Tom Keating pointed me to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s page about its opposition to Digital Rights Management, and I read this manifesto in its entirety. I do have a few questions about EFF’s understand of DRM, however:
Major entertainment companies are using “digital rights management,” or DRM (aka content or copy protection), to lock up your digital media. These DRM technologies do nothing to stop copyright pirates, but instead end up interfering with fans’ lawful use of music, movies, and other copyrighted works.
This is partially untrue. DRM does have a measurable effect on the rate of piracy. The more difficult you make it to distribute media illegally, the less piracy will occur. The real problem isn’t that DRM doesn’t stop piracy (which is an outright myth), but that DRM stops media innovation, fair use, and media creation. It creates barriers to entry for artists. And so EFF’s explanation is only half true.
DRM can prevent you from making back ups of your DVDs and music downloaded from online stores, recording your favorite TV programs, using the portable media player of your choice, remixing clips of movies into your own home movies, and much more.
Again, partially true. You still have consumer choice and you still have analog. I know we aspire to live in an all-digital, all-networked world, one which DRM holdouts will be the very last to join. So another problem I foresee is that DRM retards the advancement of social assimilation into the all-digital realm.
The DMCA has been a disaster for innovation, free speech, fair use, and competition.
Amen on this point. And I would add that, though EFF won’t come right out and say it, DMCA-inspired controls have been a disaster for what I call “beneficial piracy”. Pirated music sells mindshare. Mindshare sells albums. Sold albums equals more pirated music. More pirated music equals more mindshare. More mindshare sells more albums; infinity.
Today, these media giants want to use DRM to take away your legitimate fair use and home recording rights, hoping to sell those rights back to you later.
Yup, it’s a twisted scheme of a business model, ain’t it?
Worse still, recent DRM has invaded users’ privacy and created severe security vulnerabilities in computers.
If this is in reference to the Sony debacle, it sounds an awful lot like FUD coming from the EFF. That Sony thing will never happen again, period. Get over it.
Fans shouldn’t be treated like criminals, and neither should the innovators who build the gadgets on which they rely.
I’ve long held that copyright profiteering should be a felony, and should be well-enforced–but charging a cover and offering free beers during a pay-per-view fight is against the law, and that’s just ridiculous.
