Death by DMCA (Spectrum) [LWN.net]

IEEE Spectrum has an article on the costs of the DMCA and related legislation. There will be few surprises here for most LWN readers, but it is a good, comprehensive summary. "Now, in an even more vexing situation, U.S. entertainment companies are successfully spreading the copyright code changes established by the DMCA around the world. Laws similar to the DMCA now exist in Japan, Australia, and much of Europe. At least nine additional countries, including Chile, Guatemala, and Singapore have also been pressured to enact DMCA-like laws as part of a devil's bargain with U.S. trade negotiators, who say the copyright change is necessary to secure free trade pacts with the United States that would govern all sorts of commerce. And in Europe, the body charged with defining the European digital television standards is mixing in content-protection obligations, responding yet again to pressure from major U.S. movie studios."

Death by DMCA (Spectrum)

Posted Jun 16, 2006 22:14 UTC (Fri) by rabnud (guest, #2839) [Link]

The real problem is, and will remain, consumer attitudes. For as long as consumers have had unrestricted abilities to translate the media from one storage type to another (the past), it is evident that the consumer has been allowed to move all copies of songs, movies, etc for which they posessed rights of archiving and rights of reproduction, from medium to any subsequently developed medium, and back again. I still own LPs, but have purchased CDs of many of the same LPs. In certain instances, I own rights to 2 copies of the contents. I wish to store one copy in MP3 format, placed in rotating magnetic memory. I can transfer the digital contents via ethernet, from my storage PC to the PC which has a burner.

RIAA: you don't like it? Tough - you stood still on the matter for DECADES. The rights are GRANDFATHERED. Get out of my hardware, you jerks, because you are messing with my legitimate grandfathered rights of archive and reproduction. I also use the same systems for music that is distributed for free: Independent artists often allow unrestricted redistribution of certain performances. Your restricted hardware will impede my freedoms to transfer those performances. The hardware will also impede the redistribution rights which the aforementioned artists have granted.

The problem consumer is the consumer who does not transfer the file to himself... the consumer that redistributes to any other entity has to surrender the ownership of the source file. This would suggest a software and hardware solution, and the keys to the situation lie in not allowing consumers to edit certain distribution blocks within the file. Make the editor programs enforce the law, not the world.