Technorati Tags: childen, creative commons, podcasting, video
In order to address the APIG questions on DRM, I need to state some principles.
Firstly, the Church-Turing thesis, one of the basic tenets of Computer Science, which states that any general purpose computing device can solve the same problems as any other. The practical consequences of this are key - it means that a computer can emulate any other computer, so a program has no way of knowing what it is really running on. This is not theory, but something we all use every day, whether it is Java virtual machines, or Pentiums emulating older processors for software compatibility.
How does this apply to DRM? It means that any protection can be removed. For a concrete example, consider MAME - the Multi Arcade Machine Emulator - which will run almost any video game from the last 30 years. It's hard to imagine a more complete DRM solution than custom hardware with a coin slot on the front, yet in MAME you just have to press the 5 key to tell it you have paid.
The second principle is the core one of jurisprudence - that due process is a requirement before punishment. I know the Prime Minister has defended devolving summary justice to police constables, but the DRM proponents want to devolve it to computers. The fine details of copyright law have been debated and redefined for centuries, yet the DRM advocates assert that the same computers you wouldn't trust to check your grammar can somehow substitute for the entire legal system in determining and enforcing copyright law.
Each computers' immanent ability to become any kind of machine and the copying of data that happens as part of this, leads the DRM advocates naturally to the point where they want to outlaw computers, or to take them over by stealth, using virus-like techniques.
The reductio ad absurdum of this is to privilege DRM implementers in law above the owners of the computers on which their software runs, without their effective consent. Sadly, this is exactly what is being demanded by the publishers' lobby.
With those principles established, I will respond to the questions asked by APIG
Yes. DRM arrogates law enforcement to a dumb mechanism. The computer program acts as judge, jury and executioner, and it is controlled by the publisher. It is an attempt to recreate through technological fiat the publishers' dominance, at the expense of both readers and authors, that the Statute of Anne, and subsequent UK copyright laws, were created to fight. Just at the time that computer-based editing, and internet publishing enables all of us to become publishers of our own creative works, the DRM lobby want to re-establish a privileged role for publishers, like the 17th century Stationers' monopoly.
These are designed to work with current copyright law, and involve a fair degree of complication to make them work legally. Changes in copyright law to reinstate the registration requirement, or to revert to shorter, more defensible terms to clarify public domain status of orphaned works would be advantageous to these licenses.
The law should require DRM to be removed, or for the creator of the DRM to fund sufficient emulation software that their publication can be accessed by future scholars. An earmarked tax on DRM may be appropriate here, just as the Statute of Anne provided penalties for not submitting publications in a useful form.
Consumers are generally wise enough to reject DRM systems. Seeing them discontinued reinforces this wisdom. However, a requirement to provide DRM-free copies to the copyright deposit libraries will help.
A more robust requirement would be for the DRM-using publisher to be required to fund the costs of archival copying and emulation until the copyrighted work is released to the public domain, so that this does not burden the limited budgets of copyright libraries. As reliance on DRM frequently leads to bankruptcy due to consumer rejection, mandating the purchase of an annuity to fund this by DRM practitioners may be the safest course.
DRM systems should make exceptions for everyone. They should warn but not enforce. The computer cannot know if I am partially sighted, or have other requirements for transformative software.
None. My computer is mine; it is not owned by people trying to sell me media. They should have no control over what I do with it. This is prior restraint that reverses the presumption of innocence, and makes the increasingly false assumption that individuals are passive viewers of media, not the creators they evidently are. Penalties for actual copyright infringement are severe enough, let those suffice.
They can be huge. DRM systems inevitably lead to a power grab by publishers to take control of our computers - the Sony DRM debacle illustrates this clearly. As DRM is inherently ineffective, lobbying leads to an effort to repeal by fiat the underlying mathematical laws that govern computers, and the demand for draconian powers over others' computers grows. Any interference by DRM systems with computer owners' ability to listen to, create, edit and publish media should continue to be illegal, and criminal prosecutions under the Computer Misuse Act should be initiated against Sony/BMG and First4Internet for their assault on our computers.
The UK Parliament set the precedent for Copyright law in the Statute of Queen Anne that defended authors from rapacious publishers, and which has served as the basis for global copyright law ever since. Re-reading it for this essay, I was struck by how well it balanced authors', readers' and publishers' rights:
Whereas printers, booksellers, and other persons have of late frequently taken the liberty of printing, reprinting, and publishing, or causing to be printed, reprinted, and published, books and other writings, without the consent of the authors or proprietors of such books and writings, to their very great detriment, and too often to the ruin of them and their families: for preventing therefore such practices for the future, and for the encouragement of learned men to compose and write useful books;
We also recall Macauley's judicious balancing in 1841:
It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.
The independence of both MPs and Peers from the extremes of special interest lobbying that bedevil the US Congress and House give an opportunity for the principles of free expression, of jurisprudence, and of underlying scientific facts to hold sway over the fear-mongering fictions of professional fantasists.
Technorati Tags: copyright, digital rights, DRM, law, politics, rhetoric, sony
Some time in 2005, we quietly passed a dramatic milestone in Internet history: the one-billionth user went online. Because we have no central register of Internet users, we don't know who that user was, or when he or she first logged on. Statistically, we're likely talking about a 24-year-old woman in Shanghai.
By using this plonkingly inaccurate metaphor, Cheever helps us clearly differentate theft from copyright infringement. Lets rewrite it to more accurately reflect what is going on:It's late at night, and you are in the bedroom cruising auction sites for furniture on the Internet. You should go to sleep, but you don't. Then you see them, the pair of chairs from your own living room. They are for sale by someone in New Jersey, but they are your chairs. You can even see the stains on the blue one where your son spilled some orange juice and the stitching on the slipcover you repaired. What are they doing out there in cyberspace?
You go into the living room and, sure enough, they are gone, leaving gaping spaces on the floor where they once stood. A table is gone, too, the one your father built for you when you got your own place. The bowl you had as a centerpiece is shattered on the floor. It's a strange experience to see your own property in someone else's possession when they haven't asked your permission for it or paid for it. It's disorienting and infuriating. You've been robbed. That's how it feels when something of yours suddenly appears in cyberspace, whether it's a chair or a book excerpt, a table or a newspaper column.
It's a while since I linked to Orwell's Politics and the English Language, but it always bears re-reading when trying to write to convince.It's late at night, and you are in the bedroom cruising auction sites for furniture on the Internet. You should go to sleep, but you don't. Then you see them, the pair of chairs from your own living room. They are for sale by someone in New Jersey, but they are your chairs. You can even see the stains on the blue one where your son spilled some orange juice and the stitching on the slipcover you repaired. What are they doing out there in cyberspace?
You go into the living room and they are still there. Evidently someone loved your table and chairs enough to make a perfect copy of them and share them with the world. It's a strange experience to see your own property so appreciated. It's disorienting and beguiling. You've been quoted. That's how it feels when something of yours suddenly appears in cyberspace, whether it's a chair or a book excerpt, a table or a newspaper column.
Technorati Tags: copyright, digital rights, meme, rhetoric
Technorati Tags: attention.xml, conference, microformat, microformats, Syndicate
The one that I look for, which I derived from reading Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker, and from my experiences in the CD-ROM publishing business in the mid 90's is this simple rule:
When expensively educated, fashionable young graduates start showing up in your field, you're in a bubble.
Lewis describes this in the investment banking business, when his entire Yale graduating class applied to become investment bankers.
The trouble with this indicator is that if you aren't looking for it it seem like the natural order of things - of course having personable young things hanging on your every word is to be expected - finally you're getting the recognition you deserve!
In practice, however, the finely-tuned herd instincts that get selected for in the Ivy League or the posher UK universities make them flock to the latest bubble.
Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.
As it is now such a focus of discussion, here are my recollections of Bloggercon 2003 and Podcasting.
On the first day, when we were all in the same room, I was sitting there webcasting live, and Adam Curry was in the row behind.
Technorati Tags: Adam Curry, BloggerCon, podcasting, QuickTime, video, wikipedia
Technorati Tags: Adam Curry, ethics, podcasting, wikipedia
