I don't really know a whole lot about copyright and there are thousands of sources of information on copyright and so many rants on copyright and DRM that there are rants about the rants, but I think that the answer to this whole mess is pretty simple and the consequences for the future, fairly dire.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (pdf summary) does not protect the rights of consumers. It protects the rights of copyright holders when and if they are able to file lawsuits against you for infringement. It protects your service provider by limiting their liability in regards to acts that you as their customer commit. But the DMCA does not do anything to protect the consumer and does nothing to provide proper incentives for consumers to respect the letter of the law in copyright. The very shallow thinking of counter-DMCA initiatives such as the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act do little more than create exceptions to the mess created by the DMCA, really just bringing us back to a state where sanity is just over the horizon instead of where it is today: somewhere deep within the labyrinth of the legal system. And surely, even if you have never downloaded a song from the internet or the Pirate Bay you are still in the labyrinth because all of your music and movies are belong to someone else.
Beyond the scope of the DMCA, there are things for which consumers should be seeking protection. For example, when my material copy of a compact disk is damaged, I should retain the rights implicit in my original purchase; a license to make use of the licensed content. I should be able to retain access to the content of such media independent of any physical form. I think that my copyright; that is, my right to a copy upon purchase, should be protected. The double-speak of the copyright world would have us believe that we are purchasing a revocable license to limited use of the content, but that this ephemeral license is also tied to a physical media. It is encrypted to prevent my fair use. So smart consumers crack the encryption so that we can store our DVDs on our computers or listen to our copy-protected CD music on our iPods (or vice-versa). I would argue that if the license is ephemeral, it is logically independent of the media on which it is stored. And if my CD collection is stolen, lost, or otherwise destroyed, my license is not destroyed, but perhaps just proof that I had a license to begin with. This is even more true in today's world of digital content where I can't physically touch the tangible form of the media.
I think that if there are copyright laws to protect the copyright holder, there should certainly be complimentary law that guarantees certain rights to consumers. Isn't that license that I am purchasing just a contract anyway? How about someone write a better contract and give me good sound reasons to hold true to the contract.
I'm not even sure what is truly a copyright violation. Just ask yourself. If you watch a film on DVD with some friends, how many friends does it take for it to be a 'public presentation'? Is it infringement to show a Halloween flick at a party with 15 people present? How about 30? 50? What if everyone is invited? Do you feel like you are violating copyright when you are downloading music for which have already purchased a license? Are those individuals that are providing you with this download service violating copyright? According to the law, it is probably "yes" in both cases. Should this be the case? Probably not. If the media conglomerates want to retain control of their music, then they need to let us do the controlling. As a metaphor drawn out to ridiculous lengths: How does any person or group think that they can drive all of our cars all at once given that we are all going in different directions, at different speeds, to different destinations, and will make different stops on the way. I don't want to be confounded by the DRM "encryption circus". I don't want DRM. The real copyright violators will copy whatever they want anyway. Why don't we do something to take away their incentive to copy instead of our fair use rights to the media? It just hurts the consumer and gives us less for more. We pay more for music and films today in part because of the extra special secret sauce of DRM. It doesn't do anything for me but cause me physical pain and make me angry.
To elucidate a bit: I just recently had video produced for a conference. The production team did a good job and keeping things absolutely simple, they didn't do anything extra or charge me anything extra. Their process was to go directly from DV to DVD. This would be fine if I thought DVD was an adequate distribution mechanism, but it isn't. I wanted AVI or QuickTime, hell, anything web-ready, which absolutely excludes DVD. With 6 DVDs representing about 13 hours of video in hand, I was faced with the completely stupid situation of having to extract and decrypt DVDs for which I own the copyright. Huh? So yeah, I'm a geek, this should be simple, but settings be damned, it takes an awful lot of trial & error trying to make sure that everything is ripping and decrypted properly and that the re-encoding process doesn't screw things up. It took me nearly two weeks of trial and error to find the right software and the right software configuration to get things into the right format without any horrendous glitches. I'd even done this before with DVD movies that I own, and I'm tech savvy. Sometimes it seems painless, but most of the time it is like sawing off one of your own limbs. Like I said, DVD encryption and format settings be damned.
Before you start pointing me in the direction of the newest and greatest wiz-bang DVD extraction tool 1, just ask: Why the hell was it encrypted to begin with? Encrypted? Never-mind that the production team has a broken process. They are just going along with the industry and using the de facto standard. The de facto standard is to go through superfluous steps which take incredible amounts of extra work to make the content as difficult to copy as possible. WTF? If we continue down this path there will be nothing left of the present when the future finally arrives. It will all be lost to the noise of arbitrary encryption schemes that only ever really served to make things temporary, fragile, and disposable in the face of time.
Oh, sure, we'll have über-geeks and super smart software that knows about gobs of DRM and media encryption/encoding/decoding schemes, but should our technological resources really be so caught up in just decrypting and decoding the present (or worse, the past)? Why will the future of media suck if we continue? Because encryption will always be broken, new methods will always need to be developed, and before we know it we will just have a huge retarded trash heap of media rights management technology that requires media players and computers smarter than people just to figure out how to pull a dead rabbit out of the very convoluted hat. I don't want that.
So what do we do? Fuck it. Drop DRM entirely and completely. Artists should produce art because they enjoy producing it. My home stereo output is definitely not a live performance and it shouldn't cost anything close, especially when the media is for all intents and purposes, intangible.
If you put control back in my hands, I'll do what I think is right. I just bought the new Radiohead album, which is being sold with exactly this model. I paid what I thought it was
worth to download the album. Less than what I would have paid on iTunes, but far more than free. Just think, because people pay what they think it is worth, or what they think that they can pay, there is no market for pirating it. That option was not available before. This is a really good idea and it doesn't require any computer geniuses to figure out how to implement or big, dumb, greedy companies to try to cajole me into thinking it is OK. It is better than OK. It makes sense where current digital music pricing and DRM are senseless. One might also turn to Copyleft or Creative Commons and release your original works into the public domain, or use the Creative Commons license tools, draft your own license, and distribute it yourself. This has worked for me so far, as I have produced only 2-3 original compositions per year. And since I'm not in it for the money, please, download my music. It will make me happy knowing that someone else is listening to it and enjoying it. Which brings me back to the point I was trying to make before losing myself in the agonies of DRM. Why do we listen to music? Why do we make music? Why do we communicate?
I like good music. I enjoy making art. And I like good ideas. And I'm really not convinced that wealth creates better art. I don't think that there is any correlation at all. And I'm absolutely certain that DRM is a dumb idea. If you can convince me otherwise, I'll buy you dinner where I'll provide you with an encryption key for viewing my next blog post.
