Fwd: Please Stand Against the New Copyright Bill

[Ian Petersen]

On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 9:38 PM, Mr Chris Aitken <chris-n/jUll39koHNgV/OU4+dkA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I'd be interested in your thoughts. Seriously.

There are two things that concern me the most about
government-supported DRM: the disappearance of the public domain, and
remote permission servers determining if and when I can experience my
media.

I never really appreciated Shakespeare's work in high school but it's
always held up as a shining example of English literature.  If DRM had
existed in the 15th century, Shakespeare's estate would probably still
be controlling access to his works.  Strictly speaking, his works
would probably be "in the public domain" as they are today, but the
people controlling access via DRM could still excise payment from
every high school in the land.  Hopefully you'll agree that, centuries
later, the right thing to do is to allow everyone unrestricted access
to Hamlet.  (Never mind that, AFAIK, "copyright" didn't exist in
Shakespeare's time, and great art was produced nonetheless.)

On the subject of remote permission servers, I think it was Yahoo!
that recently shut its servers down.  People who had shown themselves
to be paying customers by buying DRM'ed music and allowing their music
players to check with Yahoo! for permission before each performance of
a "protected" work were suddenly screwed out of their money because
Yahoo! no longer felt like supporting the permission-granting service.
 It should not be illegal for those people to find a way to listen to
the music they paid for.  (And, I'd argue, they shouldn't _have_ to
"find a way"--they paid for the music, it should be easy to listen
to.)

I don't usually buy into Richard Stallman's deliberate vocabulary
because I don't want to spend time explaining myself to my peers, but
Digital Restrictions Management is worth the effort, I think.  DRM is
evil and the law should not enshrine for it a right to exist or a
right to be enforced.  Art is fundamentally an analogue activity and
any digital means of conveying art is going to be fundamentally
limited by its need to be converted into analogue form before being
experienced by the audience.  DRM can't change that and the law
shouldn't try to help it.

On a different note, I think part of the reason that copyright is even
in the public consciousness right now is because of the clash between
the internet and the traditional content distributors.  At its core,
the internet is a tool for copying information from one place to
another in an efficient, speedy, and robust manner.  That such a tool
is available to nearly every member of the First World at trivial cost
flies in the face of the RIAA's and MPAA's reason for being.  The
recording labels and the infrastructure they have created for
themselves are a relic of a time when it was fundamentally hard to
tell everyone in the United States about the latest and greatest music
act.  These days, you can tell the whole world about something in a
fraction of a second at nearly zero incremental cost.  There may be a
purpose for recording labels in the future, but I hope that some sort
of market Darwinism forces them to adapt or perish because the only
other alternative I can see is for the internet to be castrated.

Ian

PS By the way, I make my living as a software developer but I also
contribute to open source and free software projects.  Creative works
can be given away without undermining the whole "industry".
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