I have several problems with you point of view, which I will detail below, but the crux of it is that I suppose you are right in a very idealistic way, however you could not be more wrong, in my opinion, in a practical sense. As far as I an concerned, copyright is a legal tool used for resolving disputes about the ownership of work. As such, any discussion of copyright existing outside of a dispute, is meaningless. If there is no dispute, then it wouldn't matter if there were a single copyright law on the books or not, because it would never have to go to court. Laws are the way we settle disputes, about how we deal with things when something goes wrong, not about how we deal with things in the best case scenario.
Now on to the specifics.
So, this is where our disagreement (or misunderstanding) comes from. For you, every download -- every copy -- feels like an original. For you, you need every technical measure possible, even the ones that arguably diminish other people's natural rights, to protect that feeling. I assert that it's pretentious to treat each copy as an original. I assert that copies don't need to be limited to only actions that amuse or enrich their creator. If someone uses a copy in a way that does not affect the creator's life, liberty, fortune, state granted expression monopoly, etc. I don't see why it should be regulated. Now on this point, the Constitution and the law agrees with me. That's why copyright doesn't govern use, it governs distribution.
Ok, two things here. First, you seem to be muddying terms here. Original, copy, these are terms that deal with the media, not the art. I am talking about giving a digital performance of a digital piece. To turn around and call the first digital performance the original, and the second digital performance the copy is an odd distinction indeed. I understand why, from a consumer perspective you would see it this way, because you believe that what copyright deals exclusively with, is the distribution of the commercial product of art (that being the copies of the original, as you are defining it). However, that brings me to my second point. You say that copyright doesn't govern use, it governs distribution. Once again, I understand why from the perspective of a consumer you see it this way, however from the point of view of a commercial artist, this is arguable. While copyright may not govern how you the consumer uses a piece (though I think even this point is tenuous) it most definitely governs artistic uses of a piece. I will go into examples below, but suffice to say, one artist cannot include your entire copyrighted work as an integral part of their copyrighted work, without your permission, just because they went and bought a DVD of your work. I think some of this confusion comes from the fact that a lot of copyright owners "let it slide" when the infringing artwork is of a non-commercial nature, thus leaving the impression that fair use might have much more far reaching implications that it legally does.
Ok, so with that said, you can see why I'm against technical means to restrict my freedom (even with copies of other art/artistic products). I guess what it comes down to is (like usual) property rights. If an artistic work is fixed in a tangible medium it is property. Do you disagree? Why don't I have permission from you (and others like you) to exercise my own decisions about my own property?
Ok, once again, we are arguing two different things here. You are making the absolute argument that the media IS the art, and the art IS the media. Now I would first argue that with or without the DMCA, this was not the case. Just try to take a book you bought down to a copyshop, and have them make a photocopy of every page of it if you don't believe me. Well before the DMCA, it was established that you do not have the right to make an unauthorized copy of any media you care to. Now you might well hav
Is that how you reinforce your own belief in your infallibility? You just keep repeting the same "you're wrong, I'm right" ad nauseam, and then end with "we all know I'm right, just don't bother replying, because you just make yourself look like a fool." Thus allowing you to say in your own mind "see, he knew I was right all along" when your opponent gets tired of you ignoring the argument and just constantly stating you are right like some child? I could go through the entire argument again, but since you have yet to actually do anything but tell me I don't know what I am talking about, and insult me for not acquiescing to your self-imagined expertise on the subject, I don't really see the point.
Rest assured, however, you have not convinced me of anything other than your absolute inability to debate a topic, beyond saying that your opponent needs to trust that you know best. No matter how well versed you might think you are "no, no, no, no, no you are wrong you lying liar, and I'm not listening to you" is hardly a persuasive argument, or one that speaks particularly well for why we should all just trust you have all sides of the issue covered.
Wow. You are trolling me, again. I can't believe I started to think you were reasonable. I guess I'll keep playing for one more round.
You must be very used to people just saying "wow, you are so smart" and letting you have your way in arguments, because you have a very bad, and unseemly reaction to anyone who just doesn't agree with you, no matter how many times you tell them they have no idea what they are talking about. Are you a teacher or something? You started to think I was reasonable? Why, because I agreed with you on a few things, so I must be reasonable? Of course now that I am not agreeing with you again, I have obviously lost all sense of reason, because any reasonable person would know how utterly incapable of error you are.
Except of course for fair uses, right? Except when the copyright expires, right?
No, none, ever! That doesn't mean I get my wish, but if you don't understand why an artist would want his work to stand unaltered forever, then you don't know much about artists. What is the point of devoting your life to expressing your views in your art, if anyone who cares to can change your art to reflect their views? That doesn't mean that I am against fair use as a law, that doesn't mean that I think copyright should never expire either. It just means that if I had my way, my art would remain unaltered forever, and would always be presented in a way I would approve of. I think every artists feels that way about their art, no matter how unrealistic it is. It is like a parent who doesn't want to see his daughter date some loser. You know there really isn't much you can do about it, but that doesn't stop you from wanting it.
Oh come off it. Every one works hard at what they do. Copyright still protects them regardless. If I download a movie -- because let's face it you are letting me do it, expression == giving -- and I want to crop it and mash it up and sit on it or any other conceivable thing I CAN. What I can't do is distribute it.
You know, an attitude like yours will do more to stifle artistic expression than a 100 laws. You seem to think the artist is some factory worker who's job it is to turn out funny little widgets for you to amuse yourself with. The artist gets to choose every aspect of the presentation of his work, and the terms on which you get to view it. If the artist only wants his work viewed in one park in the middle of nowhere, then you have to drag your ass down to the park, or you don't get to see it. If the artist only wants to show his work underwater surrounded by fish, then you better take some SCUBA lessons if you want to see it. By the same token, if the artist wants to encrypt his video with DRM and only allow you to view it on the computer where you downloaded it, then you best live with that, or not watch it. Just because the venue is your computer screen, doesn't suddenly mean that you have absolute rights to dictate to the artist how their work will be handled from that point on. Sure, their are plenty of people in the creative industry that are willing to let you have any terms you wish as long as you give them the right amount of money, but the next time you are moaning about the dearth of decent Hollywood movies, or all the crap on network TV, you might stop and think about how many decent artists' work you will never see, because they aren't willing to agree to your "I can do anything I want with it" terms.
Another lie. If I uploaded it to anyone, let alone YouTube, I would have been infringing your copyright and BREAKING THE FUCKING LAW. A COPYRIGHT LAW THAT'S EXISTED SINCE THE FIRST CONGRESS. The DMCA didn't make copyright infringement illegal.
Another lie. I've infringed a copyright, and since fair use is only an affirmative defense I am in fact guilty until proven innocent, er sorry I mean to say infringing until found non-infringing. Copyright has always been s
I frankly have no idea what you are even talking about at this point. You are obviously arguing some obscure semantical difference that is very important to you, even though I fail to see the importance of it in the slightest. You argue that publication has nothing to do with copyright protection, I send you a link to a.gov site where it very concisely lays out how the date of publication directly effects any copyright case, and you come back with "Date of publication really does have nothing to do with copyright protection." All I can figure is that those italics mean something very important to you. Either that, or you are now maintaining that you know more that the copyright office about copyright, and their page is just plain wrong.
Ok, yes I suppose your are correct and any artist has a completely useless, completely indefensible claim to copyright from the moment they create the work, and has since the moment the first congress was convened. That is fantastic, assuming that the work is never sold, never published, never displayed, and never infringed on. What is the point though? The moment the work is infringed on, if you wish to take legal recourse, it becomes ALL about who filed what, when the artwork in question was published, and what qualifies as publication. Yes it is just "a legal formality intended to make a public record of the basic facts of a particular copyright." Of course a deed is just a a legal formality intended to make a public record of the basic facts of a particular chain of ownership, a marriage certificate is just a legal formality intended to make a public record of the basic facts of a particular civil union, and a death certificate is just a legal formality intended to make a public record of the basic facts of a particular death. None of those things TECHNICALLY keep me from giving away property, or living with a woman and calling her my wife, or dying, yet all of these things have profound legal ramifications, and can be the legal formality that determine who wins and who loses a case.
I honestly don't know if your point of view is so academic that you really can't see the difference between the theory of copyright and the legal formalities, or if you are being purposely obtuse because you just want to try to win an argument. Either way, your argument is in my opinion hopelessly naive. You seem to be arguing some personal vision of how you feel the copyright system SHOULD work, based on your personal interpretation of the statutes. Unfortunately, unless you are a judge, your personal interpretation has even less bearing than my feelings, as you put it. What does have a bearing, is how cases are decided in court. In court, all those 'unnecessary' legal formalities are exactly what decide the case.
However, to answer your question about why a business would not file a trademark, the answer is quite simple; because they were never told they had to. Sure, businesses large enough to have a legal department are told they need to, and sure creative businesses are more sensitive to the issue, but your average locally owned hardware store just thinks of artwork like anything else for their business. It is something they go out and buy when they need to. They don't file a form with the government when they buy business cards. They don't file a form with the government when they buy a newspaper ad. By the same token, they don't file a form with the government when they pay some guy to design what is going to be on that card or ad either.
And yet you post and read/.? So much for making good use of all that extra time!
Really though, at different point in my life I have gone without TV, and I just don't get the whole "TV sucks" thing. Just like anything else, there are good shows, and there are bad shows. There is stupid stuff, and there is really enlightening stuff. Besides, some people need to just unwind sometimes.
I mean, I have been 10 years now without a car, and I could certainly make comments like "What I find constantly amazing is seeing otherwise intelligent people I know throwing away tens of thousands of dollars just so they can be fat and lazy and not have to walk to the store." By the same token I haven't gotten drunk in years and I could say "What I find constantly amazing is seeing otherwise intelligent people I know pay money to kill off brain cells." However, I realize that it is a gross oversimplification to even think that way.
People do what pleases them. If reading on/. and posting your personal opinions is what does it for you, great! But don't look down your nose at other people just because they enjoy something you don't.
Right! Registered a trademark. A completely different matter (but lumped under "intellectual property" to confuse the issue, sometimes intentionally). Trademarks, although they are copyrighted, must be registered with the PTO, the Patent and Trademark Office. (Copyrights don't have to be registered.) So what's interesting in this trademark infringement case, is that after the judge ruled in favor of the registerer, the original artists -- you two -- could have counter-counter-sued them after the injunction for violating your copyright on the design.:-D
You see, this is where the difference in my mind comes down to academic vs. practical. Sure, in the strictest sense they are two totally separate areas of the law. Yet when the copyright holder (the logo was designed on a for-hire buyout basis, so the company was the full owner of the work) takes another company to court for copyright infringement, and the copyright holder gets trumped by trademark law, it suddenly doesn't look so separate. Remember, while the countersuit filed by the second company was a straight trademark suit, the first case was supposed to be about copyright, but became about trademark. If trademark supersedes copyright in a copyright case, then they aren't really all that seperate from a practical sense, no matter how seperate they may be on the books.
Ah, but see this relate directly to what I am saying in the above statement. The simple truth of the matter (and there might be room for legitimate debate as to whether this is an issue of the interpretation or the letter of the DMCA) is that under the DMCA a blogger CAN admit as evidence information subpoenaed from the ISP or hosting company to prove date of 'publication' of the work. Under pre-DMCA law, this was not something you would ever get a judge to allow as evidence.
False. Again. No one has had to explicitly regerister a copyright since 1977. Since Ford signed the 1976 Act, every utterance, every scribble, every doodle, every little jingle-jangle of your keys has been copyright since the moment of creation. But... I now have an idea where the confusion of the issue comes from...
Registration establishes a public record of the copyright claim.
Before an infringement suit may be filed in court, registration is necessary for works of U. S. origin.
If made before or within 5 years of publication, registration will establish prima facie evidence in court of the validity of the copyright and of the facts stated in the certificate.
If registration is made within 3 months after publication of the work or prior to an infringement of the work, statutory damages and attorney's fees will be available to the copyright owner in court actions. Otherwise, only an award of actual damages and profits is available to the copyright owner.
Registration allows the owner of the copyright to record the registration with the U. S. Customs Service for protection against the importation of infringing copies. For additional information, go to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection website at www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/import. Click on "Intellectual Property Rights."
My favorite in light of our conversation would be "Before an infringement suit may be filed in court, registration is necessary for works of U. S. origin." I would really like to hear you explain that one away as just being wrong. I would also like to hear how publication has nothing to do with copyright when "If made before or within 5 years of publication, registration will establish prima facie evidence in court of the validity of the copyright and of the facts stated in the certificate."
Why? What section of the DMCA is even relevant? A movie is a movie. 17-USC-201 is pretty straight forward about ownership -- how would it be any different if it was fixed on a hard disk or on film? I mean even the characters are copyright the first time you ink or model their likeness...? With copyright by default every subversion carries your life plus 70 (or more).
Ok, let's say that I make an animation, and I want to distribute it on the Internet, primarily as a marketing tool for my production company, and to generate interest in a project. However, I feel for whatever whimsical or technical reason, that if it is played at below a certain bitrate, and below a certain resolution, in any CODEC other than the one I chose, that it does more harm than good to my goal. Let's say that I also want to make sure that everyone knows who did it, so I want to place a watermark in the corner. Let's go one, obvious, but none the less important step, and say that I absolutely do not want anyone editing it in any way I did not intend, or repurposing the content. Now, I am sure to you the consumer, this all sounds quite unreasonable and like I am making demands that I have no right to, because you should be able to use the file any way you want. You, on the other hand, did not just give up two years of your life, and a fair chunk of what little money you have, to making this project.
Now, before the DMCA, if you had downloaded that file off the Internet, decided to edit it like you wanted to, cropped it so my watermark was gone, cut the resolution in half, then encoded it in Flash with a fraction of the bitrate, and uploaded it to YouTube, I would have had no real recourse, because you were not doing anything wrong. Well, nothing wrong except shitting all over a couple years of my life, and perhaps damaging any chance I had of getting my project off the ground and making a decent living. However, legally, you had not actually done anything I could take legal action over. As such, there is no doubt in my mind that the only way I would have been able to release the piece (and maintain any control over its content) was through art house distribution, which would not have had the desired effect, and thus there is a piece of work that just never would have been made.
After the DMCA, there are several issues with that scenario (even the dreaded Section 1201) and it would be a fairly straightforward issue to force (if need be) YouTube to take down the file. Furthermore, there would be a reasonable argument that could be made in court to be able to subpoena YouTube to provide the identity of the person redistributing the piece in an altered form, in order to send them a cease and desist order. Now I am not deaf, and can hear the gasp of horror at the very idea of someone using RIAA-style tactics, but ask yourself: If you had put every waking hour for two years, and almost $60,000 in a two year span where you had no income, into a project, would you really just want to let anyone with an Internet connection do whatever they wanted to it, and redistribute it all over the Internet in a possibly butchered form?
You see, the common conception is that the only purpose DRM serves, is a way to screw you out of money. However, that overlooks that it also gives the creator a way to have some level of control over the viewing experience, and some legal recourse if someone attempts to hijack the content they worked so hard on. It isn't just about money, it is also about pride, and artistic expression.
You ask what the difference between a movie on your harddrive, and a movie on film is. The simple answer is that you never get the film print, you just watch it. Even with a DVD, you have to go through several steps that run afoul of the DMCA to get in there and change the content and redistribute it. Those steps are enough to get your redistribution shut down, thus the artist doesn't have to worry about his work being ruined. Personally, every artist I know is happy as can be
Haha -- that said, this does seem kinda trollish [slashdot.org] what with the flagrant disregard for facts (i.e., "only by the virtue of the DMCA that putting something up on a web page is considered 'publication' at all!", in light of first publication being irrelevant for the last 30 years) and the syrupy condecension. Aren't you just trolling me to respond, "the DMCA was a flawed bill that shouldn't have been passed in the first place because it regulates behavior that has historically and of right ought not to be regulated by the State"? Well it did, and I have, so I'd consider the moderation fair.:-D
You know, a constitutionalist view is grand, and I admire it. I really mean that, it is not "syrupy condescension" in this particular instance. Philosophically, I agree 100% that the federal government has usurped all sorts of powers never intended for a federal government in this country. I think it is a shame where we are, and think that probably half the laws in this country could, and should be struck down because they are in direct violation of the constitution.
That, however, is a philosophical argument that has absolutely nothing to do with what a judge is going to decide in court. In court I have to worry about getting my paltry payment out of companies who have an annual legal budget many time greater than the sum of money I'll ever make in my entire life. In court, what matters is not the broad strokes of what the law was intended to convey, but rather the minutia of how that law was interpreted in the past, and what precedents that set. As such, no matter what the broad strokes of the previous law might have been, or what the broad strokes of the DMCA might be, the interpretation of the two is VERY different when you get into court.
What I do have a problem with is the DMCA sections that affect what I can do with my own property in my own home. And again, the DMCA permits (and criminalizes the circumvention of) "DRM" that is unconstitutional (i.e., all mechanisms that don't permit excerpting or expiration).
See, this is where it gets very sticky. In the case of something like a printer cartridge, where the DMCA is used to keep you from refilling the ink, that is clearly an instance of you being thwarted in a legitimate and fair use of property you purchased, and something that just frankly should not be allowed. I would argue that it is quite simply a misapplication of copyright law at all that copyright (DMCA or no) should enter into this. However, when you start getting into something like software, or even more so something like entertainment content, it becomes a legitimate question of whether or not you are paying for the media, the content of the media, or the right to view the content under specific terms. By way of example, if I go to a theater, I am paying to see the movie, not to buy the seat. I have every right to watch the movie, but I do not have every right to do whatever I want with the seat, projector, screen, or film. Now I am not saying that it is a foregone conclusion that you are just paying to use the media in the way it is intended, but I also don't think it is an absolute right to do whatever you want with the media either. I think it is a point that has yet to be settled.
That's fair and true. I am not a lawyer. I made no such claim of course. However, is it fair to paint me as the enemy (ad hominem) and my point of view irrelevant when my knowledge of the code is academic rather than practical?
I am not trying to say your point of view is irrelevant, but rather to point out that the "truth on the ground" is often quite different than how it might look in abstract theory. Neither you nor I are lawyers who deal with this on a daily basis, and I think you would agree that if it were as cut and dry as you make it out, there would be no point to having all those expensive lawyers, because everything could be settled in a couple of minutes. I have some limited experience with the system from the point of view of the creator of the material. This gives me an admittedly biased, but none the less firsthand look at the process in action. That actual involvement in the system, I think, is a large part of why I have a different perception of how things work than you might.
Nevermind that it's a fact?
I am not trying to be difficult, but it is also a fact that the Constitution says "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." However, if you try to argue that constitutional point with an LAPD officer while carrying a gun on the subway, you are going to end up dead, or in jail. There are many laws that say very lofty, and important things. That doesn't mean that once you get to court it turns out to be the law that is applicable to your case. If we could all just point to one passage of one law, and the judge would then say "oh, got my there, my bad" then we really wouldn't have much of a legal profession, would we. The law in general, and IP law in specific, is labyrinthine, confusing, maddeningly pedantic, and often seemingly contradictory. As I said before, saying that there is a passage in a law from '76, therefore that is how things must have worked is simplistic.
It is great to say that copyright always was presumptively in the ownership of the creator from the moment of creation, but how do you PROVE the moment of creation? Before '98 there was very little short of registration of the work with the copyright office, or proof of publication, that a court would accept as proof of creation.
This is false. Can I read the decision in your case? I'm sure first publication had
It just sounds like you are willfully uninformed about the DMCA and what the world was like both before and after it. That's where the friction and the 'troll' ratings are coming from.
Oh, and no, the 'troll' ratings are coming from the fact that any time anyone expresses an unpopular opinion on/. they are immediately marked as a 'troll.' It has nothing to do with anything but how popular your opinion is. You can make the foulest, most uninformed, insulting post in the world, and as long as it ultimately says that Apple is the greatest company on earth, OSS software will kill MS, and DRM is evil, you will be marked as an insightful, welcome part of the community. However, the most civil mention of anything that throws any of those conclusions in doubt, and you are instantly a mindless troll.
It isn't the extension of the length of the copyright that makes the difference. It is the availability of viable legal recourse for infringement. Before the DMCA had I planned on Internet distribution (Just assuming for the sake of argument that it would have been technically practical at that point) I would have been in a very tenuous position had someone infringed on the material, and I had not found out about the infringing property until after it was published.
I am not arguing the point that the length of copyright is too long. I agree that it is, but that is not something that is going to be changed by repealing the DMCA. I even have issue with the Section 1201 of the DMCA, and more specifically the way it has been used in a number of cases. However, what you are advocating is the very definition of throwing out the baby with the bath water. Are you saying we should not be a member of the WIPO? That is also part of the DMCA. Are you saying that Internet service providers should be held accountable for copyright infringement by their users? Those exemptions are a part of the DMCA as well. Should a copyright holder be able to sue Google for caching their page? That exemption is part of the DMCA too.
The DMCA is a large act, it contains a lot of provisions, and many of them are provisions that other countries required to continue recognizing U.S. copyrights. To boil it down to a pithy summation of one section, and some example of how that one section has been used in a questionable fashion by a few companies, is not only simplistic, but bordering on propaganda.
Do you post more on Slashdot because you know your novel turn of phrase will be protected for nearly 200 years? Would you post less if it wasn't? 'Copyright by default' is a nearly useless feature of the Berne Convention (we already had laws for trust and honesty -- er, that is to say -- contracts, plagarism and fraud).
No, but I certainly wouldn't have spent the last two years of my life (not to mention somewhere in the neighborhood of $60,000) producing and directing an animated film if I didn't have legal recourse to protect my material once I distributed it on the Internet.
The DMCA should have never been passed, there is no point to making copyright infringement illegaler. The Act is just a givaway to the copy-protectors. It doesn't help "artists" or "invetors" in any meaningful way (which seems to be your premise in other posts where you mock DMCA opponents). In fact, if the artists are programmers and the inventors are systems-integrators it actually hurts them.
Alright, I'll bite. I am currently in my second year of working on an animated film that I am doing everything on, including developing custom scripts, and programming custom tools in Maya Embedded Language. As such, I definitely fall in the category of an artist that is a programmer. Why don't you explain to me how the DMCA hurts me, since it is your contention that it does.
Spoken like someone who read about how the law works, rather than learning about it in court. You can say that "copyright by default" has been the law since '76 all you want, but when it comes time to try to get damages for infringement on an unpublished piece of work, you find out really quickly that is not the case. I have been through several fights on this issue, being an artists who has worked for some pretty unethical clients, along with some pretty decent clients. Before the DMCA, if you walked into court and tried to claim infringement of artwork that was only ever published on the web, and the infringing artwork had been published in a traditional format like a newspaper or television ad, you were sunk. You did not have a leg to stand on unless you had filed for a copyright.
You are completely ignoring every part of the DMCA except for Section 1201, which really just came from Article 11 of the WCT. By your argument, there was no reason at all for the WCT, because everything contained within it was part of the Berne Convention. Of course you seem to be taking the rather odd position that in fact even that, and as far as I can tell most of our copyright system, needs to be struck down, because you think it does not protect your interests, and therefore doesn't protect anyone's interest. I can appreciate the desire to see more work in the public domain, but as someone who's very livelihood comes entirely from the commercial value of my art (IP, Copyrights, or whatever you choose to call it), I am afraid I don't wholeheartedly agree that anything that makes things difficult for the consumer, is therefore a bad law.
I'm sorry I don't agree with you, but disagreeing doesn't mean that I have no idea what I am talking about. I suggest you actually read the entire DMCA, not just section 1201. I especially think you should look at Title II which limits the liability of Internet infrastructure providers, in ways that would make it very hard to operate the thriving blog economy we have now, were those provisions not in place.
Sure SJ Games got royally screwed, and I really felt bad for Steve in particular. However, what does that really have to do with how accurate the claims of the EFF are in this particular instance.
I personally think it is a real problem that the EFF has been somewhat derailed, and instead of working to protect citizens digital rights (NSA data mining, Echelon, privacy rights) is instead spending all their time evangelizing OSS and demonizing DRM, as though they were some digital consumer protection agency. I am much more worried about the ACTUAL Bill of Rights, than some silly consumer Bill of Rights.
Let me worry about what file formats or software I choose to support with my money, and get back to trying to make sure the government doesn't abuse technology to trample all over our actual rights! But then that is actually hard work, and it is never pleasant to go head to head with the government. Picking on companies that don't support your political ideology, now that there is plenty of support for, and it doesn't get your door kicked in by scary guys in black suits.
Well, first off are we talking about Nikon's RAW format, or the Kodak Cineon format? I assume you mean Nikon when you say Kodak in your response. However, it brings up an interesting point since Kodak had been requiring licensing on their Cineon format for many, many years before the DMCA was even written, much less passed into law. If you stop and think about it, if it is your contention that the DMCA somehow forced people to license something from Nikon that it was absolutely unnecessary to license, then why did so many companies pay Kodak for their format before the DMCA even existed?
Anyway, I fail to see how a chemical process being required to make the photo you took viewable is *nothing* like a mathematical process being required to make the photo you took viewable. Also, it is absolutely not the case for you to talk about it as though it is just a bitmap with some encryption. It is in fact a completely different type of file, with a completely different colorspace, and without special software would be totally unreadable on a computer. The encryption was not what kept the file from being readable, the encryption was what kept Adobe from reverse engineering the file format. Middleware had to be made to make the file viewable. The debate was just over the issue of whether Adobe should have to pay Nikon for the right to sell a commercial piece of middleware that would let you view the file. With or without the encryption, you could not have used the file without some middleware by someone, because it isn't an 8-bit per-channel RGB bitmap, and your computer would not know how to process the colorspace to display it.
Well, it is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and it was an omnibus bill that made sweeping reform to copyright across the board, so I don't see how it really could be separate from copyright law. Also, you are correct that you could not just download any copyrighted material from the Internet before the DMCA, but what pieces did and didn't get the full protection of copyright in court was changed dramatically by the DMCA.
People always focus on the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, while totally ignoring that it is also the ratification, in law of this countries agreement to the provisions of the WIPO, which required several changes in US copyright law at that point.
That would be great, if it were even remotely true. In fact there have been PLENTY of cameras where you were locked into buying film from one company, because they made the camera. Have you ever heard of a company called Polaroid? For that matter, you are looking at the tail end of the film market, and saying that since now a lot of formats are cross-licensed, it must have always been that way. That just isn't the case. In the early days of photography, each camera had pretty much its own format of film. As it became a bigger market there was standardization, and eventually you had film that could be used in any camera of the same format, regardless of the camera manufacturer. However, that didn't happen overnight, and that wasn't the way it was for the bulk of the history of photography.
It is great that you choose to completely ignore the business models that have been in place for decades, and say "but I want it to work this way right now," but that just isn't the way the world works. By the way, when I said that Nikon wanted their cut of the development cost, I didn't mean "development" in terms of what it cost to develop the file format, I meant "development" in terms of "I have to get this film developed, and make prints." For decades, film manufacturers, camera makers, and photo shops (the real places, not the software from Adobe) have been operating on an intricate web of licensing deals, subsidies, and cross-promotional deals. All Nikon was doing, was exactly what they have been doing for decades. They basically said "Ok, we cut the film manufacturer out of the picture, and Adobe cut the traditional photo shop out of the deal, so now all we have to do is cut a deal with Adobe, and we have the whole thing wrapped up, and we will make even more money, instead of losing money like we thought we would at first."
Now you can call that evil if you want, and jump up and down and get upset because you think that all file formats should be free, and no one should ever make any money off developing a better way to store information, but I think that makes you a rather unrealistic utopianist. Realistically the only reason this is even an issue, is because the competing format to Nikon's (Kodak Cineon) is so old, and has already made so much money for Kodak, that they now license it out for free. By the way, care to explain to me why, if a file format using 10-bit per-channel logarithmic colorspace is such a trivial thing to develop, so many companies paid so much money to license the Kodak Cineon format even before the DMCA existed?
It is clear to me that you are just one of these people who thinks that anything you can load on your harddrive you should now have absolute rights to do whatever you want with, up to and including reverse engineering it for whatever purpose you choose. However, what you absolutely fail to see is how much better things are than BEFORE all these awful proprietary formats! I guarantee you that having to deal with Microsoft's evil.DOC format is a million times better than having to do layout with straight line border tape, scratch-on Letraset text, negotiate fonts with the printer, and not even know what your final page was going to look like until you had already paid half the printing cost up front!
All of these are huge changes that pretty much made the viability of commercial web pages a reality, and made the situation much better for the proverbial starving artist. Of course, most people talking about the evils of the DMCA aren't professional artists, and so haven't had to deal with the pre-DMCA world where a client could end up owning your work, just because they were the one who paid for the ad where it was first published. In fact, most people railing against the DMCA don't know the first thing about copyright law, because they have never had to deal with it in the slightest. They just know that it is that evil thing that makes your printer cartridges more expensive, and that keeps you from being able to copy your friends software and movies for free.
The reason I find the bloggers more humorous than everyone else, is because they just take it as a given that everything scribble on their page is their's to do whatever they want with, and don't realize that the only reason they don't have to constantly worry about copyright law, is because the DMCA they hate so much made it so much easier to deal with copyright.
I think it is a riot how unanimously bloggers hate the DMCA, even though it is only by the virtue of the DMCA that putting something up on a web page is considered "publication" at all! I'm sure their are plenty of those nasty old media corporations who would be more than happy to live in a world without the DMCA, so that they could just blatantly rip-off anything they found on the web with no concern whatsoever for copyright law. But of course, we don't want to throw out the parts of the DMCA that benefit us do we? Hell, we don't even want to mention those! We just want to throw out the parts that are inconvenient, and pretend that is the whole of the law. Because law is such a simple thing (especially copyright law) that there is no way throwing out the part we hate would ever weaken the part that gets us our paycheck.
This is just the silliest overstatement I have ever seen! Actually, what the Nikon RAW encryption is almost *exactly* like, is if Kodak had patented the formula for the developing solution for their film, and only Kodak, or people who licensed the formula from Kodak, could make the chemicals to develop the film you shot. You know, kind of like the exact situation that has been the case since the introduction of Kodachrome film!
I get so tired of how people think that something being digital, suddenly means that any abridgments of their 'freedom' (even freedoms they never had before) is a violation of their "rights." Nikon made the camera, and they have every right to have it record in whatever format they want. If you, as the consumer, don't like it, instead of whining about how it is a horrible misuse of the DMCA for them to decide who can and can't license their proprietary format, just buy a damned Canon!
If you are so worried about them revoking the license and rendering your photos useless, then make a copy in Kodak Cineon, or a 16-bit per-channel SGI file, or OpenEXR, or any number of other formats that can support a High Dynamic Range Image without loss. No one is stopping you from doing that, any more than anyone is stopping you from copying your negatives, or making prints of your film. Nikon justs wants a cut of the 'development' costs, just like Kodak, AGFA and Fuji have been getting for years! I bet if you are a professional photographer, you don't have much of a problem with the streamlined copyright procedures that came with the DMCA though, do you? I am guessing that while you want them to repeal any part of the DMCA that causes you the even the smallest inconvenience, you are in no hurry to have to go back to making a print of your picture, filling out a form, and registering it with the copyright office in order to get the benefit of copyright law, are you?
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Thank you for making an actual argument.
I have several problems with you point of view, which I will detail below, but the crux of it is that I suppose you are right in a very idealistic way, however you could not be more wrong, in my opinion, in a practical sense. As far as I an concerned, copyright is a legal tool used for resolving disputes about the ownership of work. As such, any discussion of copyright existing outside of a dispute, is meaningless. If there is no dispute, then it wouldn't matter if there were a single copyright law on the books or not, because it would never have to go to court. Laws are the way we settle disputes, about how we deal with things when something goes wrong, not about how we deal with things in the best case scenario.
Now on to the specifics.
Ok, two things here. First, you seem to be muddying terms here. Original, copy, these are terms that deal with the media, not the art. I am talking about giving a digital performance of a digital piece. To turn around and call the first digital performance the original, and the second digital performance the copy is an odd distinction indeed. I understand why, from a consumer perspective you would see it this way, because you believe that what copyright deals exclusively with, is the distribution of the commercial product of art (that being the copies of the original, as you are defining it). However, that brings me to my second point. You say that copyright doesn't govern use, it governs distribution. Once again, I understand why from the perspective of a consumer you see it this way, however from the point of view of a commercial artist, this is arguable. While copyright may not govern how you the consumer uses a piece (though I think even this point is tenuous) it most definitely governs artistic uses of a piece. I will go into examples below, but suffice to say, one artist cannot include your entire copyrighted work as an integral part of their copyrighted work, without your permission, just because they went and bought a DVD of your work. I think some of this confusion comes from the fact that a lot of copyright owners "let it slide" when the infringing artwork is of a non-commercial nature, thus leaving the impression that fair use might have much more far reaching implications that it legally does.
Ok, once again, we are arguing two different things here. You are making the absolute argument that the media IS the art, and the art IS the media. Now I would first argue that with or without the DMCA, this was not the case. Just try to take a book you bought down to a copyshop, and have them make a photocopy of every page of it if you don't believe me. Well before the DMCA, it was established that you do not have the right to make an unauthorized copy of any media you care to. Now you might well hav
Is that how you reinforce your own belief in your infallibility? You just keep repeting the same "you're wrong, I'm right" ad nauseam, and then end with "we all know I'm right, just don't bother replying, because you just make yourself look like a fool." Thus allowing you to say in your own mind "see, he knew I was right all along" when your opponent gets tired of you ignoring the argument and just constantly stating you are right like some child? I could go through the entire argument again, but since you have yet to actually do anything but tell me I don't know what I am talking about, and insult me for not acquiescing to your self-imagined expertise on the subject, I don't really see the point.
Rest assured, however, you have not convinced me of anything other than your absolute inability to debate a topic, beyond saying that your opponent needs to trust that you know best. No matter how well versed you might think you are "no, no, no, no, no you are wrong you lying liar, and I'm not listening to you" is hardly a persuasive argument, or one that speaks particularly well for why we should all just trust you have all sides of the issue covered.
You must be very used to people just saying "wow, you are so smart" and letting you have your way in arguments, because you have a very bad, and unseemly reaction to anyone who just doesn't agree with you, no matter how many times you tell them they have no idea what they are talking about. Are you a teacher or something? You started to think I was reasonable? Why, because I agreed with you on a few things, so I must be reasonable? Of course now that I am not agreeing with you again, I have obviously lost all sense of reason, because any reasonable person would know how utterly incapable of error you are.
No, none, ever! That doesn't mean I get my wish, but if you don't understand why an artist would want his work to stand unaltered forever, then you don't know much about artists. What is the point of devoting your life to expressing your views in your art, if anyone who cares to can change your art to reflect their views? That doesn't mean that I am against fair use as a law, that doesn't mean that I think copyright should never expire either. It just means that if I had my way, my art would remain unaltered forever, and would always be presented in a way I would approve of. I think every artists feels that way about their art, no matter how unrealistic it is. It is like a parent who doesn't want to see his daughter date some loser. You know there really isn't much you can do about it, but that doesn't stop you from wanting it.
You know, an attitude like yours will do more to stifle artistic expression than a 100 laws. You seem to think the artist is some factory worker who's job it is to turn out funny little widgets for you to amuse yourself with. The artist gets to choose every aspect of the presentation of his work, and the terms on which you get to view it. If the artist only wants his work viewed in one park in the middle of nowhere, then you have to drag your ass down to the park, or you don't get to see it. If the artist only wants to show his work underwater surrounded by fish, then you better take some SCUBA lessons if you want to see it. By the same token, if the artist wants to encrypt his video with DRM and only allow you to view it on the computer where you downloaded it, then you best live with that, or not watch it. Just because the venue is your computer screen, doesn't suddenly mean that you have absolute rights to dictate to the artist how their work will be handled from that point on. Sure, their are plenty of people in the creative industry that are willing to let you have any terms you wish as long as you give them the right amount of money, but the next time you are moaning about the dearth of decent Hollywood movies, or all the crap on network TV, you might stop and think about how many decent artists' work you will never see, because they aren't willing to agree to your "I can do anything I want with it" terms.
Sorry, I had a bad tag in there and forgot to preview.
I frankly have no idea what you are even talking about at this point. You are obviously arguing some obscure semantical difference that is very important to you, even though I fail to see the importance of it in the slightest. You argue that publication has nothing to do with copyright protection, I send you a link to a .gov site where it very concisely lays out how the date of publication directly effects any copyright case, and you come back with "Date of publication really does have nothing to do with copyright protection." All I can figure is that those italics mean something very important to you. Either that, or you are now maintaining that you know more that the copyright office about copyright, and their page is just plain wrong.
Ok, yes I suppose your are correct and any artist has a completely useless, completely indefensible claim to copyright from the moment they create the work, and has since the moment the first congress was convened. That is fantastic, assuming that the work is never sold, never published, never displayed, and never infringed on. What is the point though? The moment the work is infringed on, if you wish to take legal recourse, it becomes ALL about who filed what, when the artwork in question was published, and what qualifies as publication. Yes it is just "a legal formality intended to make a public record of the basic facts of a particular copyright." Of course a deed is just a a legal formality intended to make a public record of the basic facts of a particular chain of ownership, a marriage certificate is just a legal formality intended to make a public record of the basic facts of a particular civil union, and a death certificate is just a legal formality intended to make a public record of the basic facts of a particular death. None of those things TECHNICALLY keep me from giving away property, or living with a woman and calling her my wife, or dying, yet all of these things have profound legal ramifications, and can be the legal formality that determine who wins and who loses a case.
I honestly don't know if your point of view is so academic that you really can't see the difference between the theory of copyright and the legal formalities, or if you are being purposely obtuse because you just want to try to win an argument. Either way, your argument is in my opinion hopelessly naive. You seem to be arguing some personal vision of how you feel the copyright system SHOULD work, based on your personal interpretation of the statutes. Unfortunately, unless you are a judge, your personal interpretation has even less bearing than my feelings, as you put it. What does have a bearing, is how cases are decided in court. In court, all those 'unnecessary' legal formalities are exactly what decide the case.
However, to answer your question about why a business would not file a trademark, the answer is quite simple; because they were never told they had to. Sure, businesses large enough to have a legal department are told they need to, and sure creative businesses are more sensitive to the issue, but your average locally owned hardware store just thinks of artwork like anything else for their business. It is something they go out and buy when they need to. They don't file a form with the government when they buy business cards. They don't file a form with the government when they buy a newspaper ad. By the same token, they don't file a form with the government when they pay some guy to design what is going to be on that card or ad either.
And yet you post and read /.? So much for making good use of all that extra time!
/. and posting your personal opinions is what does it for you, great! But don't look down your nose at other people just because they enjoy something you don't.
Really though, at different point in my life I have gone without TV, and I just don't get the whole "TV sucks" thing. Just like anything else, there are good shows, and there are bad shows. There is stupid stuff, and there is really enlightening stuff. Besides, some people need to just unwind sometimes.
I mean, I have been 10 years now without a car, and I could certainly make comments like "What I find constantly amazing is seeing otherwise intelligent people I know throwing away tens of thousands of dollars just so they can be fat and lazy and not have to walk to the store." By the same token I haven't gotten drunk in years and I could say "What I find constantly amazing is seeing otherwise intelligent people I know pay money to kill off brain cells." However, I realize that it is a gross oversimplification to even think that way.
People do what pleases them. If reading on
Ah, but see this relate directly to what I am saying in the above statement. The simple truth of the matter (and there might be room for legitimate debate as to whether this is an issue of the interpretation or the letter of the DMCA) is that under the DMCA a blogger CAN admit as evidence information subpoenaed from the ISP or hosting company to prove date of 'publication' of the work. Under pre-DMCA law, this was not something you would ever get a judge to allow as evidence.
That's great, care to explain the below snippet from http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#cr regarding the reasons you should register your copyright EVEN TODAY?
My favorite in light of our conversation would be "Before an infringement suit may be filed in court, registration is necessary for works of U. S. origin." I would really like to hear you explain that one away as just being wrong. I would also like to hear how publication has nothing to do with copyright when "If made before or within 5 years of publication, registration will establish prima facie evidence in court of the validity of the copyright and of the facts stated in the certificate."
Ok, let's say that I make an animation, and I want to distribute it on the Internet, primarily as a marketing tool for my production company, and to generate interest in a project. However, I feel for whatever whimsical or technical reason, that if it is played at below a certain bitrate, and below a certain resolution, in any CODEC other than the one I chose, that it does more harm than good to my goal. Let's say that I also want to make sure that everyone knows who did it, so I want to place a watermark in the corner. Let's go one, obvious, but none the less important step, and say that I absolutely do not want anyone editing it in any way I did not intend, or repurposing the content. Now, I am sure to you the consumer, this all sounds quite unreasonable and like I am making demands that I have no right to, because you should be able to use the file any way you want. You, on the other hand, did not just give up two years of your life, and a fair chunk of what little money you have, to making this project.
Now, before the DMCA, if you had downloaded that file off the Internet, decided to edit it like you wanted to, cropped it so my watermark was gone, cut the resolution in half, then encoded it in Flash with a fraction of the bitrate, and uploaded it to YouTube, I would have had no real recourse, because you were not doing anything wrong. Well, nothing wrong except shitting all over a couple years of my life, and perhaps damaging any chance I had of getting my project off the ground and making a decent living. However, legally, you had not actually done anything I could take legal action over. As such, there is no doubt in my mind that the only way I would have been able to release the piece (and maintain any control over its content) was through art house distribution, which would not have had the desired effect, and thus there is a piece of work that just never would have been made.
After the DMCA, there are several issues with that scenario (even the dreaded Section 1201) and it would be a fairly straightforward issue to force (if need be) YouTube to take down the file. Furthermore, there would be a reasonable argument that could be made in court to be able to subpoena YouTube to provide the identity of the person redistributing the piece in an altered form, in order to send them a cease and desist order. Now I am not deaf, and can hear the gasp of horror at the very idea of someone using RIAA-style tactics, but ask yourself: If you had put every waking hour for two years, and almost $60,000 in a two year span where you had no income, into a project, would you really just want to let anyone with an Internet connection do whatever they wanted to it, and redistribute it all over the Internet in a possibly butchered form?
You see, the common conception is that the only purpose DRM serves, is a way to screw you out of money. However, that overlooks that it also gives the creator a way to have some level of control over the viewing experience, and some legal recourse if someone attempts to hijack the content they worked so hard on. It isn't just about money, it is also about pride, and artistic expression.
You ask what the difference between a movie on your harddrive, and a movie on film is. The simple answer is that you never get the film print, you just watch it. Even with a DVD, you have to go through several steps that run afoul of the DMCA to get in there and change the content and redistribute it. Those steps are enough to get your redistribution shut down, thus the artist doesn't have to worry about his work being ruined. Personally, every artist I know is happy as can be
See, this is where it gets very sticky. In the case of something like a printer cartridge, where the DMCA is used to keep you from refilling the ink, that is clearly an instance of you being thwarted in a legitimate and fair use of property you purchased, and something that just frankly should not be allowed. I would argue that it is quite simply a misapplication of copyright law at all that copyright (DMCA or no) should enter into this. However, when you start getting into something like software, or even more so something like entertainment content, it becomes a legitimate question of whether or not you are paying for the media, the content of the media, or the right to view the content under specific terms. By way of example, if I go to a theater, I am paying to see the movie, not to buy the seat. I have every right to watch the movie, but I do not have every right to do whatever I want with the seat, projector, screen, or film. Now I am not saying that it is a foregone conclusion that you are just paying to use the media in the way it is intended, but I also don't think it is an absolute right to do whatever you want with the media either. I think it is a point that has yet to be settled.
I am not trying to say your point of view is irrelevant, but rather to point out that the "truth on the ground" is often quite different than how it might look in abstract theory. Neither you nor I are lawyers who deal with this on a daily basis, and I think you would agree that if it were as cut and dry as you make it out, there would be no point to having all those expensive lawyers, because everything could be settled in a couple of minutes. I have some limited experience with the system from the point of view of the creator of the material. This gives me an admittedly biased, but none the less firsthand look at the process in action. That actual involvement in the system, I think, is a large part of why I have a different perception of how things work than you might.
I am not trying to be difficult, but it is also a fact that the Constitution says "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." However, if you try to argue that constitutional point with an LAPD officer while carrying a gun on the subway, you are going to end up dead, or in jail. There are many laws that say very lofty, and important things. That doesn't mean that once you get to court it turns out to be the law that is applicable to your case. If we could all just point to one passage of one law, and the judge would then say "oh, got my there, my bad" then we really wouldn't have much of a legal profession, would we. The law in general, and IP law in specific, is labyrinthine, confusing, maddeningly pedantic, and often seemingly contradictory. As I said before, saying that there is a passage in a law from '76, therefore that is how things must have worked is simplistic. It is great to say that copyright always was presumptively in the ownership of the creator from the moment of creation, but how do you PROVE the moment of creation? Before '98 there was very little short of registration of the work with the copyright office, or proof of publication, that a court would accept as proof of creation.
It isn't the extension of the length of the copyright that makes the difference. It is the availability of viable legal recourse for infringement. Before the DMCA had I planned on Internet distribution (Just assuming for the sake of argument that it would have been technically practical at that point) I would have been in a very tenuous position had someone infringed on the material, and I had not found out about the infringing property until after it was published.
I am not arguing the point that the length of copyright is too long. I agree that it is, but that is not something that is going to be changed by repealing the DMCA. I even have issue with the Section 1201 of the DMCA, and more specifically the way it has been used in a number of cases. However, what you are advocating is the very definition of throwing out the baby with the bath water. Are you saying we should not be a member of the WIPO? That is also part of the DMCA. Are you saying that Internet service providers should be held accountable for copyright infringement by their users? Those exemptions are a part of the DMCA as well. Should a copyright holder be able to sue Google for caching their page? That exemption is part of the DMCA too.
The DMCA is a large act, it contains a lot of provisions, and many of them are provisions that other countries required to continue recognizing U.S. copyrights. To boil it down to a pithy summation of one section, and some example of how that one section has been used in a questionable fashion by a few companies, is not only simplistic, but bordering on propaganda.
Spoken like someone who read about how the law works, rather than learning about it in court. You can say that "copyright by default" has been the law since '76 all you want, but when it comes time to try to get damages for infringement on an unpublished piece of work, you find out really quickly that is not the case. I have been through several fights on this issue, being an artists who has worked for some pretty unethical clients, along with some pretty decent clients. Before the DMCA, if you walked into court and tried to claim infringement of artwork that was only ever published on the web, and the infringing artwork had been published in a traditional format like a newspaper or television ad, you were sunk. You did not have a leg to stand on unless you had filed for a copyright.
You are completely ignoring every part of the DMCA except for Section 1201, which really just came from Article 11 of the WCT. By your argument, there was no reason at all for the WCT, because everything contained within it was part of the Berne Convention. Of course you seem to be taking the rather odd position that in fact even that, and as far as I can tell most of our copyright system, needs to be struck down, because you think it does not protect your interests, and therefore doesn't protect anyone's interest. I can appreciate the desire to see more work in the public domain, but as someone who's very livelihood comes entirely from the commercial value of my art (IP, Copyrights, or whatever you choose to call it), I am afraid I don't wholeheartedly agree that anything that makes things difficult for the consumer, is therefore a bad law.
I'm sorry I don't agree with you, but disagreeing doesn't mean that I have no idea what I am talking about. I suggest you actually read the entire DMCA, not just section 1201. I especially think you should look at Title II which limits the liability of Internet infrastructure providers, in ways that would make it very hard to operate the thriving blog economy we have now, were those provisions not in place.
Wow, that is really clever. However, why don't you just use a more reasoned approach like "Nah, nah, nah I can't hear you."
Wow, that was a fun WorldCon!
Sure SJ Games got royally screwed, and I really felt bad for Steve in particular. However, what does that really have to do with how accurate the claims of the EFF are in this particular instance.
I personally think it is a real problem that the EFF has been somewhat derailed, and instead of working to protect citizens digital rights (NSA data mining, Echelon, privacy rights) is instead spending all their time evangelizing OSS and demonizing DRM, as though they were some digital consumer protection agency. I am much more worried about the ACTUAL Bill of Rights, than some silly consumer Bill of Rights.
Let me worry about what file formats or software I choose to support with my money, and get back to trying to make sure the government doesn't abuse technology to trample all over our actual rights! But then that is actually hard work, and it is never pleasant to go head to head with the government. Picking on companies that don't support your political ideology, now that there is plenty of support for, and it doesn't get your door kicked in by scary guys in black suits.
Well, first off are we talking about Nikon's RAW format, or the Kodak Cineon format? I assume you mean Nikon when you say Kodak in your response. However, it brings up an interesting point since Kodak had been requiring licensing on their Cineon format for many, many years before the DMCA was even written, much less passed into law. If you stop and think about it, if it is your contention that the DMCA somehow forced people to license something from Nikon that it was absolutely unnecessary to license, then why did so many companies pay Kodak for their format before the DMCA even existed?
Anyway, I fail to see how a chemical process being required to make the photo you took viewable is *nothing* like a mathematical process being required to make the photo you took viewable. Also, it is absolutely not the case for you to talk about it as though it is just a bitmap with some encryption. It is in fact a completely different type of file, with a completely different colorspace, and without special software would be totally unreadable on a computer. The encryption was not what kept the file from being readable, the encryption was what kept Adobe from reverse engineering the file format. Middleware had to be made to make the file viewable. The debate was just over the issue of whether Adobe should have to pay Nikon for the right to sell a commercial piece of middleware that would let you view the file. With or without the encryption, you could not have used the file without some middleware by someone, because it isn't an 8-bit per-channel RGB bitmap, and your computer would not know how to process the colorspace to display it.
Well, it is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and it was an omnibus bill that made sweeping reform to copyright across the board, so I don't see how it really could be separate from copyright law. Also, you are correct that you could not just download any copyrighted material from the Internet before the DMCA, but what pieces did and didn't get the full protection of copyright in court was changed dramatically by the DMCA.
People always focus on the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, while totally ignoring that it is also the ratification, in law of this countries agreement to the provisions of the WIPO, which required several changes in US copyright law at that point.
That would be great, if it were even remotely true. In fact there have been PLENTY of cameras where you were locked into buying film from one company, because they made the camera. Have you ever heard of a company called Polaroid? For that matter, you are looking at the tail end of the film market, and saying that since now a lot of formats are cross-licensed, it must have always been that way. That just isn't the case. In the early days of photography, each camera had pretty much its own format of film. As it became a bigger market there was standardization, and eventually you had film that could be used in any camera of the same format, regardless of the camera manufacturer. However, that didn't happen overnight, and that wasn't the way it was for the bulk of the history of photography.
.DOC format is a million times better than having to do layout with straight line border tape, scratch-on Letraset text, negotiate fonts with the printer, and not even know what your final page was going to look like until you had already paid half the printing cost up front!
It is great that you choose to completely ignore the business models that have been in place for decades, and say "but I want it to work this way right now," but that just isn't the way the world works. By the way, when I said that Nikon wanted their cut of the development cost, I didn't mean "development" in terms of what it cost to develop the file format, I meant "development" in terms of "I have to get this film developed, and make prints." For decades, film manufacturers, camera makers, and photo shops (the real places, not the software from Adobe) have been operating on an intricate web of licensing deals, subsidies, and cross-promotional deals. All Nikon was doing, was exactly what they have been doing for decades. They basically said "Ok, we cut the film manufacturer out of the picture, and Adobe cut the traditional photo shop out of the deal, so now all we have to do is cut a deal with Adobe, and we have the whole thing wrapped up, and we will make even more money, instead of losing money like we thought we would at first."
Now you can call that evil if you want, and jump up and down and get upset because you think that all file formats should be free, and no one should ever make any money off developing a better way to store information, but I think that makes you a rather unrealistic utopianist. Realistically the only reason this is even an issue, is because the competing format to Nikon's (Kodak Cineon) is so old, and has already made so much money for Kodak, that they now license it out for free. By the way, care to explain to me why, if a file format using 10-bit per-channel logarithmic colorspace is such a trivial thing to develop, so many companies paid so much money to license the Kodak Cineon format even before the DMCA existed?
It is clear to me that you are just one of these people who thinks that anything you can load on your harddrive you should now have absolute rights to do whatever you want with, up to and including reverse engineering it for whatever purpose you choose. However, what you absolutely fail to see is how much better things are than BEFORE all these awful proprietary formats! I guarantee you that having to deal with Microsoft's evil
Before the DMCA (and in fact even after the DMCA, it is just that the DMCA broadened the terms) to have the full protection of copyright law, you either had to file for a copyright with the copyright office, or the work had to be published with the markings you mention (which pre-DMCA did not specifically include the Internet, or any electronic form, but rather published in the sense of having to go through a printing press, and be distributed), in order to be considered a copyrighted piece of work. If you just had some piece of artwork, or a photo, or a script, and were just showing it around your local coffee shop, or had it up on your personal webpage, then you had no guaranteed legal recourse under copyright law, since you could not prove publication, no matter how many little ©s you had on the piece. If you played a little ditty you came up with while sitting at the park, anyone who heard it could steal it, unless you had published sheet music for it. That changed with the DMCA. Copyright was changed to take effect at the moment of creation, not at the moment of publication, and the web and digital files were now considered to be a form of publication as well.
All of these are huge changes that pretty much made the viability of commercial web pages a reality, and made the situation much better for the proverbial starving artist. Of course, most people talking about the evils of the DMCA aren't professional artists, and so haven't had to deal with the pre-DMCA world where a client could end up owning your work, just because they were the one who paid for the ad where it was first published. In fact, most people railing against the DMCA don't know the first thing about copyright law, because they have never had to deal with it in the slightest. They just know that it is that evil thing that makes your printer cartridges more expensive, and that keeps you from being able to copy your friends software and movies for free.
The reason I find the bloggers more humorous than everyone else, is because they just take it as a given that everything scribble on their page is their's to do whatever they want with, and don't realize that the only reason they don't have to constantly worry about copyright law, is because the DMCA they hate so much made it so much easier to deal with copyright.
I think it is a riot how unanimously bloggers hate the DMCA, even though it is only by the virtue of the DMCA that putting something up on a web page is considered "publication" at all! I'm sure their are plenty of those nasty old media corporations who would be more than happy to live in a world without the DMCA, so that they could just blatantly rip-off anything they found on the web with no concern whatsoever for copyright law. But of course, we don't want to throw out the parts of the DMCA that benefit us do we? Hell, we don't even want to mention those! We just want to throw out the parts that are inconvenient, and pretend that is the whole of the law. Because law is such a simple thing (especially copyright law) that there is no way throwing out the part we hate would ever weaken the part that gets us our paycheck.
This is just the silliest overstatement I have ever seen! Actually, what the Nikon RAW encryption is almost *exactly* like, is if Kodak had patented the formula for the developing solution for their film, and only Kodak, or people who licensed the formula from Kodak, could make the chemicals to develop the film you shot. You know, kind of like the exact situation that has been the case since the introduction of Kodachrome film!
I get so tired of how people think that something being digital, suddenly means that any abridgments of their 'freedom' (even freedoms they never had before) is a violation of their "rights." Nikon made the camera, and they have every right to have it record in whatever format they want. If you, as the consumer, don't like it, instead of whining about how it is a horrible misuse of the DMCA for them to decide who can and can't license their proprietary format, just buy a damned Canon!
If you are so worried about them revoking the license and rendering your photos useless, then make a copy in Kodak Cineon, or a 16-bit per-channel SGI file, or OpenEXR, or any number of other formats that can support a High Dynamic Range Image without loss. No one is stopping you from doing that, any more than anyone is stopping you from copying your negatives, or making prints of your film. Nikon justs wants a cut of the 'development' costs, just like Kodak, AGFA and Fuji have been getting for years! I bet if you are a professional photographer, you don't have much of a problem with the streamlined copyright procedures that came with the DMCA though, do you? I am guessing that while you want them to repeal any part of the DMCA that causes you the even the smallest inconvenience, you are in no hurry to have to go back to making a print of your picture, filling out a form, and registering it with the copyright office in order to get the benefit of copyright law, are you?