This is hilairous. Be sure to check out the FAQ. And I’m especially amused that they went to the trouble of actually writing source code, which includes some funny comments.
DMCA, DRM & Piracy 
This is nothing new, but it’s something that grinds my gears to no end, and that’s how the DMCA makes it illegal for me to use works that are completely in the public domain. Researching my previous post, I had occasion to download and read a PDF of the 9/11 Commission Report. This is a report created by the federal government and therefore has no copyright; it is in the public domain. Nevertheless, when I selected some text and and hit ⌘-C to copy it, I get this lovely message:
If I click to enter a password it tells me that I have permission to read and print the document, but not to copy from it. Because there is no copyright, the government has no right to prevent me from copying. I could circumvent the DRM on the PDF, but then it’s possible that I’d be violating the DMCA (not the way I read it, but I’d have to take the risk). Even if I’m not breaking the law by circumventing the DRM, how am I supposed to do that? I have no hacking skills; I’m just a non-profit lawyer trying to read a government document. Normally I’d buy some software utility that would let me do this, but such a utility is something the DMCA definitely prohibits. I better start writing my petition for a Copyright Office exemption next time they grant them in two years.
As the recording industry flirts with releasing music in MP3 format, Ed Felten points out that the labels have become a victim of their own twisted rhetoric about DRM technology:
Of course the industry won’t sell music “with no copying restrictions” or “unrestricted”. The mother of all copying restrictions–copyright law–will still apply and will still restrict what people can do with the music files. I can understand leaving out a qualifier in the headline, where space is short. But in a 500-word article, surely a few words could have been spared for this basic point.
Why did the Times (and many commentators) mistake MP3 for “unrestricted”? Because the industry has created a conventional wisdom that (1) MP3 = lawless copying, (2) copyright is a dead letter unless backed by DRM, and (3) DRM successfully reduces copying. If you believe these things, then the fact that copyright still applies to MP3s is not even worth mentioning.
The industry will find these views particularly inconvenient when it is ready to sell MP3s. Having long argued that customers can’t be trusted with MP3s, the industry will have to ask the same customers to use MP3s responsibly. Having argued that DRM is necessary to its business–to the point of asking Congress for DRM mandates–it will now have to ask artists and investors to accept DRM-free sales.
The phrase “using DRM responsibly” calls to mind an analogy to “drinking responsibly.” In particular, most drivers would find it intolerably paternalistic for their cars to be fitted with breathalyzers that prevented the car from being started up if the driver was intoxicated. Only a minority of drivers drive drunk, and so it’s unreasonable to impose the inconveniences of a breathalyzer system on everyone.
Given that driving drunk is a much more serious crime than sharing a copyrighted song, why should consumers be any less angry that they’re being subjected to a similarly intrusive scheme with respect to the music they purchase. The vast majority of people who buy music online have no intention of engaging in mass piracy, yet each and every one of them is subjected to the indignities of DRM restrictions.
Apple was dealt a blow in Europe on Wednesday when Norway’s powerful consumer ombudsman ruled that its iTunes online music store was illegal because it did not allow downloaded songs to be played on rival technology companies’ devices.
The decision is the first time any jurisdiction has concluded iTunes breaks its consumer protection laws and could prompt other European countries to review the situation.
The ombudsman has set a deadline of October 1 for the Apple to make its codes available to other technology companies so that it abides by Norwegian law. If it fails to do so, it will be taken to court, fined and eventually closed down.
Apple, whose iTunes dominates the legal download market, has its proprietory system Fairplay. Songs and tunes downloaded through iTunes are designed to work with Apple’s MP3 player iPod, but cannot be played on rival devices.
Although I applaud the goal of increasing competition in the legal download market, I don’t think having Norwegian bureaucrats overseeing Apple’s software development process is a good solution. But as I’ve pointed out before: this should be a surprise. Regulatory schemes like the DMCA (and the EUCD in Europe) frequently have unintended consequences. And often, those unintended consequences are often cited as a justification for enacting more regulations to mitigate the harms caused by the previous round of regulation.
What we need, instead, is deregulation: Congress should repeal the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, so that companies are free to reverse-engineer Apple’s products in order to build compatible devices.
In an op-ed in The American today (and also in comments to National Journal on the reintroduction of the Boucher fair use bill), PFF’s Patrick Ross writes that those of us who advocate reversing the DMCA and strengthening fair use rights have little faith in markets. According to him, curtailing the DMCA means government intervention in emerging markets.
What arguments like Patrick’s ignore is that copyright is unlike other property rights, copyright is a different animal. This is evident in the fact that the power to create copyright is one of the enumerated powers of Congress laid out in the Constitution. Copyright would not exist but for the grace of Congress. If Congress decides to create copyrights, it has complete discretion (within constitutional bounds) to set the outlines of copyright. Congress can decide, among many other parameters, that copyright is for only one year or for 100 or for any length of time in between. Therefore, whatever market in copyrighted works emerges once Congress has created copyright, it must conform to the shape of the copyright Congress created.
Ken Fisher at Ars has a great article on the flaws in HDCP, the copy protection scheme that “secures” most high-definition devices these days:
This stuff doesn’t work reliably for even the basic stuff like showing video flawlessly, let alone securing outputs. I even have a HDCP/HDMI issue with my TiVo, which decides that my TV is no longer secure about once a month, requiring a reboot.
Stranger reports have arisen from PlayStation 3 owners who are experiencing blinking displays when connected to some HDTV sets. When playing games, occasionally the sound cuts out and the entire display would blink on and off. As it turns out, the HDCP technology in the PS3 would freak out and sputter if a connected TV could not consistently and quickly indicate it was copy-protection ready. No one knew that this was the case until the guys at Popular Mechanics pinned the tail on the donkey.
Via Techdirt, BusinessWeek reports that Hollywood (aside from Disney) is holding steadfast in its determination to make movie download services unappealing to consumers. This is just baffling:
What does Hollywood want from Steve Jobs? For starters, more protection for their films. “His user rules just scare the heck out of us,” one studio executive told me. Indeed, under Apple’s video iPod digital-rights-management scheme, folks can share their flicks with as many as three other iPod users.
That’s good for the guys who get free flicks, but it’s bad for Hollywood, which goes bat crazy over the notion of pirated freebies on the Internet. To them, losing a customer courtesy of the video iPod is just as bad. Add into the equation the new Apple TV, which would allow folks to put that movie on their TVs, and Hollywood sees more and more of its DVD bucks headed out the door.
I don’t know if this is the exec misunderstanding Apple’s DRM scheme, the reporter misunderstanding the exec, or me misunderstanding the whole passage, but that doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s true that you can have your iTunes content on more than one iPod, but each iPod can only be linked to one copy of iTunes. So yes, you can have the same movie on three iPods. But it can’t be any three iPods–it has to be three iPods that have all of your content–and only your content–on them. Which means that, at most, this will allow family members to share movie downloads.
Now, the goofy thing about this is that even with the ability to watch movies on three iPods, Apple’s DRM scheme is still way more restrictive than what you can do with a traditional DVD. I can play a DVD on any DVD player in the world, and I can potentially share it with dozens of different people. If their goal is to make sure no one gets to watch a movie without paying Hollywood for the privilege, DVD-sharing is a much bigger threat than anything people can do with their iPods.
So I don’t understand who’s supposed to be “getting free flicks” or how Hollywood would be “losing a customer” by signing up with iTunes. Can anyone explain what the problem is supposed to be?
Good news from the Senate:
At first [Hollywood] approached the FCC, and the FCC complied by dutifully trotting out some new broadcast flag regulations. Unfortunately for the content industry, the FCC doesn’t generally have the right to tell manufacturers how to build their products. The rules were thrown out by an appeals court in 2005.
Undaunted, the industry tried again in Congress. Last year, when a rewrite to the 1996 Telecommunications Act was being considered, broadcast flag legislation was in fact attached to the bill and even made it through committee before bogging down.
Sununu’s bill will attempt to rein in the FCC and prevent it from reviving the broadcast flag without Congressional authorization to do so. “The FCC seems to be under the belief that it should occasionally impose technology mandates,” Sununu said in a statement. “These misguided requirements distort the marketplace by forcing industry to adopt agency-blessed solutions rather than allow innovative and competitive approaches to develop. We have seen this happen with the proposed video flag, and interest groups are pushing for an audio flag mandate as well. Whether well-intentioned or not, the FCC has no business interfering in private industry to satisfy select special interests or to impose its own views.”
Whatever your views on DRM more generally, it’s awfully hard to make a libertarian argument for giving the FCC authority to dictate how consumer electronics companies will design their products.
Over at the EFF blog, Derek Slater makes an excellent point:
Great gadgets for your music collection are all over CES: servers that stream to devices throughout your house, slick portable players and music cell phones, place-shifting software that lets you–and your friends–hear your collection from any computer, and much more. But if you want to do more with your DVD collection, you can basically forget about it.
The reason why is, of course, the DMCA. While anyone can build a device that rips music CDs and make use of your MP3s, no one can build a device that unlocks the DRM on DVDs without getting Hollywood’s permission first. Sure, you can find software online to help you rip your DVDs and put them on your iPod, but you won’t find such features built into consumer products on display here. (Kaleidescape, which offers a high-end multi-thousand dollar DVD server and got sued for it, is the exception that proves the rule.)
This fact is even more striking in light of all the emerging video delivery system here, including Microsoft’s IPTV system, cell phone video services, and movie downloading systems. You don’t have to look hard at CES to find a product that aims to help consumers acquire video on the device of their choice. Yet DVDs remain just as limited as they ever were.
I’ve made this point before. I always get really frustrated when DMCA supporters assert that the DMCA has been on the books for almost a decade and no harm has been done. It’s impossible to predict which specific devices would have been invented without the DMCA. But there’s obviously a Kaleidescape-shaped hole in the consumer electronics market, and I’m having trouble thinking of another explanation.
In an increasingly digital world filled with intangible products and instantaneous downloads, does the world really need packaged media anymore? That was the theme of an interesting panel I sat in on this morning at CES in Las Vegas. Panelists debated the future of packaged, physical media (CDs, DVDs, tapes, etc) and generally concluded that it was not dead just yet.
For example, DVDs as a form of packaged media are not dead but growth is slowing, argued Stephanie Ethier, an analyst with market research firm InStat. As broadband speeds grow, however, this could change. Homes need to have roughly 10 Megs of bandwidth to have a satisfactory movie downloading experience, she said, and that world could be upon us soon. 18% of music will be distributed electronically by 2010, she said, but there is still value in the CD due to the “collection value” many users place on having the actual physical disc in their home somewhere. Don Patrican of Maxell agreed saying that “people are collectors by nature” and that they love the idea of having a small personal and physical library in their home that they can see and feel. I thought that was a very good point which I can certainly relate to since I do that myself.
But I then asked a question about whether or not this was all just a generational thing and wondered if my kids would have ANY physical media / storage devices or formats when they are adults in the 2020’s. In response, Don Patrician said we shouldn’t confuse early adopters with the mass market. “Many demographic groups will not embrace all this new technology for some time.” Rich Lappenbusch of Microsoft generally agreed saying that “Many families still don’t trust technology” and want the security that comes along with a physical backup copy.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.