DRM technology and policy

[Adam Back]

I agree with Carsten's comments.

I consider there is no moral obligation to pay the author or
distributor.  There is essentially zero copying cost once content is
produced.

The fact that we have the current copyright and patent systems is just
a societal convention codified into current laws.  This is largely
historical accident, and many of the original justifications for
creating these systems have been lost, or changed such that it is no
longer clear these systems are in the public good.

In fact most of the recent expansions of copyright have been basically
laws to profit large corporations which they have succeeded in
obtaining not because of any moral consensus, but because they have
spent lots of money lobbying.

When you face mass civil disobedience and violation of a victimless
crime (considering the scale of software and mp3 trading, movies,
taping of shows etc., etc) it is clear that the end user feels no
moral obligation.  This suggests to me that the world is now a
different place with different schelling points (or natural sensible
defaults) surrounding information exchange, and that current copyright
systems should be phased out.


So the fact that this may change the economics of being a movie
company or record company is not an argument to fixing this problem.

I'm presuming that as long as people are interested in consuming those
things with whatever the legal framework those things will be
produced.  Current content distribution and production companies will
either adapt or lose to other companies.  Maybe they'll lose some of
their ability to charge huge margins over physical reproduction costs,
but that is a net good.

The main remaining and bad effect of copyright law is a government
subsidy of media conglomorates -- the government implements and
enforces laws that benefit large content distribution companies at the
expense of individual freedoms.

Adam

On Wed, Apr 23, 2003 at 08:58:35PM +0200, Carsten Kuckuk wrote:
> >> (copyrights, patents, ip, DRM, culture)
> 
> As far as I can tell, it's not the musicians, writers or artists in
> general who demand DRM technology but it is the companies whose
> business model is solely based on reproduction and distribution of
> works. It's their business model that is threatened and they don't
> bother finding another.
> 
> One of the original intentions for patents and copyrights was
> to give their owners a monopoly that was limited in time to
> reap the fruits of their work. I can fully understand this.
> I have a wife and a child, mouths to feed, bills to pay. I
> need to make a living. But I don't understand why these
> monopolies get extended and extended and extended without
> the original authors/artists profiting from it. Why should copyright
> protection exceed the life of the author? Why should people who just
> happened to be born to prolific writers inherit a monopoly that will
> last several decades? (Why do authors of scientific articles not get a
> single cent for having their works published?)
> 
> Another of the original intentions (at least for patents) was "to
> promote progress in science and the useful arts". The idea is that you
> only get the protection of a patent if you disclose everything so that
> everybody can read about it, learn from it, and stand on your
> shoulders - after the patent's term is over. In other words: the
> public grants a limited monopoly in exchange for progress and free
> access after a certain period.
> 
> When it comes to DRM systems, I can only see protection for the
> busines models (and profits) of the distribution companies, but I can
> neither see an advantage for the original authors/artists neither for
> society in general:
> - Artists/Authors won't get a higher percentage of the revenues
> - The artists/authors will lose segments of the worlds population
> because of DRM policies. Michael Moore's soon-to-be-released DVD, for
> example, is listed on Amazon as "Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. This
> DVD will probably NOT be viewable in other countries". By his
> distribution company's choice of this region code, most of this worlds
> population has been cut off. Selling his film as an "unprotected" VHS
> cassette would mean that he could reach almost everybody on this
> planet. But by using the DVD DRM system, his distribution company in
> effect limited the potential reach of Mr Moore's film. What is the
> advantage for Mr Moore here?
> - In a few decades, when other media with different formats will have
> replaced today's formats, all contents stored in today's DRM protected
> formats will be lost. In 2103 we will still be able to read the Luther
> bible, listen to Edison's recordings, watch Fred Astaire films, listen
> to Elvis songs, but this decade's films and music will be lost because
> it will be unaccessible. This decade's culture will be lost. Forever.
> Society will have a collective black-out.
> 
> At home I have a shelf with digital files (programs, texts, databases)
> I have created in the past. I can still (physically) read the CDs, the
> 3 1/2" disks, and the 5 1/4" disks, but only the ones written on PCs.
> I can't physically read the 5 1/4" disks written on Commodore or Apple
> PCs (at their time the dominating computers) nor the tapes written by
> them. I can still read the punched cards I made at my first paid job.
> And I'm only talking about a period of time covering the past 25
> years. And when I look at the files I can physically read, I can only
> really use a very small amount of them: Source code for computer
> programs, and data files that are stored in plain ASCII. All the other
> files -- compiled computer programs, data stored in proprietary
> formats, like for example Visicalc, dbase -- are lost, because I can't
> make sense of them anymore. So when I look at my personal digital
> works, I have to conclude, that the only ones that survived are the
> ones that were stored in a very plain format without any encoding at
> all.
> 
> When I transfer this "lesson learned" to the world in general, I can't
> help but notice that DRMs or proprietary non-obvious, undocumented
> file formats are a one-way street and will lead to total data-loss in
> the next decades. Our society will lose all works created by artists
> and autors that are forced to use DRM technology. Society is on its
> way to grant (and extend) monopolies without getting its part of the
> deal -- free access to the contemporary culture, our heritage for
> future generations.
> 
> 
> Where would society be if God had handed down the ten commandments
> in a DRM protected form disallowing making copies of it?
> 
> 
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