C certainly can have some magic happening under the covers, but it's an order of magnitude less than what goes on in C++.
Well, that's exactly the assumption I'm questioning. Certainly it was true once, but I'm not sure the gap is anywhere near that wide any more. It's not just about the differences written into the language specs, like overloading and construction/destruction in C++. It's also about all the things that aren't specified at all but matter in practice.
Perhaps the balance will shift back a bit now that both C and C++ have incorporated more detailed semantics in some of the tricky areas into their recent specifications, particularly in terms of the memory access model and concurrency, but even that is just the headline example at the top of a long list.
It seems you missed my point. Both C and C++ have huge amounts of non-obvious things going on under the surface with modern compilers and processors/hardware architecture. The parts of C++ that add further implicit behaviours really aren't that big a deal in comparison, and ruling out C++ for systems programming on the grounds of magic happening and expecting C to be much better in that respect is highly optimistic.
One of the real powerful things about C, especially for writing an operating system, is that a good C programmer can look at a piece of C code and have a pretty good idea of the machine code being generated.
For better or worse, that hasn't really been true for a long time now. Modern processors and the related architecture have become so complicated that generating correct, efficient code is an extremely specialist skill. Once you move beyond toy examples with basic flow control and arithmetic, it's common today that what you get out of a C compiler won't seem to bear much resemblance to what you put in, unless you happen to be one of the handful of people in the world who really is an expert in compiler technology and code generation on your particular platform.
With C you just need to follow the code without worrying about a constructor being called or an operator being overloaded.
Until your compiler starts optimizing things.
Or anyone mentions "#define".
Or you have to worry about concurrency.
Or interrupts.
Or memory-mapped I/O.
The claim that C++ does lots of magic but C does not is one of those mythical ideas that makes us feel better about deciding to use C for some systems programming job, but really there's plenty of magic that goes on in both. If you're working on things like operating systems or device drivers, you simply have to know how your code is going to compile in all kinds of situations. Next to that, the differences where C++ systematically provides for things like construction/destruction or overloading are relatively minor concerns.
We are talking specifically about the UK in this discussion. It's right there in the title.
In the UK, circumvention of technical measures is illegal even if it is otherwise legal to make the copy itself. There is really no ambiguity about any of this. It is fully enshrined in the laws of each relevant jurisdiction within the UK, it has been for years, it has been tested in court and it stood up, and nothing in the reforms we're discussing changes the situation.
All the discussion about DMCA and EUCD and what happens in other European countries is just a distraction from these basic facts and does not change them.
Somehow I think society would survive without new big-budget productions like Lord of the Rigs et al.
No doubt, but what does survival have to do with anything? The question is whether society would be better or worse off in one situation or the other, and clearly there are multiple reasonable interpretations of "better off".
The benefits from making all of the world's information readily available, by no longer treating it as property, would far outweigh that loss.
Well, yes, if you take it as axiomatic that the same volume of good quality work would be created and distributed with or without the commercial incentive offered by copyright, then of course since copyright also has drawbacks we would be better off without it. But you're glossing over the potential difference in what "all of the world's information" would be in those two cases, which is the entire point of the debate.
Anti-consumer behaviour is not something that capitalism has shown successful in preventing.
I'm not really trusting them to act in consumers' interests. It see it more as relying on money-grabbing b*****ds to be money-grabbing b*****ds.
Well, your 'perfect DRM' idea is just a thought-experiment.
Of course. In reality I don't support DRM, because in practice I think we are very long way from either perfect DRM or a reasonable copyright framework, and with the current balance I think DRM does more harm than good. That said...
Let's not forget that, in the real world, DRM doesn't help anyone.
I'm quite sure that's not true. Just because it doesn't prevent or deter all illegal copying, that doesn't mean it doesn't prevent or deter some illegal copying. Even that is still probably worth a lot of money to rightsholders that they are perfectly within their rights to want to collect. Of course, the downside of this is that honest consumers who pay for something are the ones who get screwed when it doesn't work properly in legitimate cases, which brings me back to why I'm not generally a fan of DRM in the real world today.
The legal situation seems quite clear in your example. If lots of people collectively own a CD, then they collectively own that copy of whatever data is on it. Of course, only one of them can actually play that CD at once without making additional copies.
The new rules about using cloud storage are analogous. You can transfer your copy of some work to a cloud hosting service for your own convenience, but you aren't then allowed to share access to that library with others in the cloud equivalent of making lots of copies of that one CD so everyone can play the music at once without paying for a full copy themselves.
We've shot our bolt, and missed. That's what we get for not organising our lobbying.
Frankly, I'm not sure we ever stood a chance. If you read the "debates" in the House of Lords and with senior civil servants that have taken place in recent months, they are among the most one-sided politics I have ever seen on any subject. Several of the prominent members of the Lords who speak on the subject came from Big Media backgrounds or have continuing interests in the area. I recall noticing one prominent figure openly acknowledging that their primary concern with the whole issue was the promotion of "UK PLC".
In contrast, hardly ever have I seen anyone who walks the corridors of power raise the question of whether copyright and the associated restrictions were morally justifiable as a statutory limitation on freedoms that would otherwise exist, or suggest that perhaps the existing implementation of the law might have been excessive or that the proposed changes might not go far enough, or give the slightest consideration to the negative effects of copyright on over 60 million people living in the UK, or acknowledge that existing copyright laws have been coerced and sidelined to further the interests of rightsholders at the expense of the public. There are a few rare exceptions to this, even including one or two of the Lords who have spoken, but they are barely a drop in the ocean.
This was never a debate, because one side wasn't even invited. Whether that was a deliberate policy or merely an indication of the ignorance and one-sided experience of almost everyone in this field who operates at a senior government level we cannot easily tell, but the effect is the same either way.
Not really. If there is sufficient demand for something, the market would tend to provide it at a viable price. For more niche uses, it wouldn't, but that's always the deal when you go outside the mainstream with any technology.
The difference in "my world" is that there would be a much shorter time limit on how long any sort of lock-in could last for. If anything, that should create a greater incentive to maximise availability via different channels as broadly and quickly as possible to gain the maximum commercial advantage from the limited-time opportunity. Creators and distributors would not be able to play the waiting game or lock people into very expensive payment schemes, because they would always be competing with the not-so-far-away alternative of completely free access, so it would almost inevitably be more profitable to promote more access sooner while it still brings in revenues for them.
On the other hand, I simply don't subscribe to the "everything must be free" camp. It costs a lot to make good content, and someone has to pay for it. Moreover, it is abundantly clear that a lot of people aren't holding up their side of the deal, and that means some combination of the content providers and the other consumers who do pay for content are picking up the slack unfairly. So, want to play something on Linux? Get Linux to support my idealised bulletproof DRM and show there's enough of a market to justify any overheads in making the content available on that platform -- just like any other platform has to. Don't want to play by the same rules as everyone else? No problem, you aren't forced to, but unlike today you'll still get to enjoy the content within a relevant time frame after its statutory protection expires.
All existent content is naturally abundant when the cost of duplicating it is fractions of a cent.
Indeed. No-one is arguing that abolishing copyright today wouldn't be good for everyone but the rightsholders tomorrow. It's whether it's still good for everyone next week or next year or ten years from now that is in question.
Your point about the best amateur work today competing with good professional work from a decade or two ago is well made, and it's a sign of how far and how fast technology has evolved in recent years. However, it's also a sign that amateurs now have access to tools and techniques originally developed for professionals a few years ago. You're ignoring that in a world where no-one has any incentive to make big budget productions like Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, there is also no budget to develop those professional-grade tools in the first place and nothing to start the trickle down effect.
I think you're also overstating the case dramatically. While today's dedicated and skilled amateurs can make work rivalling professional quality from yesteryear, few amateurs have the time and skill to actually do it. The rest of the time, you get music recordings that are good, but not as good as they would have been if someone had hired a professional recording studio with the right acoustics and equipment. You get the occasional brilliant piece of writing, but you have to filter out a thousand uninspired works of fan fiction to find it. You get a fun film project, but it looks like someone's friend held the camcorder and they ran through a couple of After Effects tutorials afterwards, because that really is what happened. And of course they used After Effects, probably downloaded from a pirate site, to do that, because for the most part the community-built alternatives to professionally created software don't cut it.
As a final point, the growth in capabilities and scale for modern creative projects is astounding. Twenty years ago, a single developer could create a state-of-the-art game, maybe with a little help from specialists on the graphics and audio fronts. Today, a single good developer can still create a fun game, but it won't look like the state-of-the-art, or anything close to it. I'm all for games with interesting gameplay and films with interesting storylines, and I'll be the first to agree that those are more important than the latest big budget effects and a full soundtrack. But professional quality work today can produce all of the above, and no small group of amateurs will ever compete with that, no matter how enthusiastic or skilled they might be or how long you wait.
So I don't think it's self-evident from your valid point about what some today's amateurs can do today that amateurs in a few years would match today's best professional work if we abolished the incentives for big budget productions tomorrow. Star Wars was released in 1977, nearly four decades ago, and today's hobbyists on YouTube are still doing light saber effects. At that rate, most of us will be dead before anyone is keeping up with what today's commercial industry can do.
No, we're still talking about artificial scarcity. Copies are naturally superabundant, even though the supply of original works is scarce.
Right, but it's that scarcity that matters in this case, because that is the part that takes serious time and money to do. Copyright is just a way of amortizing those costs over a large user base who are only willing to contribute a small amount individually, such that expensive-to-create works are still viable. I would argue that having some economic model that allows this distribution of costs, whether copyright or something else, is clearly a good thing if we value the creation and distribution of high quality work.
For those looking for something new, there are a variety of ways to fund its production other than copyright.
Yes there are, and there are some interesting ideas there that might offer better alternative models in time. Moreover, as you say, there is a question of how much distributors artificially distort the markets using copyright; one of the more infamous examples is Disney's strategy of releasing a movie on disc for only a very limited time and then locking it back in the vault for years.
Even so, right now, today, alternative funding models have yet to reach within about two orders of magnitude of funding what copyright does. Therefore, while copyright obviously has some undesirable properties, as an economic tool I claim it is currently the least bad model we have found.
Lulz, if that's the case then I and many other people are simply going to wait for the copyrights to expire and get the books, music and movies for free.
Of course you are, and I have no problem with that. Copyright wasn't supposed to be a mechanism for locking up culture indefinitely. As long as enough people still want things soon enough to pay for them at reasonable prices, creators can still make a decent return and will still create and share stuff, and that is what it's all about.
That is a fair point, but I think it's orthogonal to the main issue. There are already laws about accessibility and discrimination for various other commercial activities, and I see no reason similar rules could not be extended to cover provision of creative content within the kind of scheme I described.
As a curious aside, technically there is already a provision for raising problems caused by DRM with the government in the UK. However, it's so obscure and awkward that I've never heard of anyone actually trying to use it.
Think about the content that is created today through the work of skilled, creative people. We're talking thousands of person-years for blockbuster movies, AAA games, top TV shows. Just presenting TV news and weather bulletins takes a not-so-small army of people working 24/7. For smaller scale works like, say, academic textbooks, we're still looking at a whole team of people working over several years.
The question is, is that kind of content naturally abundant? If society truly would continue to benefit from the same quantity and quality of such work even if those skilled, creative people didn't get paid, then you're right and the scarcity is artificial. Otherwise, we're not talking about artificial scarcity, we're just talking about economics.
But the law doesn't say, for example, that you have a legally protected right to make back-ups. It just says that making back-ups under certain conditions doesn't infringe copyright, which is a completely different statement.
The guys who negotiated these laws are not new at this. These changes have been in negotiation and consultation for several years, and despite the apparent wishful thinking of many posting in this Slashdot discussion, they didn't get to that process and then accidentally give away the keys to the kingdom without noticing.
Personally, in an ideal world but one where we accept the basic principle of copyright as a reasonable economic tool? I'd have:
1. 100% effective DRM. (Yes, really, but read on for what balances it.)
2. Compulsory escrow for any work being distributed commercially with DRM applied, and criminal sanctions for those who fail to provide the unprotected content to the relevant regulatory authority.
3. Much shorter copyright durations, probably varying by industry/type of work and dictated by what creates a reasonable commercial incentive but not an excessive one in each context, which I suspect would be around 5-10 years in most cases.
4. Original creators keeping the master copyright to any work they do, so big media distributors can only ever have exclusive licensing for relatively short periods (maybe 1-2 years) after which they have to renegotiate with the original creators if they want to renew their licence.
In short, I would give the creators primary control for the duration of the copyright, I would make big distribution channels into a market that is subservient to creators rather than the other way around, and then within that structure, members of the general public get a clear choice to enjoy a work immediately on whatever terms the market will support (one-off purchase, rental, library subscription, etc.) or to wait a significant but not absurd length of time until the work enters the public domain forever.
In shorter, I'd screw the distributor middlemen, make copyright back into something that provides a reasonable incentive to create and share good works, and make the default legal position that everyone can enjoy everything once that incentive has done its job.
What does America have to do with anything? This is about the UK, I live in the UK, and I'm talking about UK law. Here we have the EUCD, which is hardly "murky" on this matter, and the relevant provisions have been incorporated into UK law for around a decade now.
When do you think this hasn't held up in court? There have been various cases elsewhere in Europe where things like mod chips have survived a court challenge in various ways. However, in the UK, the judiciary seems to have taken a very consistent and pro-rightsholder view in such cases so far.
Also, what "clearer law saying something is specifically allowed" do you think applies here? The changes taking effect today have little to say about TPMs.
Perhaps you should read the Intellectual Property Office guidance (PDF) about this issue. Pay particular attention to the FAQ on page 4, where for example it notes:
However, you should note that media, such as DVDs and e-books, can still be protected by technology which physically prevents copying and circumvention of such technology remains illegal.
Or just go straight to reading the changes themselves, which are written in legalese but clear enough for a non-lawyer to understand.
That's not how I read the BBC article, but if that is what it meant then it is wrong.
We have the EUCD here, which in somewhat similar to the DMCA. In fact, it is arguably stricter in this particular area, because it covers not only access control mechanisms but also copy protection mechanisms. The relevant details of the EU directive have been incorporated into UK law for roughly a decade.
Rightsholders can therefore pursue not only those circumventing such technical measures but also those making or distributing the equipment used to do so, and in some cases this can fall under criminal rather than civil law. Moreover, this has actually happened, for example in the Sony PS2 mod chip case.
At least it's not illegal to [circumvent technical measures].
Yes, it still is. That's the point. Almost all of the theoretical benefits of these changes can immediately be nullified, because all the content provider has to do is apply technical measures and then breaking those measures remains against the law even if the copy would otherwise now be legal.
Slashdot Mirror
It's almost like playing quotation bingo with these issues now.
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." -- Pitt the Younger
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
"The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -- George Santayana
C certainly can have some magic happening under the covers, but it's an order of magnitude less than what goes on in C++.
Well, that's exactly the assumption I'm questioning. Certainly it was true once, but I'm not sure the gap is anywhere near that wide any more. It's not just about the differences written into the language specs, like overloading and construction/destruction in C++. It's also about all the things that aren't specified at all but matter in practice.
Perhaps the balance will shift back a bit now that both C and C++ have incorporated more detailed semantics in some of the tricky areas into their recent specifications, particularly in terms of the memory access model and concurrency, but even that is just the headline example at the top of a long list.
It seems you missed my point. Both C and C++ have huge amounts of non-obvious things going on under the surface with modern compilers and processors/hardware architecture. The parts of C++ that add further implicit behaviours really aren't that big a deal in comparison, and ruling out C++ for systems programming on the grounds of magic happening and expecting C to be much better in that respect is highly optimistic.
One of the real powerful things about C, especially for writing an operating system, is that a good C programmer can look at a piece of C code and have a pretty good idea of the machine code being generated.
For better or worse, that hasn't really been true for a long time now. Modern processors and the related architecture have become so complicated that generating correct, efficient code is an extremely specialist skill. Once you move beyond toy examples with basic flow control and arithmetic, it's common today that what you get out of a C compiler won't seem to bear much resemblance to what you put in, unless you happen to be one of the handful of people in the world who really is an expert in compiler technology and code generation on your particular platform.
You glossed over the "or resources" part of Greyfox's comment.
With C you just need to follow the code without worrying about a constructor being called or an operator being overloaded.
Until your compiler starts optimizing things.
Or anyone mentions "#define".
Or you have to worry about concurrency.
Or interrupts.
Or memory-mapped I/O.
The claim that C++ does lots of magic but C does not is one of those mythical ideas that makes us feel better about deciding to use C for some systems programming job, but really there's plenty of magic that goes on in both. If you're working on things like operating systems or device drivers, you simply have to know how your code is going to compile in all kinds of situations. Next to that, the differences where C++ systematically provides for things like construction/destruction or overloading are relatively minor concerns.
We are talking specifically about the UK in this discussion. It's right there in the title.
In the UK, circumvention of technical measures is illegal even if it is otherwise legal to make the copy itself. There is really no ambiguity about any of this. It is fully enshrined in the laws of each relevant jurisdiction within the UK, it has been for years, it has been tested in court and it stood up, and nothing in the reforms we're discussing changes the situation.
All the discussion about DMCA and EUCD and what happens in other European countries is just a distraction from these basic facts and does not change them.
Somehow I think society would survive without new big-budget productions like Lord of the Rigs et al.
No doubt, but what does survival have to do with anything? The question is whether society would be better or worse off in one situation or the other, and clearly there are multiple reasonable interpretations of "better off".
The benefits from making all of the world's information readily available, by no longer treating it as property, would far outweigh that loss.
Well, yes, if you take it as axiomatic that the same volume of good quality work would be created and distributed with or without the commercial incentive offered by copyright, then of course since copyright also has drawbacks we would be better off without it. But you're glossing over the potential difference in what "all of the world's information" would be in those two cases, which is the entire point of the debate.
Anti-consumer behaviour is not something that capitalism has shown successful in preventing.
I'm not really trusting them to act in consumers' interests. It see it more as relying on money-grabbing b*****ds to be money-grabbing b*****ds.
Well, your 'perfect DRM' idea is just a thought-experiment.
Of course. In reality I don't support DRM, because in practice I think we are very long way from either perfect DRM or a reasonable copyright framework, and with the current balance I think DRM does more harm than good. That said...
Let's not forget that, in the real world, DRM doesn't help anyone.
I'm quite sure that's not true. Just because it doesn't prevent or deter all illegal copying, that doesn't mean it doesn't prevent or deter some illegal copying. Even that is still probably worth a lot of money to rightsholders that they are perfectly within their rights to want to collect. Of course, the downside of this is that honest consumers who pay for something are the ones who get screwed when it doesn't work properly in legitimate cases, which brings me back to why I'm not generally a fan of DRM in the real world today.
The legal situation seems quite clear in your example. If lots of people collectively own a CD, then they collectively own that copy of whatever data is on it. Of course, only one of them can actually play that CD at once without making additional copies.
The new rules about using cloud storage are analogous. You can transfer your copy of some work to a cloud hosting service for your own convenience, but you aren't then allowed to share access to that library with others in the cloud equivalent of making lots of copies of that one CD so everyone can play the music at once without paying for a full copy themselves.
As a result, [the EUCD] is in no shape or form binding for individual citizenry.
But the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 as amended is.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, people have already been sued under this law in the UK, and they have lost.
And as I wrote before, the relevant parts were incorporated into UK law about a decade ago.
You might not like it, but that is the law in the UK today, and there is really nothing ambiguous or open to significant interpretation about it.
We've shot our bolt, and missed. That's what we get for not organising our lobbying.
Frankly, I'm not sure we ever stood a chance. If you read the "debates" in the House of Lords and with senior civil servants that have taken place in recent months, they are among the most one-sided politics I have ever seen on any subject. Several of the prominent members of the Lords who speak on the subject came from Big Media backgrounds or have continuing interests in the area. I recall noticing one prominent figure openly acknowledging that their primary concern with the whole issue was the promotion of "UK PLC".
In contrast, hardly ever have I seen anyone who walks the corridors of power raise the question of whether copyright and the associated restrictions were morally justifiable as a statutory limitation on freedoms that would otherwise exist, or suggest that perhaps the existing implementation of the law might have been excessive or that the proposed changes might not go far enough, or give the slightest consideration to the negative effects of copyright on over 60 million people living in the UK, or acknowledge that existing copyright laws have been coerced and sidelined to further the interests of rightsholders at the expense of the public. There are a few rare exceptions to this, even including one or two of the Lords who have spoken, but they are barely a drop in the ocean.
This was never a debate, because one side wasn't even invited. Whether that was a deliberate policy or merely an indication of the ignorance and one-sided experience of almost everyone in this field who operates at a senior government level we cannot easily tell, but the effect is the same either way.
It's just a band-aid.
Not really. If there is sufficient demand for something, the market would tend to provide it at a viable price. For more niche uses, it wouldn't, but that's always the deal when you go outside the mainstream with any technology.
The difference in "my world" is that there would be a much shorter time limit on how long any sort of lock-in could last for. If anything, that should create a greater incentive to maximise availability via different channels as broadly and quickly as possible to gain the maximum commercial advantage from the limited-time opportunity. Creators and distributors would not be able to play the waiting game or lock people into very expensive payment schemes, because they would always be competing with the not-so-far-away alternative of completely free access, so it would almost inevitably be more profitable to promote more access sooner while it still brings in revenues for them.
On the other hand, I simply don't subscribe to the "everything must be free" camp. It costs a lot to make good content, and someone has to pay for it. Moreover, it is abundantly clear that a lot of people aren't holding up their side of the deal, and that means some combination of the content providers and the other consumers who do pay for content are picking up the slack unfairly. So, want to play something on Linux? Get Linux to support my idealised bulletproof DRM and show there's enough of a market to justify any overheads in making the content available on that platform -- just like any other platform has to. Don't want to play by the same rules as everyone else? No problem, you aren't forced to, but unlike today you'll still get to enjoy the content within a relevant time frame after its statutory protection expires.
All existent content is naturally abundant when the cost of duplicating it is fractions of a cent.
Indeed. No-one is arguing that abolishing copyright today wouldn't be good for everyone but the rightsholders tomorrow. It's whether it's still good for everyone next week or next year or ten years from now that is in question.
Your point about the best amateur work today competing with good professional work from a decade or two ago is well made, and it's a sign of how far and how fast technology has evolved in recent years. However, it's also a sign that amateurs now have access to tools and techniques originally developed for professionals a few years ago. You're ignoring that in a world where no-one has any incentive to make big budget productions like Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, there is also no budget to develop those professional-grade tools in the first place and nothing to start the trickle down effect.
I think you're also overstating the case dramatically. While today's dedicated and skilled amateurs can make work rivalling professional quality from yesteryear, few amateurs have the time and skill to actually do it. The rest of the time, you get music recordings that are good, but not as good as they would have been if someone had hired a professional recording studio with the right acoustics and equipment. You get the occasional brilliant piece of writing, but you have to filter out a thousand uninspired works of fan fiction to find it. You get a fun film project, but it looks like someone's friend held the camcorder and they ran through a couple of After Effects tutorials afterwards, because that really is what happened. And of course they used After Effects, probably downloaded from a pirate site, to do that, because for the most part the community-built alternatives to professionally created software don't cut it.
As a final point, the growth in capabilities and scale for modern creative projects is astounding. Twenty years ago, a single developer could create a state-of-the-art game, maybe with a little help from specialists on the graphics and audio fronts. Today, a single good developer can still create a fun game, but it won't look like the state-of-the-art, or anything close to it. I'm all for games with interesting gameplay and films with interesting storylines, and I'll be the first to agree that those are more important than the latest big budget effects and a full soundtrack. But professional quality work today can produce all of the above, and no small group of amateurs will ever compete with that, no matter how enthusiastic or skilled they might be or how long you wait.
So I don't think it's self-evident from your valid point about what some today's amateurs can do today that amateurs in a few years would match today's best professional work if we abolished the incentives for big budget productions tomorrow. Star Wars was released in 1977, nearly four decades ago, and today's hobbyists on YouTube are still doing light saber effects. At that rate, most of us will be dead before anyone is keeping up with what today's commercial industry can do.
No, we're still talking about artificial scarcity. Copies are naturally superabundant, even though the supply of original works is scarce.
Right, but it's that scarcity that matters in this case, because that is the part that takes serious time and money to do. Copyright is just a way of amortizing those costs over a large user base who are only willing to contribute a small amount individually, such that expensive-to-create works are still viable. I would argue that having some economic model that allows this distribution of costs, whether copyright or something else, is clearly a good thing if we value the creation and distribution of high quality work.
For those looking for something new, there are a variety of ways to fund its production other than copyright.
Yes there are, and there are some interesting ideas there that might offer better alternative models in time. Moreover, as you say, there is a question of how much distributors artificially distort the markets using copyright; one of the more infamous examples is Disney's strategy of releasing a movie on disc for only a very limited time and then locking it back in the vault for years.
Even so, right now, today, alternative funding models have yet to reach within about two orders of magnitude of funding what copyright does. Therefore, while copyright obviously has some undesirable properties, as an economic tool I claim it is currently the least bad model we have found.
Lulz, if that's the case then I and many other people are simply going to wait for the copyrights to expire and get the books, music and movies for free.
Of course you are, and I have no problem with that. Copyright wasn't supposed to be a mechanism for locking up culture indefinitely. As long as enough people still want things soon enough to pay for them at reasonable prices, creators can still make a decent return and will still create and share stuff, and that is what it's all about.
Well, I was talking about Cygwin at that point. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it. ;-)
That is a fair point, but I think it's orthogonal to the main issue. There are already laws about accessibility and discrimination for various other commercial activities, and I see no reason similar rules could not be extended to cover provision of creative content within the kind of scheme I described.
As a curious aside, technically there is already a provision for raising problems caused by DRM with the government in the UK. However, it's so obscure and awkward that I've never heard of anyone actually trying to use it.
Think about the content that is created today through the work of skilled, creative people. We're talking thousands of person-years for blockbuster movies, AAA games, top TV shows. Just presenting TV news and weather bulletins takes a not-so-small army of people working 24/7. For smaller scale works like, say, academic textbooks, we're still looking at a whole team of people working over several years.
The question is, is that kind of content naturally abundant? If society truly would continue to benefit from the same quantity and quality of such work even if those skilled, creative people didn't get paid, then you're right and the scarcity is artificial. Otherwise, we're not talking about artificial scarcity, we're just talking about economics.
But the law doesn't say, for example, that you have a legally protected right to make back-ups. It just says that making back-ups under certain conditions doesn't infringe copyright, which is a completely different statement.
The guys who negotiated these laws are not new at this. These changes have been in negotiation and consultation for several years, and despite the apparent wishful thinking of many posting in this Slashdot discussion, they didn't get to that process and then accidentally give away the keys to the kingdom without noticing.
What would you have?
Personally, in an ideal world but one where we accept the basic principle of copyright as a reasonable economic tool? I'd have:
1. 100% effective DRM. (Yes, really, but read on for what balances it.)
2. Compulsory escrow for any work being distributed commercially with DRM applied, and criminal sanctions for those who fail to provide the unprotected content to the relevant regulatory authority.
3. Much shorter copyright durations, probably varying by industry/type of work and dictated by what creates a reasonable commercial incentive but not an excessive one in each context, which I suspect would be around 5-10 years in most cases.
4. Original creators keeping the master copyright to any work they do, so big media distributors can only ever have exclusive licensing for relatively short periods (maybe 1-2 years) after which they have to renegotiate with the original creators if they want to renew their licence.
In short, I would give the creators primary control for the duration of the copyright, I would make big distribution channels into a market that is subservient to creators rather than the other way around, and then within that structure, members of the general public get a clear choice to enjoy a work immediately on whatever terms the market will support (one-off purchase, rental, library subscription, etc.) or to wait a significant but not absurd length of time until the work enters the public domain forever.
In shorter, I'd screw the distributor middlemen, make copyright back into something that provides a reasonable incentive to create and share good works, and make the default legal position that everyone can enjoy everything once that incentive has done its job.
This is not America, there is no DMCA.
What does America have to do with anything? This is about the UK, I live in the UK, and I'm talking about UK law. Here we have the EUCD, which is hardly "murky" on this matter, and the relevant provisions have been incorporated into UK law for around a decade now.
When do you think this hasn't held up in court? There have been various cases elsewhere in Europe where things like mod chips have survived a court challenge in various ways. However, in the UK, the judiciary seems to have taken a very consistent and pro-rightsholder view in such cases so far.
Also, what "clearer law saying something is specifically allowed" do you think applies here? The changes taking effect today have little to say about TPMs.
Perhaps you should read the Intellectual Property Office guidance (PDF) about this issue. Pay particular attention to the FAQ on page 4, where for example it notes:
However, you should note that media, such as DVDs and e-books, can still be protected by technology which physically prevents copying and circumvention of such technology remains illegal.
Or just go straight to reading the changes themselves, which are written in legalese but clear enough for a non-lawyer to understand.
That's not how I read the BBC article, but if that is what it meant then it is wrong.
We have the EUCD here, which in somewhat similar to the DMCA. In fact, it is arguably stricter in this particular area, because it covers not only access control mechanisms but also copy protection mechanisms. The relevant details of the EU directive have been incorporated into UK law for roughly a decade.
Rightsholders can therefore pursue not only those circumventing such technical measures but also those making or distributing the equipment used to do so, and in some cases this can fall under criminal rather than civil law. Moreover, this has actually happened, for example in the Sony PS2 mod chip case.
At least it's not illegal to [circumvent technical measures].
Yes, it still is. That's the point. Almost all of the theoretical benefits of these changes can immediately be nullified, because all the content provider has to do is apply technical measures and then breaking those measures remains against the law even if the copy would otherwise now be legal.