Today’s hearing was chock full of clueless statements. Here’s Cliff Stearns, Chairman of the subcommittee:
While I would like to explore the issues HR 1201 seeks to remedy, I think the cleaner solution to this lies in technology, not necessarily legislation. On that note, I have a number of issues I would like to discuss here today. The first question I have is whether we have gotten any closer to technology that would allow a limited number of protective copies to be made of copyright-protected works. According to Mr. Valenti, representing the Motion Picture Association before the Subcommittee last year, “Keep in mind that, once copy protection is circumvented, there is no known technology that can limit the number of copies that can be produced from the original.” I would like to know about the state of technology in this area. I can’t think that this is not a solvable challenge. Why don’t we make it the copyright equivalent of the race to the moon. We went to the moon almost 40 years ago–it seems to me technology should afford a means of limiting the number of copies we can make of a protected work. Absent promising news on the technology front, I assume we will have to allow the legislative process to work and see if that will yield a solution, although perhaps an inelegant one.
Now, for the non-programmers in the audience: making an uncopyable file is akin to building a perpetual motion machine. It’s not just technologically challenging. It’s theoretically and logically impossible. Files are just strings of 1s and 0s. Computers manipulate 1s and 0s. There’s no such thing as an uncopyable 1 or 0, so there’s no such thing as an uncopyable file. If you’ve got one copy of a file, you can make as many copies of it as you like. That’s just the way computers work.
It’s depressing that that Rep. Stearns isn’t getting competent advice from his staff. But it’s heartening that the supporters of the DMCA have been reduced to such transparently bogus arguments. Congressman Stearns clearly accepts the premise that consumers have fair use rights that need to be respected. At some point, he’s going to realize that DRM developers are selling snake oil, and at that point the DMCA is going to be in big trouble.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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