strongly influenced by many factors. Copyright is supposed to balance this positive process of influence by providing some protection to the authors. What I argue is that the amount of protection is gotten out of whack, and is actually harmful to new authors; and therefore to society.
Get out there and come up with your own 3-note riff
How much do you know about music composition? I'd say there is probably a 99% chance that the 3-note rift had been used somewhere before (very likely in music that is now in the public domain). When you get down to such small elements of music, this is more like an "idea" than an "expression". As I said, the line is fuzzy and I can certainly accept that people can write songs with a substantial infringement upon other songs. My argument is that the fuzzy line has been pushed too far, and the 3-note rift is an example of that. Your belief in total originality with no other influences is very touching.
I said: real example: can?t back-up child?s favorite tape with post-DMCA VCR, so I had buy another one when it was worn out a year later
You replied: I wrecked my car. The car company, to my everlasting amazement, refuses to give me another one. They say I have to buy another one. Pretty unfair, huh?
That is a really pitiful analogy, try this instead: I bought a car, and saw the tires were going to wear out. I used to be able to replace the tires, but the DMCAR law was passed with a loophole that allowed manufacturers to prevent me from replacing the tires. Now when the tires wear out, I have to buy a new car instead. I'm told to stop complaining, I'm just a whiner who thought I was somehow entitled to replace tires.
If you don't like it, lobby your representatives to get it changed.
There is no legal mandate for copyright holders to allow anybody to do anything with their works.
This statement (and others in the post supporting this position) is so far from reality, it makes it difficult to know where to start. Copyright law provides creators with a set of privileges, but these privileges are by no means absolute. At the very basis, copyright only protects the expression, not the ideas. Copyrighted material is time limited, and subject to many other considerations like "first sale doctrine" and "compulsory licensing".
The actual copyright law is extremely complex, and defies ordinary definitions of "right and wrong". This is true both for people who want to expand the rights of copyright creators, as well for those of us who want to reform the system.
Copyright law does not allow anybody to make a copy of anything.
Perhaps this is an issue of wording. There are very few places where the Copyright law gives positive rights to people on the other side of the copyright bargain (aside: perhaps that is part of what is wrong with it). But your statement implies that copyright law completely prohibits people (without the copyright holder's permission) from making a copy. That is totally incorrect, the easiest counter-example is the Digital Home Recording Act (DHRA) of 1992; although there are many, many other examples.
When the RIAA/MPAA (and you) belittle fair-use as merely a defense against a copyright infringement suit, it is like saying "going below the speed limit is merely a defense against a speeding ticket". These activities are legal (they both even have gray areas, like weather conditions that can change the safe speed).
Where did you get the idea that you have any kind of right related to somebody else's work?... You are entitled to nothing.
Rhetorically speaking, where did you get the idea that copyright holders have complete control and rights over their work? It is certainly not true legally, and you don't have to stretch too far to see why it is not true morally (the biggest key is to stop confusing copyrights with property ownership). Although you seem to think so, I'm not advocating the removal of copyrights (my living is helped by copyright law). What I am saying is that copyright is a balance (not original to me, read the US Constitution), and that the balance has gone out of whack.
Why do you keep spouting vague remarks about "the massive give-away of our rights"...
In terms of cold hard cash, the Sonny-Bono Copyright Extension Act (and the 10 other extensions that have occurred in the last 100 years) is the best example. There is nothing in the copyright balance that promises an author that he will hold all rights and privileges to their work until the work is worthless (although you seem to believe it). The retroactive increasing of copyright terms by 20 years essentially steals from the public domain (which is "owned" by citizens and culture), and any additional profits given to the copyright holders are essentially stolen from us. I'd suggest reading the briefs from the Eldritch case for depth on this subject.
The radical expansion of "derivative works" is a more insidious method that copyright laws have stolen from us (citizenry and the culture). Copyright law is only supposed to protect the expression, not the ideas. There is a fuzzy line here, and IMHO it has gone way too far into protecting ideas as well. A good example was the lawsuit against "The Wind Done Gone". This is clearly a very original work, although it uses characters and even dialogue from "Gone with the Wind". The lawsuit was eventually dismissed because of another fair-use safety valve (parody), but it should not even have been able to happen in the first place.
How can we say copyright is promoting the arts when someone can be successfully sued for using a 3 note-rift in a song that is also used in another song? Unless you think the creation of copyrighted work occurs in a vacuum, the removal of "ideas" from culture for life+75 years is not good for society!
I want something that is not mine, and I want it to be given to me for free. I feel that efforts to restrict my access to what I want amount to ripping me off. But this isn't an entitlement issue.
We used to be able to perform certain useful and legal actions (back-ups, time-shifting, etc.). The DMCA contained a loophole, which allows copyright holders to legally prevent me from performing these legal and useful actions. This prohibition costs me real money (real example: can't back-up child's favorite tape with post-DMCA VCR, so I had buy another one when it was worn out a year later). So I loose money (directly, and through inconvenience), and the copyright holders get more money. That is my definition of a government give-away.
You can only get away with calling it an "entitlement" if you can prove the activities now prohibited by the DMCA anti-circumvention loophole were illegal in the first place, otherwise it is clearly a case of a new law taking away legal (and useful) activities. So far the best you have done is claim that legal actions are actually illegal without any proof (not to mention spouting RIAA/MPAA propaganda). Let me turn around the challenge: show me a federal law that prohibits fair-use activities like "the first sale doctrine", "time-shifting", or "making back-up copies". The best you will be able to do is come up with partial prohibitions in narrow circumstances. That is because these activities are legal!
PS: Homework Hint - In order to prove time-shifting is illegal, you have two main targets. First you have to explain away the "Sony vs. Universal" Supreme Court decision. Next you have to somehow explain why the DMCA Section K does not mean what it says (this is one of the very few areas of copyright law that gives positives rights to consumers, we can thank Rep. Boucher for this one).
Seeing as how actually copying the CD's is illegal anyway, this is not a problem.
This statement is mostly incorrect. The 1992 DHRA gives explicit rights to record CD's and even distribute them to other people (so long as you use the "taxed" CD-Audio blanks). Copy protected CD's are probably illegal because they don't allow this to occur (although no test case has established it). General copyright law allows the user to record CD's for a variety of reasons (including time-shifting and space-shifting).
The narrow truth of the statement is that the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent digital copy protection under most circumstances; and current court cases seem to support that the DMCA clause about protecting fair-use does not apply to the anti-circumvention rules.
It is a big leap to go from DMCA prohibitions about not breaking copy protection (even for fair-use); to say that all coping of a CD is illegal.
You have no fair use rights.
Actually, that is a statement directly from the RIAA and MPAA spokesmen (usually followed by a statement that their latest scheme fully supports fair-use - i.e. their definition which is that there is no fair-use). It is an opinion from a biased source, and should not be treated as a fact. It is a complicated subject no doubt, but the rest of the post closely follows the RIAA/MPAA party-line and is highly biased.
The culture of entitlement isn't satisfied with this arrangement, though.
This is correct, although not in the way you meant. The RIAA and MPAA believe they are entitled too much, much more; which is why you see them trying to bills like the CDBTPA! They are used to buying the law they want, and think they are entitled to get even more. If the copyright balance and the health of our culture get in the way of their profits, the RIAA/MPAA profit entitlements should have the highest priority.
Of course Twirlip thought he was referring to the general public with the entitlement description, and I'll grant that there might be some small kernel of truth in the "music-wants-to-be-free" crowd. But those people are actually pretty rare, and the majority of/. posts I've read (plus the actual copyright reformers I've met) are really protesting the massive give-away of our rights and money to large corporations.
The current DMCA reduction of fair-use should not be treated as the historical default, and the protestors as whiners. It is in fact a historical aberration, which only occurs because of a combination of specialized lobbying and a careless congress. We, citizens and society, have been ripped-off, and that is not an entitlement issue.
... I consider it an essential feature to be able to copy out (securely) any and all keys the chip has generated...
Can you back up that requirement with an application and the threat modes the application is being protected against? Chances are, most applications that allow the key to be exported don't need the level of security provided by the chip in the first place.
The ability to stop keys from being exported is often a vital feature of hardware crypto systems. For example that is why the Microsoft CAPI interface (at least in versions up to a couple of years ago) is almost useless as a library interface to hardware crypto engines -- it allows all keys to be exported.
To further explain the dangers of key exportation, CAPI only allows these keys to be exported when they are encrypted with an asymmetric key. You might think this meets the "securely" part, but in reality is very simple to compromise. Just create your own "known" asymmetric key, and export all the keys under it. Now you can easily decrypt and read the supposedly protected keys.
A former employer of mine made the first actual hardware CAPI driver (and the second driver created - NT 4.0 days). We dealt with the problem in two ways - the most obvious was to create a secure out-of-channel method for disabling the key export command. The second was more subtle, and more typical of secure hardware design, was to provide a method of limiting the introduction of keys into a system.
The other alternative to key export is the method used by IBM in this case, which is not to allow the key to be exported at all. This is also popular with a number of smartchip/card designs. These keys are typically only used for signing, because real life systems usually need an export function for encryption keys. I've always felt there were ways that you could securely export a signing key (warning! many people don't agree with this statement, at least not at until I spend 10 minutes explaining how and why). But I can agree that in simple designs, disallowing the exportation of signing keys is generally a good thing.
Despite working in the industry, I am generally against DRM (see my post history). I'm writing this because I'm tired of seeing basic hardware crypto security mechanisms described as useful for DRM only. Lets face it, these are tools, and they can be used for good or bad!
But that is not really what DRM is about. Protecting against illegal copies is just an excuse, what they really want shows up in this quote from page 4 of the Wired article:
A digital rights management system isn't just a traffic cop; it's a powerful tool that gathers all kinds of information about consumers, from credit card numbers to listening habits, and dictates which devices can talk to the PC and how.
What Sony entertainment, and the other publishers are really afraid of is "money left on the table". A lot of that money comes from things consumers used to do for free, but they are in business of making money, not running a charity. If they have to buy a few laws to get extra control, they don't care if it hurts society in the long run. Let's close this post with another quote from page 4:
"If you're looking for logic in this situation - hey, it's the music business," says Launch founder Dave Goldberg. "There's not a lot of logic in what they do." But to Ehrlich, the logic is in not letting another company play music gratis when it could be paying. Precedents matter: If broadcast radio hadn't been exempted from royalty payments decades ago, for reasons hardly anyone can remember, the music industry could be collecting an extra $2 billion or so a year. "It's hard to change the old world," Ehrlich declares.
Well, at least you Europeans don't need to worry about your artistic heritage vanishing...
Actually, the extension was passed to "normalize" the US copyright system with Europe. Well except they did not really normalize things.
For example European copyrights on music are still just 50 years. A number of classic recordings are about to enter the public domain in Europe, but will still be protected for 45 more years in the US. Of course the copyright industry wants to normalize these laws too, of course by extending them to US lengths.
The concept of normalization is a race to the bottom because the industry with the money will always chose the longest time with the best terms. Next let's buy some small country, make copyright perpetual, and than tell congress we have to normalize with them!
How about the AUTHOR decide how long they want to keep it copyrighted?
In many cases, the AUTHOR is long deceased (or defunct in the case of a corporation), and no one really knows who the proper heirs are. Thus the work is kept out of the public domain by default.
When the work is on a fragile medium like film stock, the work may be totally lost because people won't commit the time and expense of repairing the work when they don't know if some unknown heir will pop out of the woodwork and sue them.
This is a real problem with old films right now. And if they have all this trouble with a film that is usually owned by corporations that should be fairly traceable, imagine how much harder it is to find the heirs of an obscure AUTHOR who has been dead for 74 years.
Oh no, we can't use Mickey Mouse. What will we ever do? Same thing we've been doing for thousands of years, Pinky: come up with our own ideas.
Obviously a troll, but fun to respond to. Interestingly enough, if today's rules existed back when Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse, he would have been sued back into the Stone Age. The first Mickey film was based on Steamboat Bill, and even used similar music for the score. This is why Disney is such a good target; they are busy paying for laws to outlaw practices that made them rich and successful.
There is no natural law that lets AUTHORs own an idea, and almost no idea is truly original. The troll pretends otherwise, but provides no proof.
So when society decides to provide partial protection for ideas (Patents) or specific expressions (Copyrights), this should not be confused with some grand natural process. The current concept of copyright rules started c. 18th century, and the concept of distributive work control (i.e. no one except the copyright holder can write a sequel) is less than 100 years old. If we really do what people have been doing for thousands of years, there would be no copy protection at all!
The linked article mentions that the tags will have a "self destruct" mechanism, and even mentioned that consumers might have a device that could kill off the tags at home.
So what is to stop a shoplifter from getting a "tag killer" device and using it at the store. After that it becomes a normal shoplifting theft. At best this is only slightly better than the current magnetic tags, good for getting the stupid theives.
Does everything have to be political, what ever happened to good technilogical discussions? I've done my fair share of ranting against DRM, but the Transmeta features have other uses too.
Much like the Intel P3 features, it is quite useful to have a good random number generation and increased speed for software cryptography. Even the hidden storage registers have non-DRM uses (although I suspect they won't make the FIPS 140-1 level 3 or 4 that I'm used to).
Here are some non-DRM uses to consider:
* Increased crypto speed helps servers (don't forget Transmeta sells chips for dense servers). * Network identification and IPSEC support (increasingly important in these wireless days) * Local encryption options (protect data on vunerable computers, like laptops).
I basically agree with the idea that overuse of a debugger can be bad. But in 20+ years of programming I recall times when debuggers really made a difference! My favorite two examples (actually since they were embedded systems I used ICE not software debuggers, but same basic concept):
1) We were doing real-time analog-to-digital conversions in a data logger, but an intermittent bug was really bothering us. We were using an Orion which is more of a logic-analyzer than an in-circuit-emulator - important difference is that Orion does not replace the CPU with its own pod unlike a normal ICE. Finally after much debugging, it turned out that our version of the 64180 had a mask error (known to the manufacturer naturally), which occasionally caused interrupt routines to not meets specs. There was no way studying code was going to tell us what was wrong here. Even a normal ICE might have had problems.
2) We had a device with memory backed-RAM which became "unstable" after an extensive code change - becoming "unstable" was intermittent and only occurred after a long period of use. After lots of code inspection, I started examining memory dumps of returned units. After looking at about 20 units, I finally got lucky, and found a device in the "early" part of being unstable. The code area of the device was being overwritten by a recognizable pattern. Turns out the new code made an existing feature optional, but missed a part of the code that expected it to be there. The rogue code was trying to update a non-existent global variable (all this was complicated by the MMU, and the fact that the device had several features like code checksums that were supposed to detect this kind of problem - but obviously didn't).
Two extreme examples I'll confess, but I can think of other situations where debuggers have saved days of debugging time. Debuggers do have their uses.
The real interesting factor, is to compare individual income vs. the more common household income. Given the same types of houses and jobs, it took two of us working full-time to barely qualify for our first house in 1990, compared to 1970 where my same job would of easily allowed me to buy the house just by myself with much less sacrifice. What happens in the next 20 years -- we move to 3.8 incomes per household (assuming 1.8 kids in an average family).
Actually some of the desired/expected concepts I grew up with (born in the 60's) have already been discredited - lifetime employment is a good example. The concept of a nuclear family with 2 adults and some number of children being a viable financial structure is on its way. The "norm" of the nuclear family really became normal in the 1950's, prior to that it was probably more common to have extended family groups living together. That is probably how we will see household incomes increase beyond 2 (although it will no longer be the stereotypical unmarried aunt).
One other interesting place to watch is Bermuda. They have the second highest cost of living (only behind Hong Kong). There is no ground water, so they can't build high-density housing. In the 1980's they converted single family homes into apartments so that families could house their adult children. What happens now, when the apartment dwelling families have kids of their own? Bermuda is one place that makes even boom Silicon Valley real estate prices look like a bargain (even when ignoring the extremely large tax Bermuda adds to non-citizen purchases).
Actually, if it was done in the way you described, this would fail. A book publisher tried doing this about 100 years ago, and the case established the doctrine of "first sale". The publisher tried to control resale of the book (using something very much like a shrinkwrap license).
The courts ruled, to simplify, that the normal terms of copyright were more powerful than the attempted contract. The purchase of a book (or in your example, a CD) is a copyright transactions, and is subject to the rules of copyright.
So does this mean we have nothing to fear? No, here is what they can do instead. They create a CD with some type of limit against reproduction and/or resale (I don't quite know how they would do the last, perhaps burn a computer system ID onto the disc). The protection does not have to be foolproof, just good enough to meet the legal definition of "effective".
Once they have done that, it would be illegal (thanks to the DMCA) for you to circumvent the protection. That is precisely why the companies want to push "copy protected" CDs, because it allows them to use the full force of the DMCA to limit your actions and presumably make them more money (by giving them more power).
I'm more pessimistic, but perhaps as someone in the security industry I over estimate the ability of what can (or will) be done. But first let me ask if you have ever heard of someone breaking the DIVX (DVD) system? I never did.
The examples you (and most people who make this argument) draw on are largely on satellite broadcasts, and they have a lot of design constraints that make good security pretty much impossible. It would be a mistake to use those systems as a comparison basis for good security design.
In a properly designed system, every client has a different key. At best, if you break one key, you only get the access that the original system had. Since everyone has unique keys, it is very easy to shut-off individual units (as soon as they are identified).
The subject of identification brings us to the other major difference - two way communication. The current satellite systems have no idea what is on the other end of their broadcast. That means it is very difficult to detect cloning, you really need to find out about it from outside sources. A two way design usually detects cloning fairly quickly, thus limiting the value of the clone. This makes the system much harder to abuse, from a cryptographic standpoint.
Of course, there is still the issue of protecting things once they have been converted into something a human can perceive, and aside from really obvious and nasty watermarks (resulting in decreased quality), this is a lost effort . I am very much anti-DRM, and one of the reasons for this is because I do believe they can be designed and implemented much more effectively than the average person does.
Interesting enough, the DMCA was written under the assumption that all copies are an infringement. While this theory does not really pass the smell test (it would make your glasses illegal copying devices when your read a book or watch a movie), that is no obstacle in creating copyright law!
The effect of this law was to make a computer a "natural infringer", since it has to make several copies just to work (hard drive, main memory, cache, bus, etc.). That is why they came up with a DRM requirement for digital works because the devices reading them are natural infringers!
Instead of shooting down the whole rotten concept, the people at the copyright convention just carved out narrow exemptions for themselves. The archival librarians got an exemption, the cryptographer researchers got an exemption, but strangely enough no member of the general public was there, so we did not get our own exemption. Congress is than presented with the whole mess, and the best they can normally do is carve out a few more exemptions, when really the whole thing should just be taken out back and shot!
The DMCA was especially noticeable, because as congress was starting to adjust the exemptions in time honored fashion, when it was suddenly passed in almost original form. One of the reasons it was so bad, was because the exemptions in the law are much closer to what came out of the copyright convention.
Tivo's so-called lifetime fee only covers the lifetime of the unit
They will transfer the service, if your unit is broken and fixed by Tivo (at least for Tivo brand units, I don't know how other mfg. handle this). Pretty good, although that does not help with obsolescence.
Actually the biggest problem is that Tivo might change that agreement sometime in the future. There are a number of other changes that Tivo "might" do -- like removing "features" or adding new unwanted ones. Welcome to the modern world where slip-stream updates and constantly changing policies are the norm.
The biggest problem with a "lifetime" fee, is that you can't cost Tivo by canceling your service in protest of some policy or feature change.
Don't get too caught up in THD measurements. During the early 80's, there was a war to reduce THD in amplifiers (and receivers). That eventually resulted in receivers that had on the order of 0.000x% THD. Sounds like a magnificent achievement.
Only problem was that these amplifiers did not sound better. As a matter of fact, they usually sounded worse than amplifiers that only had 0.1% THD. It turns out the way they got such low THD numbers was to use large amounts of negative feedback, which had an overall detrimental effect.
A couple of good lessons from this: First is that you don't target one goal to the exclusion of everything else. Second is that you can't measure everything, and occasionally things that are hard to measure turn out to be very important.
It has been a while since I've read on this subject, but I believe the general literature says most humans can't hear differences in THD below 0.5%. So lower might be better, but at some point going for those diminishing returns will start causing seriously negative trade-offs elsewhere in the design.
You can tell people that they are only allowed to view your works while wearing a fez....
There are two areas at work here - copyright law and contract law. In most cases copyright law "trumps" contract law when dealing with items that are protected by copyright. Copyright law does not provide copyright owners with absolute rights, but instead grants them a limited set of rights (time limits are the most obvious, but the right to resell is also clearly established). So when it comes to copyright law the statement that copyright holders can ask/require consumers for anything they want is dead wrong!
The problem with the DMCA (from my perspective) is that the anti-circumvention/dissemination portions of the DMCA does not put adequate restrictions on what the copyright holders can "protect"; or conversely does not allow people to circumvent protections that eliminate legal activities. The effect of this is the DMCA (and only the DMCA) allows the copyright holders to bypass all the copyright limitations (including term limits) built-in to copyright law.
Of course, since Twrilip thinks the copyright holders should not be limited in what they can demand (statement based on previous discussions as well), he does not see anything wrong with the DMCA giving them legal backing for these demands. I think it is ironic that he quotes from Section 17, but has no problem with allowing copyright holders to override any "protection or balance" that Section 17 provides to people on the other end of the copyright transaction.
I should mention that even in contract law, the notion that anything goes is quite incorrect. Many industries have uniform-commercial-codes that set the "defaults" of a transaction in that industry. Contracts that exceed the norm can often be ruled invalid (INAL, so I'm not sure of the correct legal term here). The mechanics of getting a contract to override other areas of the law is very complicated, but there are quite a few interesting, and somewhat contradictory court cases in this area.
Three courts have ruled that 1201(c)(1) did not apply to their respective cases. As a layman, fair-use appeared to be valid defense, but both the judge and expert commentators determined the fair-use protection measure just did not apply to the other subsections. It is possible that somewhere, sometime a court will find a place where 1201(c)(1) actually does apply, but probably not in our lifetime.
There is no doubt the fair-use clause is written in such a way as to provide no real protection to fair-use! The question is how did this come to pass, intentional or accidental? One theory has it being intentional, where the bill authors wrote that section in as an attempt to convince less knowledgeable congressman that fair-use would be protected, when in fact they had no intention of actually protecting it.
I do know that when Lofgren (and Honda) introduced a bill to fix this problem. In the introduction to their bill they claim the DMCA is being interpreted in the courts in a way that eliminates fair-use, and that this was not the intent of congress. The interesting quote from the MPAA went to the effect that "allowing people to overcome copy protection for any reason, including exercising their fair-use, will cause disaster to our industry". Sounds to me like they are quite happy with the bill they bought, and they don't want to it to be changed to reflect the intent of (at least some) congressmen.
Meanwhile, the fluff section continues to benefit the copyright holders (intentionally or not), because people like you can say "see it protects fair-use" by pointing at that worthless section. Seems like a number of judges, and at least some congressman don't agree.
The phone home feature was very neat. It was first implemented by Stratus (probably the second most successful fault tolerant producer after Tandem). Just another example of how competition improves the product.
I worked for Tandem quite a while. I still remember Compaq throwing out the Tandem mail system in favor of Exchange. Prior to that, our email system only failed twice in 7 years (one of those times was because we were using our "social" system for development, I worked in a back water location). I'll grant the email client (mainframe based) was not as pretty as Outlook, but the power of Microsoft at Compaq was amply demonstrated when they threw out the NonStop mail servers (lost features and much less reliability).
One other recollection was when Tandem started producing a hardened UNIX (late 80's/early 90's). They ran into a C-shell timing bug. Seems a 32-bit counter caused csh to crash after it had been running for more than a year. If someone had ever kept a UNIX system going for that long before, it certainly was not common enough that they caught this error. Actually UNIX reliability has improved a lot since those days. Back than the idea of using something as flaky as UNIX for fault tolerance was thought to be pretty risky!
I believe you will find a lot of the hot swapping capability was pioneered by Tandem Computers in the mid 1970's (now part of HP). I'm not sure about power-supplies, but I'm certain they were the first commercial system with hot-swapped CPU (not single chip CPUs in those days). The classic Tandem sales demonstration was to take a running system, and start removing parts (power-supplies, CPU boards, disks, IO controllers) while the system continued to run without any disturbances to the application.
Some of the other reliability areas probably owe to Stratus (which for a long time IBM resold when it needed fault tolerant systems, forget who owns them now). They were the first (I know of) to use multiple CPUs with a voting scheme (something the original article mentioned IBM had started doing, I wonder when). Tandem started doing this too, once they stopped producing discrete CPUs and started working with almost off-the-shelve CPUs instead (happened in the late 80's using MIPS processors).
I don't know if the Brothers Grimm even get mentioned in the credits of the Disney films that are based on their stories.
In the older movies Disney did credit the public domain books the stories started from. I have not noticed this in recent movies, but this is probably because it is no longer 1 of 20 some odd titles in the front of the movie (and is now lost in the hundreds of credits at the end of the movie, amongst mention of the caterer's booking secretary's dog:-)
The paper "Implementing Copyright Limitations in Rights Expression Languages " is the one I found most interesting. Mulligan and Burstein talk about how to implement the copyright act using a "Rights Expressions Language". They use XrML as a starting point, and go on to describe a whole bunch of issues.
I've often said the most complicated part of making a "fair" DRM (as opposed to one that just simply allows the copyright holder to do whatever they want) is to accomidate fair-use. After all, if the definition of fair-use requires lots of supplemental information and is hard to define even for a judge, what chance does a computer system have of making the right decision? This paper takes the bull by the horns, and starts trying to figure it out.
I wish we could get all of congressman to read the first two sections of this document! It does very through job of explaining how many existing checks-and-balances the DMCA removed, all in favor of the copyright holders! I know of few other examples where so much law has been invalidated with so little thought.
A well-written rights package will include an expiration date beyond which the rules will no longer apply. In fact, sellers might be required to include this provision or be in civil violation of Title 17. So after the copyright on a work expires-- after the work enters the public domain-- its Intertrust package will allow the user to do whatever he wants with the content.
This is a misunderstanding of copyright law, but is part of a very interesting subject. Copyright holders currently have no affirmative requirements to ensure their work enters the public domain. It used to be that in order to get a copyright, you had to send an archival copy to the library of congress. The film studios complained of the expense, and got an exemption at some point. Later this registration requirement was mostly eliminated in the 1976 copyright act. The result of the film exemption is the loss of over 80% of the silent films (between nitrate deterioration and studios destroying "worthless" films)!
If you believe the copyright balance requires the entry of the protected work into the public domain, you will be disappointed by how things are working now (not working is more accurate). In a previous post I've already mentioned the example that anything that was only released on DIVX is essentially lost to the public domain. This is a problem shared with virtually all complex DRM systems (including InterTrust under many circumstances). About the only fix I can think of, is to go back to an archival registration requirement when the copyrighted item will be protected by DRM.
There is closely related problem that is definitely a/. topic as well. Certain elements of items protected by copyright will never enter the public domain. A good example (which I have seen mentioned on/. before) is Visicalc. The original author got permission from the copyright holders to giveaway the Visicalc 1.0 program. The problem was that no one had saved the source code (the company had thrown it away as worthless), and most of the surviving media were copy-protected 5.25 inch floppies that won't work with most of today's computers. Society got lucky, because someone had made an unauthorized copy of the non-copy protected program and retained it over the years.
Lawrence Lessig has proposed that in order for software to receive copyrighted protection, they must register the source code for archiving. It is an interesting proposal (he also proposes changing the copyright term, perhaps having a different time for the program vs. the source code). Some have argued against the concept, stating that writers don't have to preserve their notes. Going back to the purpose of copyrights (to promote the progress of arts and science in the USA), I think a requirement to archive source code makes a lot of sense. Of course there are a few small issues, like making sure the build instructions get archived too:-)
The only time you have to interact with any servers is during a transaction.
This is a little different than I'm used to, but perhaps it depends upon the definition of a "transaction". I'm used to DRM systems that contact the host on a regular basis to see if the details have changed. Typically this is done by having the client contact the server in a poll transaction, usually whenever a protected item is accessed (DIVX had a complex sets of rules here), to see if a new transaction or other change of status has occurred.
So from the sounds of it InterTrust has some type of push mechanism where you have to update the rights package during a customer driven transaction, but the client does not have to actually access the server. This is better than usual, especially when combined with a "fail-open" expiration date. I've never heard of a typical DRM customer who wants "fail-open", so I imagine this is actually a "setting" in the rights package, and not something required by the InterTrust system (back to the copyright holders getting too much control issue).
The fact that InterTrust does not currently "automatically" update the rights package is probably a good thing (from the user rights standpoint), but I would not count upon it remaining that way. It is very counter to the way things are going in the industry (think Windows XP and all the automatic updating). Once updating occurs, all the actions I've mentioned have the potential to come into play. It may not even be InterTrust's plan, remember the judge who ordered SonicBlue to start keeping records of it's PVR user's actions (ultimately rejected in that case, but a hint of potential future problems).
Read Title 17. It grants the copyright holder absolute rights over his work...
I'll start by mentioning that copyright law is probably second only to the tax code in complexity, so the definition of absolute is not what any normal person would think. I'm going to break this down into two types of comments - how copyright is supposed to work, and how it actually works. Needless to say, this will be vastly simplified, and I'd recommend Litman's __Digital Copyright__ as a good next step.
In the USA, copyright is supposed to be balance that promotes the arts by giving certain temporary rights to creators, specifically to "expressions" and not the "facts" (you can copyright a novel, but not a phone book). In theory this balance is set by congress, but in fact for the last 100 years copyrights have been set by copyright conventions where various stakeholders (publishers, movie studios, writers guilds, etc.) get together and agree to a set of changes. Each of these conventions have similar styles, where the copyright holders make sweeping new claims of power (of course they claim this was always the way it was supposed to be), while the other stakeholders carve narrow exceptions for themselves. For example the 1998 DMCA came out of the 1995 convention where the copyright holders make the sweeping claim that all copies are acts of infringement, thus making the computer a "natural infringer" because it can have multiple copies of copyrighted item at once. While the convention members should have rejected this as ridiculous (it does not pass a simple smell test, this means that the copy of the book made by your eyeglasses are also an infringement), instead the stakeholders carved out exemptions for themselves (librarians got archival exemptions, the software industry got reverse engineering exceptions, etc.). The general public was not represented at the convention, and got screwed!
So now you can see why copyrights are so riddled with exemptions, because they are mostly based on overbroad claims. Another way of thinking about copyrights is that it is essentially a "contract" between a copyright holder and the purchaser. The copyright laws define the proper "defaults", and under most circumstances these defaults cannot be overridden. The classic example is the "first sale" doctrine. About 100 years ago a publisher included a notice on the book prohibiting resale of the book (this is something they could do if they had absolute rights as you imply). The courts determined that during a sale protected by copyrights (as opposed to an individually negotiated contract), that the copyright holder could not overrule the rules. This may have later have been formalized in law, but the original case basically was judicial interpretation of the copyright balance. It would not be too far off to say the last 100 years of copyright conventions have been mostly about setting the "defaults".
So lets wrap this up this discussion of copyrights with three definitions: prohibited-use, fair-use, and unregulated-use. A prohibited-use would be something like making and selling illegal copies, in other words copyright infringement. The "fair-use" is a gray area, often with conflicting precedence, but essentially allows certain actions like quoting part of a copyrighted item for review or making a back-up copy. An unregulated-use is the normal case, for example reading a book or lending a book to a friend. The problem with DRM systems is that they can block both "fair-use" and "unregulated-use". Ignoring fair-use for a moment, lets concentrate on unregulated use. There are a whole bunch of unregulated-uses, which are not formally protected by law, but are part of the default of the copyright transaction. An example is that we assume you will always be able to read/view the copyrighted work (otherwise why would you get it). Many DRM systems don't allow you to lend or resell the copyrighted item, which means they are effectively removing the customer's first sale rights.
There are two ways to look at this, and the truth is probably somewhere in-between. The copyright holders current stance, backed up by some lower-court decisions, is that they have no affirmative requirement to make "unregulated-use" easy (which unfortunately even some courts have confused with "fair-use"). In other words if the DRM system makes certain non-infringing uses difficult, the copyright holder is under no obligation to provide an alternative. I believe (or at least hope) this literal reading of the law will be overturned as the issue reaches higher courts; otherwise the "defaults" go out the window all in favor of whoever controls the DRM system (usually the copyright holder).
The positive spin on this is that new "transactions", with their own defaults may be setup. For example, I think there is general agreement that video rentals can have different rules than video sales. If it is a sale, a back-up copy by the "viewer" should be allowed, but should not be permitted for a rental. As a matter of fact, section K of the DMCA just this point. But in doing that, it also provides us with an excellent example of what happens when poorly written laws are combined with opportunistic copyright holders! In order to protect the video rental market, they required MacroVision/CopyGuard circuits in all video recording devices. But congress did not put any limits what they could copy protect, and most of the publishers proceeded to copy protect all of their products, not just the ones for rental. The end result is that the consumer was screwed out of both unregulated and fair-use rights by a congressional mandate. So in summary I am in favor adding new types of transactions, many of which we can't foresee now, which will be very good for both the consumer and industry. But congress has a poor track record of predicting them, and for the last 10 years or so has excessively favored existing copyright holders at the expense of both citizens and new businesses.
Sounds like a fairly typical well designed DRM system. I've worked on a team that was designing a similar system (we lost the bid, but the system eventually became DIVX). I also it find it interesting reading "Twirlip of the Mists" replies to complaints, because that is where I was 7-8 years ago. Aside: I suspect some of our early designs might provide prior art against some of those vaunted Intertrust patents, have to check into that one of these days.
The people asking for the DIVX design had a lot of idealism floating around. They were comparing this with the electrical meter. Before meters were invented, people were charged for electricity based on the number of lights they had in the house. The meter allowed them to actually measure how much electricity was used, and charge people based on their true use instead. The DIVX people reasoned that consumers could pay for how much or how little they actually wanted to use, and that both the consumer and the producer/copyright holder would be better off because of that.
That was back in the days when I had a looser understanding of copyrights, and the historical context in which they were placed. Some of my co-workers even now feel that copyright holders should have whatever control they want over their work, and that public libraries should be outlawed because of theft! I vaguely felt things were wrong then, but it took me quite a few years to solidify my reasoning.
Here are my current top reasons for disliking these systems:
* The protection lasts forever, or until the company dies! Nothing that only appeared on DIVX is ever going to make it into the public domain (unless future historians can make obscure disc players and crack the DIVX DRM system). Once the InterTrust server goes down, the "access rights" the consumer thought they "bought" are going to be worthless!
* The access rights, and types of access rights are under the control of the copyright holders, and they have a government granted monopoly! In reality, the government monopoly is only supposed to give them certain rights, but the DRM system allows them to pretty much do what they want (in the absence of affirmative copyright laws, which are not currently on the books, no one thought that they had to make certain things like the ability to read a book you just bought an explicitly name right in the copyright law). This is the classic problem with the DMCA, it protects DRM but places few to no limits on how the DRM may be used.
* The access rights can change based on the DRM controller's whims. You might have a legal recourse, and than again with our current society's EULAs, sneakwrap, and ever changing privacy policies I would not count on it. What happens when you find your "forever viewing" access blocked because:
1) The author dies, and the new copyright holders can't abide the work.
2) The government has decided this work is offensive (obscene/politically-incorrect/etc.), and should not be viewed by the public.
3) It turns out this item was a violation of someone else's copyright and the DRM controllers have been ordered to "shred" all copies.
Perhaps these objections would not be any trouble if DRM only protected "frivolous entertainment", but the overall trend starts to look pretty bad when you consider DRM protecting a wide range of societies output. Consider how this might have worked in the past, such as not being able to read Uncle Tom's cabin in the south, because certain states were able to block DRM rights (because of the offensive content). In the long run, DRM will be very dangerous to a free society!
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They say you tell when the conversation deteriorates by the ration of quoting vs. original material. I'll take one more shot at it, to clear up the misunderstandings of what I'm saying (as opposed to the spots where we just disagree).
If by "very few" you mean "none at all," I'm in complete agreement.
I gave several examples of "positive rights", including "time-shifting", and DHRA copying (although the DHRA primarily works by providing exceptions, there are elements of the bill that imply an reciprocal responsibility, as I mentioned earlier this has not been tested in the courts). There are also some formalized rights in the 1976 bill, such as the "first sale doctrine" (which first arose through the courts).
The fact that you disagree with the law's interpretation...
Sorry if you got confused here - I was talking ethics, not law. My point was that if you approach copyrights as though they were forms of property (like owning land), your ethical and moral conclusions will be incorrectly biased.
Briefs in the Eldritch case arguing against copyright extensions were judged by the Supreme Court to amount to a hill of beans.
I was suggesting the briefs in Eldritch because of their analysis of what losses and gains occurred because of copyright term extensions. They provide insightful reading. The merits of the case were actually decided on other factors (congressional power primarily), and does nothing to diminish the educational value of some of the Eldritch briefs.
So unless Congress somehow finds a way to keep a work out of the public domain forever and ever, the phrase "steals from the public domain" is just so much hogwash.
Works that were supposed to go into the public domain were delayed by 20 years (this time). This amounts to a multi-billion dollar gift to the current copyright holders. It also means the approx. 98% of the work that is not currently published (presumably because it is not valuable enough to make money) is also unavailable. The undisputed analysis of this is contained within the Eldritch briefs, which is why I recommended them.
I did not say that copyrighted items were never going into the public domain (although in the past I have postulated that additional delays may occur if congress continues without countervailing input). The retroactive delays are costing society money, some of which goes directly to the copyright holders. The material created in the 1920 is now protected an additional 60 years or so, compared to law when they were created. I think you can rightly argue the exact term, but almost everyone agrees we are past a point that is justified. This includes the Supreme Court in the Eldritch case; even the assenting opinion said that congress's actions might be unwise, but there was not enough grounds to overturn the law just because it was unwise.
I just love how you keep talking about how not getting access to other people's work amounts to theft. That's the postwar culture of entitlement for you.
The fact you call using ideas from other copyrighted works "theft" clearly shows your lack of knowledge of the creative process. Perhaps you really do believe that ideas, as well as expressions of those ideas, are created completely without regards to culture and society (hint: those categories include material that is currently copyrighted).
Regardless of what you believe, copyright law was written to protect expression, not ideas. The reason copyright laws have expanded to protect ideas is because they were largely written by copyright owners (and congress mostly rubber-stamped them), who had a vested interest in reducing competition through a government granted monopoly. I'd recommend Digital Copyright by Jessica Litman for a through explanation of how copyright laws have been produced in the last 100 years (I am not exaggerating in my statement about copyright holders writing the laws).
Friend, if you use "characters and even dialogue" from somebody else's work, then your own work is not original.
Again, the distinction is between expression and ideas. My real point here (not the one you pretend to believe) is that all people, and especially successful creators, are strongly influenced by many factors. Copyright is supposed to balance this positive process of influence by providing some protection to the authors. What I argue is that the amount of protection is gotten out of whack, and is actually harmful to new authors; and therefore to society.
Get out there and come up with your own 3-note riff
How much do you know about music composition? I'd say there is probably a 99% chance that the 3-note rift had been used somewhere before (very likely in music that is now in the public domain). When you get down to such small elements of music, this is more like an "idea" than an "expression". As I said, the line is fuzzy and I can certainly accept that people can write songs with a substantial infringement upon other songs. My argument is that the fuzzy line has been pushed too far, and the 3-note rift is an example of that. Your belief in total originality with no other influences is very touching.
I said: real example: can?t back-up child?s favorite tape with post-DMCA VCR, so I had buy another one when it was worn out a year later
You replied: I wrecked my car. The car company, to my everlasting amazement, refuses to give me another one. They say I have to buy another one. Pretty unfair, huh?
That is a really pitiful analogy, try this instead: I bought a car, and saw the tires were going to wear out. I used to be able to replace the tires, but the DMCAR law was passed with a loophole that allowed manufacturers to prevent me from replacing the tires. Now when the tires wear out, I have to buy a new car instead. I'm told to stop complaining, I'm just a whiner who thought I was somehow entitled to replace tires.
If you don't like it, lobby your representatives to get it changed.
At last, something we can both agree upon!
There is no legal mandate for copyright holders to allow anybody to do anything with their works.
... You are entitled to nothing.
This statement (and others in the post supporting this position) is so far from reality, it makes it difficult to know where to start. Copyright law provides creators with a set of privileges, but these privileges are by no means absolute. At the very basis, copyright only protects the expression, not the ideas. Copyrighted material is time limited, and subject to many other considerations like "first sale doctrine" and "compulsory licensing".
The actual copyright law is extremely complex, and defies ordinary definitions of "right and wrong". This is true both for people who want to expand the rights of copyright creators, as well for those of us who want to reform the system.
Copyright law does not allow anybody to make a copy of anything.
Perhaps this is an issue of wording. There are very few places where the Copyright law gives positive rights to people on the other side of the copyright bargain (aside: perhaps that is part of what is wrong with it). But your statement implies that copyright law completely prohibits people (without the copyright holder's permission) from making a copy. That is totally incorrect, the easiest counter-example is the Digital Home Recording Act (DHRA) of 1992; although there are many, many other examples.
When the RIAA/MPAA (and you) belittle fair-use as merely a defense against a copyright infringement suit, it is like saying "going below the speed limit is merely a defense against a speeding ticket". These activities are legal (they both even have gray areas, like weather conditions that can change the safe speed).
Where did you get the idea that you have any kind of right related to somebody else's work?
Rhetorically speaking, where did you get the idea that copyright holders have complete control and rights over their work? It is certainly not true legally, and you don't have to stretch too far to see why it is not true morally (the biggest key is to stop confusing copyrights with property ownership). Although you seem to think so, I'm not advocating the removal of copyrights (my living is helped by copyright law). What I am saying is that copyright is a balance (not original to me, read the US Constitution), and that the balance has gone out of whack.
Why do you keep spouting vague remarks about "the massive give-away of our rights"...
In terms of cold hard cash, the Sonny-Bono Copyright Extension Act (and the 10 other extensions that have occurred in the last 100 years) is the best example. There is nothing in the copyright balance that promises an author that he will hold all rights and privileges to their work until the work is worthless (although you seem to believe it). The retroactive increasing of copyright terms by 20 years essentially steals from the public domain (which is "owned" by citizens and culture), and any additional profits given to the copyright holders are essentially stolen from us. I'd suggest reading the briefs from the Eldritch case for depth on this subject.
The radical expansion of "derivative works" is a more insidious method that copyright laws have stolen from us (citizenry and the culture). Copyright law is only supposed to protect the expression, not the ideas. There is a fuzzy line here, and IMHO it has gone way too far into protecting ideas as well. A good example was the lawsuit against "The Wind Done Gone". This is clearly a very original work, although it uses characters and even dialogue from "Gone with the Wind". The lawsuit was eventually dismissed because of another fair-use safety valve (parody), but it should not even have been able to happen in the first place.
How can we say copyright is promoting the arts when someone can be successfully sued for using a 3 note-rift in a song that is also used in another song? Unless you think the creation of copyrighted work occurs in a vacuum, the removal of "ideas" from culture for life+75 years is not good for society!
I want something that is not mine, and I want it to be given to me for free. I feel that efforts to restrict my access to what I want amount to ripping me off. But this isn't an entitlement issue.
We used to be able to perform certain useful and legal actions (back-ups, time-shifting, etc.). The DMCA contained a loophole, which allows copyright holders to legally prevent me from performing these legal and useful actions. This prohibition costs me real money (real example: can't back-up child's favorite tape with post-DMCA VCR, so I had buy another one when it was worn out a year later). So I loose money (directly, and through inconvenience), and the copyright holders get more money. That is my definition of a government give-away.
You can only get away with calling it an "entitlement" if you can prove the activities now prohibited by the DMCA anti-circumvention loophole were illegal in the first place, otherwise it is clearly a case of a new law taking away legal (and useful) activities. So far the best you have done is claim that legal actions are actually illegal without any proof (not to mention spouting RIAA/MPAA propaganda). Let me turn around the challenge: show me a federal law that prohibits fair-use activities like "the first sale doctrine", "time-shifting", or "making back-up copies". The best you will be able to do is come up with partial prohibitions in narrow circumstances. That is because these activities are legal!
PS: Homework Hint - In order to prove time-shifting is illegal, you have two main targets. First you have to explain away the "Sony vs. Universal" Supreme Court decision. Next you have to somehow explain why the DMCA Section K does not mean what it says (this is one of the very few areas of copyright law that gives positives rights to consumers, we can thank Rep. Boucher for this one).
Seeing as how actually copying the CD's is illegal anyway, this is not a problem.
/. posts I've read (plus the actual copyright reformers I've met) are really protesting the massive give-away of our rights and money to large corporations.
This statement is mostly incorrect. The 1992 DHRA gives explicit rights to record CD's and even distribute them to other people (so long as you use the "taxed" CD-Audio blanks). Copy protected CD's are probably illegal because they don't allow this to occur (although no test case has established it). General copyright law allows the user to record CD's for a variety of reasons (including time-shifting and space-shifting).
The narrow truth of the statement is that the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent digital copy protection under most circumstances; and current court cases seem to support that the DMCA clause about protecting fair-use does not apply to the anti-circumvention rules.
It is a big leap to go from DMCA prohibitions about not breaking copy protection (even for fair-use); to say that all coping of a CD is illegal.
You have no fair use rights.
Actually, that is a statement directly from the RIAA and MPAA spokesmen (usually followed by a statement that their latest scheme fully supports fair-use - i.e. their definition which is that there is no fair-use). It is an opinion from a biased source, and should not be treated as a fact. It is a complicated subject no doubt, but the rest of the post closely follows the RIAA/MPAA party-line and is highly biased.
The culture of entitlement isn't satisfied with this arrangement, though.
This is correct, although not in the way you meant. The RIAA and MPAA believe they are entitled too much, much more; which is why you see them trying to bills like the CDBTPA! They are used to buying the law they want, and think they are entitled to get even more. If the copyright balance and the health of our culture get in the way of their profits, the RIAA/MPAA profit entitlements should have the highest priority.
Of course Twirlip thought he was referring to the general public with the entitlement description, and I'll grant that there might be some small kernel of truth in the "music-wants-to-be-free" crowd. But those people are actually pretty rare, and the majority of
The current DMCA reduction of fair-use should not be treated as the historical default, and the protestors as whiners. It is in fact a historical aberration, which only occurs because of a combination of specialized lobbying and a careless congress. We, citizens and society, have been ripped-off, and that is not an entitlement issue.
... I consider it an essential feature to be able to copy out (securely) any and all keys the chip has generated ...
Can you back up that requirement with an application and the threat modes the application is being protected against? Chances are, most applications that allow the key to be exported don't need the level of security provided by the chip in the first place.
The ability to stop keys from being exported is often a vital feature of hardware crypto systems. For example that is why the Microsoft CAPI interface (at least in versions up to a couple of years ago) is almost useless as a library interface to hardware crypto engines -- it allows all keys to be exported.
To further explain the dangers of key exportation, CAPI only allows these keys to be exported when they are encrypted with an asymmetric key. You might think this meets the "securely" part, but in reality is very simple to compromise. Just create your own "known" asymmetric key, and export all the keys under it. Now you can easily decrypt and read the supposedly protected keys.
A former employer of mine made the first actual hardware CAPI driver (and the second driver created - NT 4.0 days). We dealt with the problem in two ways - the most obvious was to create a secure out-of-channel method for disabling the key export command. The second was more subtle, and more typical of secure hardware design, was to provide a method of limiting the introduction of keys into a system.
The other alternative to key export is the method used by IBM in this case, which is not to allow the key to be exported at all. This is also popular with a number of smartchip/card designs. These keys are typically only used for signing, because real life systems usually need an export function for encryption keys. I've always felt there were ways that you could securely export a signing key (warning! many people don't agree with this statement, at least not at until I spend 10 minutes explaining how and why). But I can agree that in simple designs, disallowing the exportation of signing keys is generally a good thing.
Despite working in the industry, I am generally against DRM (see my post history). I'm writing this because I'm tired of seeing basic hardware crypto security mechanisms described as useful for DRM only. Lets face it, these are tools, and they can be used for good or bad!
But that is not really what DRM is about. Protecting against illegal copies is just an excuse, what they really want shows up in this quote from page 4 of the Wired article:
A digital rights management system isn't just a traffic cop; it's a powerful tool that gathers all kinds of information about consumers, from credit card numbers to listening habits, and dictates which devices can talk to the PC and how.
What Sony entertainment, and the other publishers are really afraid of is "money left on the table". A lot of that money comes from things consumers used to do for free, but they are in business of making money, not running a charity. If they have to buy a few laws to get extra control, they don't care if it hurts society in the long run. Let's close this post with another quote from page 4:
"If you're looking for logic in this situation - hey, it's the music business," says Launch founder Dave Goldberg. "There's not a lot of logic in what they do." But to Ehrlich, the logic is in not letting another company play music gratis when it could be paying. Precedents matter: If broadcast radio hadn't been exempted from royalty payments decades ago, for reasons hardly anyone can remember, the music industry could be collecting an extra $2 billion or so a year. "It's hard to change the old world," Ehrlich declares.
Well, at least you Europeans don't need to worry about your artistic heritage vanishing...
Actually, the extension was passed to "normalize" the US copyright system with Europe. Well except they did not really normalize things.
For example European copyrights on music are still just 50 years. A number of classic recordings are about to enter the public domain in Europe, but will still be protected for 45 more years in the US. Of course the copyright industry wants to normalize these laws too, of course by extending them to US lengths.
The concept of normalization is a race to the bottom because the industry with the money will always chose the longest time with the best terms. Next let's buy some small country, make copyright perpetual, and than tell congress we have to normalize with them!
How about the AUTHOR decide how long they want to keep it copyrighted?
In many cases, the AUTHOR is long deceased (or defunct in the case of a corporation), and no one really knows who the proper heirs are. Thus the work is kept out of the public domain by default.
When the work is on a fragile medium like film stock, the work may be totally lost because people won't commit the time and expense of repairing the work when they don't know if some unknown heir will pop out of the woodwork and sue them.
This is a real problem with old films right now. And if they have all this trouble with a film that is usually owned by corporations that should be fairly traceable, imagine how much harder it is to find the heirs of an obscure AUTHOR who has been dead for 74 years.
Oh no, we can't use Mickey Mouse. What will we ever do? Same thing we've been doing for thousands of years, Pinky: come up with our own ideas.
Obviously a troll, but fun to respond to. Interestingly enough, if today's rules existed back when Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse, he would have been sued back into the Stone Age. The first Mickey film was based on Steamboat Bill, and even used similar music for the score. This is why Disney is such a good target; they are busy paying for laws to outlaw practices that made them rich and successful.
There is no natural law that lets AUTHORs own an idea, and almost no idea is truly original. The troll pretends otherwise, but provides no proof.
So when society decides to provide partial protection for ideas (Patents) or specific expressions (Copyrights), this should not be confused with some grand natural process. The current concept of copyright rules started c. 18th century, and the concept of distributive work control (i.e. no one except the copyright holder can write a sequel) is less than 100 years old. If we really do what people have been doing for thousands of years, there would be no copy protection at all!
The linked article mentions that the tags will have a "self destruct" mechanism, and even mentioned that consumers might have a device that could kill off the tags at home.
So what is to stop a shoplifter from getting a "tag killer" device and using it at the store. After that it becomes a normal shoplifting theft. At best this is only slightly better than the current magnetic tags, good for getting the stupid theives.
Does everything have to be political, what ever happened to good technilogical discussions? I've done my fair share of ranting against DRM, but the Transmeta features have other uses too.
Much like the Intel P3 features, it is quite useful to have a good random number generation and increased speed for software cryptography. Even the hidden storage registers have non-DRM uses (although I suspect they won't make the FIPS 140-1 level 3 or 4 that I'm used to).
Here are some non-DRM uses to consider:
* Increased crypto speed helps servers (don't forget Transmeta sells chips for dense servers).
* Network identification and IPSEC support (increasingly important in these wireless days)
* Local encryption options (protect data on vunerable computers, like laptops).
My point is that not all cryptography is bad.
I basically agree with the idea that overuse of a debugger can be bad. But in 20+ years of programming I recall times when debuggers really made a difference! My favorite two examples (actually since they were embedded systems I used ICE not software debuggers, but same basic concept):
1) We were doing real-time analog-to-digital conversions in a data logger, but an intermittent bug was really bothering us. We were using an Orion which is more of a logic-analyzer than an in-circuit-emulator - important difference is that Orion does not replace the CPU with its own pod unlike a normal ICE. Finally after much debugging, it turned out that our version of the 64180 had a mask error (known to the manufacturer naturally), which occasionally caused interrupt routines to not meets specs. There was no way studying code was going to tell us what was wrong here. Even a normal ICE might have had problems.
2) We had a device with memory backed-RAM which became "unstable" after an extensive code change - becoming "unstable" was intermittent and only occurred after a long period of use. After lots of code inspection, I started examining memory dumps of returned units. After looking at about 20 units, I finally got lucky, and found a device in the "early" part of being unstable. The code area of the device was being overwritten by a recognizable pattern. Turns out the new code made an existing feature optional, but missed a part of the code that expected it to be there. The rogue code was trying to update a non-existent global variable (all this was complicated by the MMU, and the fact that the device had several features like code checksums that were supposed to detect this kind of problem - but obviously didn't).
Two extreme examples I'll confess, but I can think of other situations where debuggers have saved days of debugging time. Debuggers do have their uses.
The real interesting factor, is to compare individual income vs. the more common household income. Given the same types of houses and jobs, it took two of us working full-time to barely qualify for our first house in 1990, compared to 1970 where my same job would of easily allowed me to buy the house just by myself with much less sacrifice. What happens in the next 20 years -- we move to 3.8 incomes per household (assuming 1.8 kids in an average family).
Actually some of the desired/expected concepts I grew up with (born in the 60's) have already been discredited - lifetime employment is a good example. The concept of a nuclear family with 2 adults and some number of children being a viable financial structure is on its way. The "norm" of the nuclear family really became normal in the 1950's, prior to that it was probably more common to have extended family groups living together. That is probably how we will see household incomes increase beyond 2 (although it will no longer be the stereotypical unmarried aunt).
One other interesting place to watch is Bermuda. They have the second highest cost of living (only behind Hong Kong). There is no ground water, so they can't build high-density housing. In the 1980's they converted single family homes into apartments so that families could house their adult children. What happens now, when the apartment dwelling families have kids of their own? Bermuda is one place that makes even boom Silicon Valley real estate prices look like a bargain (even when ignoring the extremely large tax Bermuda adds to non-citizen purchases).
Actually, if it was done in the way you described, this would fail. A book publisher tried doing this about 100 years ago, and the case established the doctrine of "first sale". The publisher tried to control resale of the book (using something very much like a shrinkwrap license).
The courts ruled, to simplify, that the normal terms of copyright were more powerful than the attempted contract. The purchase of a book (or in your example, a CD) is a copyright transactions, and is subject to the rules of copyright.
So does this mean we have nothing to fear? No, here is what they can do instead. They create a CD with some type of limit against reproduction and/or resale (I don't quite know how they would do the last, perhaps burn a computer system ID onto the disc). The protection does not have to be foolproof, just good enough to meet the legal definition of "effective".
Once they have done that, it would be illegal (thanks to the DMCA) for you to circumvent the protection. That is precisely why the companies want to push "copy protected" CDs, because it allows them to use the full force of the DMCA to limit your actions and presumably make them more money (by giving them more power).
I'm more pessimistic, but perhaps as someone in the security industry I over estimate the ability of what can (or will) be done. But first let me ask if you have ever heard of someone breaking the DIVX (DVD) system? I never did.
The examples you (and most people who make this argument) draw on are largely on satellite broadcasts, and they have a lot of design constraints that make good security pretty much impossible. It would be a mistake to use those systems as a comparison basis for good security design.
In a properly designed system, every client has a different key. At best, if you break one key, you only get the access that the original system had. Since everyone has unique keys, it is very easy to shut-off individual units (as soon as they are identified).
The subject of identification brings us to the other major difference - two way communication. The current satellite systems have no idea what is on the other end of their broadcast. That means it is very difficult to detect cloning, you really need to find out about it from outside sources. A two way design usually detects cloning fairly quickly, thus limiting the value of the clone. This makes the system much harder to abuse, from a cryptographic standpoint.
Of course, there is still the issue of protecting things once they have been converted into something a human can perceive, and aside from really obvious and nasty watermarks (resulting in decreased quality), this is a lost effort . I am very much anti-DRM, and one of the reasons for this is because I do believe they can be designed and implemented much more effectively than the average person does.
Interesting enough, the DMCA was written under the assumption that all copies are an infringement. While this theory does not really pass the smell test (it would make your glasses illegal copying devices when your read a book or watch a movie), that is no obstacle in creating copyright law!
The effect of this law was to make a computer a "natural infringer", since it has to make several copies just to work (hard drive, main memory, cache, bus, etc.). That is why they came up with a DRM requirement for digital works because the devices reading them are natural infringers!
Instead of shooting down the whole rotten concept, the people at the copyright convention just carved out narrow exemptions for themselves. The archival librarians got an exemption, the cryptographer researchers got an exemption, but strangely enough no member of the general public was there, so we did not get our own exemption. Congress is than presented with the whole mess, and the best they can normally do is carve out a few more exemptions, when really the whole thing should just be taken out back and shot!
The DMCA was especially noticeable, because as congress was starting to adjust the exemptions in time honored fashion, when it was suddenly passed in almost original form. One of the reasons it was so bad, was because the exemptions in the law are much closer to what came out of the copyright convention.
Tivo's so-called lifetime fee only covers the lifetime of the unit
They will transfer the service, if your unit is broken and fixed by Tivo (at least for Tivo brand units, I don't know how other mfg. handle this). Pretty good, although that does not help with obsolescence.
Actually the biggest problem is that Tivo might change that agreement sometime in the future. There are a number of other changes that Tivo "might" do -- like removing "features" or adding new unwanted ones. Welcome to the modern world where slip-stream updates and constantly changing policies are the norm.
The biggest problem with a "lifetime" fee, is that you can't cost Tivo by canceling your service in protest of some policy or feature change.
Don't get too caught up in THD measurements. During the early 80's, there was a war to reduce THD in amplifiers (and receivers). That eventually resulted in receivers that had on the order of 0.000x% THD. Sounds like a magnificent achievement.
Only problem was that these amplifiers did not sound better. As a matter of fact, they usually sounded worse than amplifiers that only had 0.1% THD. It turns out the way they got such low THD numbers was to use large amounts of negative feedback, which had an overall detrimental effect.
A couple of good lessons from this: First is that you don't target one goal to the exclusion of everything else. Second is that you can't measure everything, and occasionally things that are hard to measure turn out to be very important.
It has been a while since I've read on this subject, but I believe the general literature says most humans can't hear differences in THD below 0.5%. So lower might be better, but at some point going for those diminishing returns will start causing seriously negative trade-offs elsewhere in the design.
You can tell people that they are only allowed to view your works while wearing a fez. ...
There are two areas at work here - copyright law and contract law. In most cases copyright law "trumps" contract law when dealing with items that are protected by copyright. Copyright law does not provide copyright owners with absolute rights, but instead grants them a limited set of rights (time limits are the most obvious, but the right to resell is also clearly established). So when it comes to copyright law the statement that copyright holders can ask/require consumers for anything they want is dead wrong!
The problem with the DMCA (from my perspective) is that the anti-circumvention/dissemination portions of the DMCA does not put adequate restrictions on what the copyright holders can "protect"; or conversely does not allow people to circumvent protections that eliminate legal activities. The effect of this is the DMCA (and only the DMCA) allows the copyright holders to bypass all the copyright limitations (including term limits) built-in to copyright law.
Of course, since Twrilip thinks the copyright holders should not be limited in what they can demand (statement based on previous discussions as well), he does not see anything wrong with the DMCA giving them legal backing for these demands. I think it is ironic that he quotes from Section 17, but has no problem with allowing copyright holders to override any "protection or balance" that Section 17 provides to people on the other end of the copyright transaction.
I should mention that even in contract law, the notion that anything goes is quite incorrect. Many industries have uniform-commercial-codes that set the "defaults" of a transaction in that industry. Contracts that exceed the norm can often be ruled invalid (INAL, so I'm not sure of the correct legal term here). The mechanics of getting a contract to override other areas of the law is very complicated, but there are quite a few interesting, and somewhat contradictory court cases in this area.
Three courts have ruled that 1201(c)(1) did not apply to their respective cases. As a layman, fair-use appeared to be valid defense, but both the judge and expert commentators determined the fair-use protection measure just did not apply to the other subsections. It is possible that somewhere, sometime a court will find a place where 1201(c)(1) actually does apply, but probably not in our lifetime.
There is no doubt the fair-use clause is written in such a way as to provide no real protection to fair-use! The question is how did this come to pass, intentional or accidental? One theory has it being intentional, where the bill authors wrote that section in as an attempt to convince less knowledgeable congressman that fair-use would be protected, when in fact they had no intention of actually protecting it.
I do know that when Lofgren (and Honda) introduced a bill to fix this problem. In the introduction to their bill they claim the DMCA is being interpreted in the courts in a way that eliminates fair-use, and that this was not the intent of congress. The interesting quote from the MPAA went to the effect that "allowing people to overcome copy protection for any reason, including exercising their fair-use, will cause disaster to our industry". Sounds to me like they are quite happy with the bill they bought, and they don't want to it to be changed to reflect the intent of (at least some) congressmen.
Meanwhile, the fluff section continues to benefit the copyright holders (intentionally or not), because people like you can say "see it protects fair-use" by pointing at that worthless section. Seems like a number of judges, and at least some congressman don't agree.
The phone home feature was very neat. It was first implemented by Stratus (probably the second most successful fault tolerant producer after Tandem). Just another example of how competition improves the product.
I worked for Tandem quite a while. I still remember Compaq throwing out the Tandem mail system in favor of Exchange. Prior to that, our email system only failed twice in 7 years (one of those times was because we were using our "social" system for development, I worked in a back water location). I'll grant the email client (mainframe based) was not as pretty as Outlook, but the power of Microsoft at Compaq was amply demonstrated when they threw out the NonStop mail servers (lost features and much less reliability).
One other recollection was when Tandem started producing a hardened UNIX (late 80's/early 90's). They ran into a C-shell timing bug. Seems a 32-bit counter caused csh to crash after it had been running for more than a year. If someone had ever kept a UNIX system going for that long before, it certainly was not common enough that they caught this error. Actually UNIX reliability has improved a lot since those days. Back than the idea of using something as flaky as UNIX for fault tolerance was thought to be pretty risky!
I believe you will find a lot of the hot swapping capability was pioneered by Tandem Computers in the mid 1970's (now part of HP). I'm not sure about power-supplies, but I'm certain they were the first commercial system with hot-swapped CPU (not single chip CPUs in those days). The classic Tandem sales demonstration was to take a running system, and start removing parts (power-supplies, CPU boards, disks, IO controllers) while the system continued to run without any disturbances to the application.
Some of the other reliability areas probably owe to Stratus (which for a long time IBM resold when it needed fault tolerant systems, forget who owns them now). They were the first (I know of) to use multiple CPUs with a voting scheme (something the original article mentioned IBM had started doing, I wonder when). Tandem started doing this too, once they stopped producing discrete CPUs and started working with almost off-the-shelve CPUs instead (happened in the late 80's using MIPS processors).
I don't know if the Brothers Grimm even get mentioned in the credits of the Disney films that are based on their stories.
:-)
In the older movies Disney did credit the public domain books the stories started from. I have not noticed this in recent movies, but this is probably because it is no longer 1 of 20 some odd titles in the front of the movie (and is now lost in the hundreds of credits at the end of the movie, amongst mention of the caterer's booking secretary's dog
The paper "Implementing Copyright Limitations in Rights Expression
Languages
" is the one I found most interesting. Mulligan and Burstein talk about how to implement the copyright act using a "Rights Expressions Language". They use XrML as a starting point, and go on to describe a whole bunch of issues.
I've often said the most complicated part of making a "fair" DRM (as opposed to one that just simply allows the copyright holder to do whatever they want) is to accomidate fair-use. After all, if the definition of fair-use requires lots of supplemental information and is hard to define even for a judge, what chance does a computer system have of making the right decision? This paper takes the bull by the horns, and starts trying to figure it out.
I wish we could get all of congressman to read the first two sections of this document! It does very through job of explaining how many existing checks-and-balances the DMCA removed, all in favor of the copyright holders! I know of few other examples where so much law has been invalidated with so little thought.
A well-written rights package will include an expiration date beyond which the rules will no longer apply. In fact, sellers might be required to include this provision or be in civil violation of Title 17. So after the copyright on a work expires-- after the work enters the public domain-- its Intertrust package will allow the user to do whatever he wants with the content.
/. topic as well. Certain elements of items protected by copyright will never enter the public domain. A good example (which I have seen mentioned on /. before) is Visicalc. The original author got permission from the copyright holders to giveaway the Visicalc 1.0 program. The problem was that no one had saved the source code (the company had thrown it away as worthless), and most of the surviving media were copy-protected 5.25 inch floppies that won't work with most of today's computers. Society got lucky, because someone had made an unauthorized copy of the non-copy protected program and retained it over the years.
:-)
This is a misunderstanding of copyright law, but is part of a very interesting subject. Copyright holders currently have no affirmative requirements to ensure their work enters the public domain. It used to be that in order to get a copyright, you had to send an archival copy to the library of congress. The film studios complained of the expense, and got an exemption at some point. Later this registration requirement was mostly eliminated in the 1976 copyright act. The result of the film exemption is the loss of over 80% of the silent films (between nitrate deterioration and studios destroying "worthless" films)!
If you believe the copyright balance requires the entry of the protected work into the public domain, you will be disappointed by how things are working now (not working is more accurate). In a previous post I've already mentioned the example that anything that was only released on DIVX is essentially lost to the public domain. This is a problem shared with virtually all complex DRM systems (including InterTrust under many circumstances). About the only fix I can think of, is to go back to an archival registration requirement when the copyrighted item will be protected by DRM.
There is closely related problem that is definitely a
Lawrence Lessig has proposed that in order for software to receive copyrighted protection, they must register the source code for archiving. It is an interesting proposal (he also proposes changing the copyright term, perhaps having a different time for the program vs. the source code). Some have argued against the concept, stating that writers don't have to preserve their notes. Going back to the purpose of copyrights (to promote the progress of arts and science in the USA), I think a requirement to archive source code makes a lot of sense. Of course there are a few small issues, like making sure the build instructions get archived too
The only time you have to interact with any servers is during a transaction.
This is a little different than I'm used to, but perhaps it depends upon the definition of a "transaction". I'm used to DRM systems that contact the host on a regular basis to see if the details have changed. Typically this is done by having the client contact the server in a poll transaction, usually whenever a protected item is accessed (DIVX had a complex sets of rules here), to see if a new transaction or other change of status has occurred.
So from the sounds of it InterTrust has some type of push mechanism where you have to update the rights package during a customer driven transaction, but the client does not have to actually access the server. This is better than usual, especially when combined with a "fail-open" expiration date. I've never heard of a typical DRM customer who wants "fail-open", so I imagine this is actually a "setting" in the rights package, and not something required by the InterTrust system (back to the copyright holders getting too much control issue).
The fact that InterTrust does not currently "automatically" update the rights package is probably a good thing (from the user rights standpoint), but I would not count upon it remaining that way. It is very counter to the way things are going in the industry (think Windows XP and all the automatic updating). Once updating occurs, all the actions I've mentioned have the potential to come into play. It may not even be InterTrust's plan, remember the judge who ordered SonicBlue to start keeping records of it's PVR user's actions (ultimately rejected in that case, but a hint of potential future problems).
Read Title 17. It grants the copyright holder absolute rights over his work...
I'll start by mentioning that copyright law is probably second only to the tax code in complexity, so the definition of absolute is not what any normal person would think. I'm going to break this down into two types of comments - how copyright is supposed to work, and how it actually works. Needless to say, this will be vastly simplified, and I'd recommend Litman's __Digital Copyright__ as a good next step.
In the USA, copyright is supposed to be balance that promotes the arts by giving certain temporary rights to creators, specifically to "expressions" and not the "facts" (you can copyright a novel, but not a phone book). In theory this balance is set by congress, but in fact for the last 100 years copyrights have been set by copyright conventions where various stakeholders (publishers, movie studios, writers guilds, etc.) get together and agree to a set of changes. Each of these conventions have similar styles, where the copyright holders make sweeping new claims of power (of course they claim this was always the way it was supposed to be), while the other stakeholders carve narrow exceptions for themselves. For example the 1998 DMCA came out of the 1995 convention where the copyright holders make the sweeping claim that all copies are acts of infringement, thus making the computer a "natural infringer" because it can have multiple copies of copyrighted item at once. While the convention members should have rejected this as ridiculous (it does not pass a simple smell test, this means that the copy of the book made by your eyeglasses are also an infringement), instead the stakeholders carved out exemptions for themselves (librarians got archival exemptions, the software industry got reverse engineering exceptions, etc.). The general public was not represented at the convention, and got screwed!
So now you can see why copyrights are so riddled with exemptions, because they are mostly based on overbroad claims. Another way of thinking about copyrights is that it is essentially a "contract" between a copyright holder and the purchaser. The copyright laws define the proper "defaults", and under most circumstances these defaults cannot be overridden. The classic example is the "first sale" doctrine. About 100 years ago a publisher included a notice on the book prohibiting resale of the book (this is something they could do if they had absolute rights as you imply). The courts determined that during a sale protected by copyrights (as opposed to an individually negotiated contract), that the copyright holder could not overrule the rules. This may have later have been formalized in law, but the original case basically was judicial interpretation of the copyright balance. It would not be too far off to say the last 100 years of copyright conventions have been mostly about setting the "defaults".
So lets wrap this up this discussion of copyrights with three definitions: prohibited-use, fair-use, and unregulated-use. A prohibited-use would be something like making and selling illegal copies, in other words copyright infringement. The "fair-use" is a gray area, often with conflicting precedence, but essentially allows certain actions like quoting part of a copyrighted item for review or making a back-up copy. An unregulated-use is the normal case, for example reading a book or lending a book to a friend. The problem with DRM systems is that they can block both "fair-use" and "unregulated-use". Ignoring fair-use for a moment, lets concentrate on unregulated use. There are a whole bunch of unregulated-uses, which are not formally protected by law, but are part of the default of the copyright transaction. An example is that we assume you will always be able to read/view the copyrighted work (otherwise why would you get it). Many DRM systems don't allow you to lend or resell the copyrighted item, which means they are effectively removing the customer's first sale rights.
There are two ways to look at this, and the truth is probably somewhere in-between. The copyright holders current stance, backed up by some lower-court decisions, is that they have no affirmative requirement to make "unregulated-use" easy (which unfortunately even some courts have confused with "fair-use"). In other words if the DRM system makes certain non-infringing uses difficult, the copyright holder is under no obligation to provide an alternative. I believe (or at least hope) this literal reading of the law will be overturned as the issue reaches higher courts; otherwise the "defaults" go out the window all in favor of whoever controls the DRM system (usually the copyright holder).
The positive spin on this is that new "transactions", with their own defaults may be setup. For example, I think there is general agreement that video rentals can have different rules than video sales. If it is a sale, a back-up copy by the "viewer" should be allowed, but should not be permitted for a rental. As a matter of fact, section K of the DMCA just this point. But in doing that, it also provides us with an excellent example of what happens when poorly written laws are combined with opportunistic copyright holders! In order to protect the video rental market, they required MacroVision/CopyGuard circuits in all video recording devices. But congress did not put any limits what they could copy protect, and most of the publishers proceeded to copy protect all of their products, not just the ones for rental. The end result is that the consumer was screwed out of both unregulated and fair-use rights by a congressional mandate. So in summary I am in favor adding new types of transactions, many of which we can't foresee now, which will be very good for both the consumer and industry. But congress has a poor track record of predicting them, and for the last 10 years or so has excessively favored existing copyright holders at the expense of both citizens and new businesses.
Sounds like a fairly typical well designed DRM system. I've worked on a team that was designing a similar system (we lost the bid, but the system eventually became DIVX). I also it find it interesting reading "Twirlip of the Mists" replies to complaints, because that is where I was 7-8 years ago. Aside: I suspect some of our early designs might provide prior art against some of those vaunted Intertrust patents, have to check into that one of these days.
The people asking for the DIVX design had a lot of idealism floating around. They were comparing this with the electrical meter. Before meters were invented, people were charged for electricity based on the number of lights they had in the house. The meter allowed them to actually measure how much electricity was used, and charge people based on their true use instead. The DIVX people reasoned that consumers could pay for how much or how little they actually wanted to use, and that both the consumer and the producer/copyright holder would be better off because of that.
That was back in the days when I had a looser understanding of copyrights, and the historical context in which they were placed. Some of my co-workers even now feel that copyright holders should have whatever control they want over their work, and that public libraries should be outlawed because of theft! I vaguely felt things were wrong then, but it took me quite a few years to solidify my reasoning.
Here are my current top reasons for disliking these systems:
* The protection lasts forever, or until the company dies! Nothing that only appeared on DIVX is ever going to make it into the public domain (unless future historians can make obscure disc players and crack the DIVX DRM system). Once the InterTrust server goes down, the "access rights" the consumer thought they "bought" are going to be worthless!
* The access rights, and types of access rights are under the control of the copyright holders, and they have a government granted monopoly! In reality, the government monopoly is only supposed to give them certain rights, but the DRM system allows them to pretty much do what they want (in the absence of affirmative copyright laws, which are not currently on the books, no one thought that they had to make certain things like the ability to read a book you just bought an explicitly name right in the copyright law). This is the classic problem with the DMCA, it protects DRM but places few to no limits on how the DRM may be used.
* The access rights can change based on the DRM controller's whims. You might have a legal recourse, and than again with our current society's EULAs, sneakwrap, and ever changing privacy policies I would not count on it. What happens when you find your "forever viewing" access blocked because:
1) The author dies, and the new copyright holders can't abide the work.
2) The government has decided this work is offensive (obscene/politically-incorrect/etc.), and should not be viewed by the public.
3) It turns out this item was a violation of someone else's copyright and the DRM controllers have been ordered to "shred" all copies.
Perhaps these objections would not be any trouble if DRM only protected "frivolous entertainment", but the overall trend starts to look pretty bad when you consider DRM protecting a wide range of societies output. Consider how this might have worked in the past, such as not being able to read Uncle Tom's cabin in the south, because certain states were able to block DRM rights (because of the offensive content). In the long run, DRM will be very dangerous to a free society!