Saturday, July 19, 2008

Back-ass-ward | The ignorance driving draconian DRM prohibitions continues undetered.

That belongs to me. Surprise, you're going to jail!

YouTube clip take-downs and media copyright infringement lawsuits, are part and parcel of a broader legal war over intellectual property rights, and the recently amended legal provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) have pushed the conflict well beyond common sense and into the upper stratosphere of sheer stupidity. But if you think that any of this has little to do with you, you'd be wrong. If you have ever copied a disc or even tried to copy an encrypted DVD movie that you purchased legitimately, you may be guilty of having committed a criminal act without knowing it.

Just how stupid is stupid, anyway?

A violation that involves more than 10 copies or is valued at $2,500 and above is a now a felony [1].

Think about how crazy this is for a second and then consider that this is only one example out of a slew of other strident measures codified into federal law, which together are meant to act as both punishment and deterrent by your government, and seen as completely sane and prudent in the vigilant effort to protect copyright owners' rights. And let’s not forget that all of this is being done at your expense; not to mention that should you ever find yourself, out of ignorance of copyright law, at the mercy of a government prosecutor don't think that you can rely on the judge to inform and explain to the jury of their option to return a null verdict if they deem the law to be inherently unjust or unfair.

Please don't tell me that any of you are actually surprised? When politicians, government attorneys and federal judges, the group in general most devoid of common sense, are left to their own devices they will invariably make a stupid situation even "stupider" - and that's precisely what has happened here. The best, and perhpas the only, way to resolve this problem is to share the primary elements of this issue, and what is truly at stake, with the rest of the rational public.

Reality vs. hoping things will work themselves out.

In blunt but exact terms, this is was what the Electronic Freedom Frontier (EFF) had to say late last year[2].

“... the regular breaking of DRM systems, followed by the steady leak of formerly-protected content into file-sharing channels, is now so common that it barely rates a mention in the tech press. But copyright policy-makers still haven't gotten the message (hey, policy-maker: DRM does not slow piracy!!). ...”

And somehow, none of this seems to heed the questionable logic behind a business model that treats its core customer demographic as suspect criminals and continues to threaten them with ever more severe legal action. The utter insanity of this notion defies all rational comprehension and yet it exists, freely pursuing its own twisted agenda.

Cutting through all the tedious legal bullshit.

In order to understand the inherent folly of this conflict, it helps to have a historical perspective, particularly in how the community of the past regarded which rights ought to belong to whom and what they considered appropriate and fair copyright law. It's important to take a look at what happened as a result of conflicts over copyrights when the conflict arrose in the pioneer days of radio, the first electronic broadcast medium, and how it challenged the legal basis of intellectual property ownership.

When you can see this issue from an earlier vantage point, with the benefit of hindsight, it clarifies and unravels the convoluted legal mess we face today, and because of the fact that we share the same basic problem that they faced back in the early days of broadcast radio, it allows us to see the simple ideas that lie at the heart of our own modern multimedia dilemma, covered over now by a mountain of ridiculous legal crap.

But rather than go through the process of spelling it all out here, I have a much better idea. It's faster and a much better option for the both of us. Larry Lessig, Standford professor and renown expert on copyright law, presented a short talk at TED not too long ago that illustrates this entire legal conundrum brilliantly, and far better than I ever could I can assure you. It is well worth the 20-minutes that it takes to watch the following clip[3], and besides, it's also quite entertaining - you'll laugh, I guarantee it:

- How Creativity Is Being Strangled By The Law -


(NOTE: Blogger prevents this clip from being embedded into this post. Clicking on the linked image above will take you to the media source page at TED where the clip will play automatically.)

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URI References:

  1. ^ 10 big myths about copright explained: http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html
  2. ^ Electronic Freedom Frontier: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/11/year-end-2007-darknet-assumptions-still-true
  3. ^ TED - Larry Lessig: How the law is strangling creativity http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_creativity.html