I have always said that DRM protection should automatically void all copyright protection. If you make it impossible for your work to enter public domain, you should not have the same protection as works that will.
Remember that there are two reasons DRM is bad. The first is that it prevents you from doing things permitted by copyright law (e.g., fair use). The second is that it has unrelated side effects to your computing freedom. The recent batch of DRM, like streaming from Spotify, is nowhere near as bad for your computing freedom as stuff like Sony's rootkit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk... . The first downside is true of all DRM; the second is true of only some.
Because it is not legal to just have a GitHub project explaining how to break Spotify's DRM, there's no incentive for Spotify to be as malicious as Sony. Their DRM only has to be good enough to convince the publishers that it works. If we say that all copyright protection is off, and DRM stands or falls entirely on its technical strength, we encourage an arms race. There will be non-sketchy websites offering reliable and well-engineered DRM removal tools, and the labels will point to them and insist that Spotify step up their game.
20 years exclusive rights. After that: 50 years commercial rights + dual license as CC-BY-NC-SA. That way content creators can earn money by licensing/selling their work for commercial use, and the public can use it non-commercially.
If the purpose of copyright is to incentivize new creation, applying changes to it retroactively only serves to hurt the public.
Why should Netflix take money and provide a service and not pay the creators of the material they wish to make revenue from?
- Copyright exists to stimulate new content by allowing creators to distribute the fixed (and sometimes variable) costs of the IP.
- DRM exists to fill the gap where enforcement of the copyright is not very feasible, but can negatively affect users.
Maybe the solution is a better scalable copyright enforcement mechanism?
Copyright without enforcement is no right at all - on that we should be able to agree.
Thus, I believe it's a societal issue in trying to figure out an equitable balance (in this case - currently policing / take downs via DMCA, civil cases a la Beastie Boys curb stomping GoldiBlox). Now, has the scale been tilted in a lopsided way? Oh yeah, I'm no fan of Copyright becoming essentially a Corporate Legal Weapon.
But...and this is a big but...killing Copyright outright also stands to injure many smaller, more vulnerable creators. I've yet to see any remotely feasable avenue to remedy it outside of "Music and movies should just be, like, free, man" like the parent asserts.
I was thinking more along the lines of the specific problem that DRM is attempting to solve - why DRM exists - to see if there is any thoughts as the way to remove DRM completely but still solve the gap in copyright enforcement.
Copyright is currently life of the creator+70yrs, while patents are a mere 20yrs. So, it seems copyright laws are weaponized for a longer duration.
I'm talking about gaps in copyright enforcement that DRM is trying to fill.
I am saying this as a scientist. I think people should be able to share every paper/book/etc. I wrote. I refuse to think of people who share this knowledge (or some tunes) as thieves ---that's what corporations want you to believe. Scientists and artists already have other sources of income. In my view, laws tailored for publishers are hindering the progress and should be undone (see recent discussions on sci-hub, and also pirate party manifesto).
I am sure this goes against the beliefs of many people here: I am a scientist, and our job long precedes industrial revolution, rise of capitalism and corporations, and their byproducts such as copyrights (in its current form) and patents whereas majority of people are a part of Silicon Valley / computer industry (and art is probably older). But I'm quite certain that in its short history, copyright laws by and large worked for big corporations and not for the good of common people.
This structure was forced down through our throats, and of course it shaped today's working landscape. It doesn't mean it is fine.
DRM is an inherently weak system because as long as you have root on your device, you can break it. Perhaps it will take some serious reverse engineering effort, but it's always going to be breakable, because in order for you to consume the content in the fist place, your device needs to decrypt it.
(Of course, that's the point the EFF is making here, that that unbreakable DRM requires compromising our ability to have root access to our own devices.)
So yeah, I agree with you. But given the assumption that DRM works (it doesn't), there's no reason why the DRM could not enforce public domain release protocol in the same way it enforces copyright requirements. Just as iTunes lets you "rent" a movie for a day, it could let you "rent" a copyrighted work until it enters public domain.
Another example: root cannot attach the debugger to binaries that have been signed with restrictive entitlements. lldb will refuse to debug `/usr/bin/git`, for example.
This has been the case for at least a year now.
[1] https://www.qualcomm.com/media/documents/files/snapdragon-st... (PDF)
The intent is to distribute the costs of the IP to consumers, in which circumventing the DRM defeats.
But you are also being obtuse. A DRM'd copy is not the same as a non DRM'd copy, even if the underlying work is the same. If they were, there would be no reason to make the distinction. Really you're claim to the contrary is very Sophistic. I don't believe for a second that you don't see the difference.
The main issue being brought up here is that copyright protection is bundled with a responsibility to relinquish control of the work at the end of the copy protection period. So Johnny_Brahms is saying that if rights holders aren't holding up their side of the deal, then they shouldn't benefit from copy protection. This puts the cost of DRM back on the rights holder, where to date, the cost has been largely externalized.
Under this scheme, rights holders still may opt for DRM, if they expect that DRM will protect the work better than copyright, but they will actually have to do a cost benefit analysis on the matter. Under the current scheme, rights holders have all of the optionality. That is, they take all of the upside, and leave the downside for the public. The aim of this scheme is to force rights holders to put some skin into the DRM game.[1] Which seems appropriate to me, since there are significant costs associated with DRM.
[1] That is, the public pays the costs of access, as well as the cost of loss of access once the DRM authentication chain can no longer be completed (usually because the rights holder loses interest in the work and so stops maintaining the authentication system). We also observe that a lot of weak DRM schemes exist. This is only because copyright exists as a safety net for a broken DRM system. There are actual legal benefits to slapping a trivially circumvented (widely known to be broken) DRM scheme onto a work. But the upside to doing so is very small, and the downside is widely distributed across all legitimate current and future users (plus would be users that are thwarted from legitimate use by the DRM) of the work. If you take away the copyright safety net, then that bit of moral hazard would likely immediately disappear since the costs of adding bad DRM would be jointly borne by the public and the rights holder, rather than just by the public.
[edit: gave the discussion tree root (Johnny_Brahms) credit for the proposal rather than the article, since it was described as a previously held position.
I'm not sure if that would be a good idea, but it's not obvious that it's not.
Yeah, yeah, can't use it in a library in 100 years, blah blah. Hasn't proved to be an issue.
You could argue that a work in the public domain with its DRM still attached provides an interesting historical perspective. Sometimes the DRM is more interesting than the content -- and could provide it's own lesson/warning to future generations.
If we already know what lesson it would be, why wait?
Yes, you could argue that a work in the public domain with its DRM still attached provides an interesting historical perspective; it's a free country. Doesn't mean it's a good argument, though.
¹ http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/reports/orphan-works2015.pdf
The report somewhat misleadingly names anything they cannot digitize as "orphan works." These millions of items are largely books and photographs for which they lack a formal license -- it's a discussion relating to the Google book scanning lawsuit and Fair Use not DRM.
1. There's an issue of orphans works, as the report shows.
2. DRM makes it worse, by making it illegal to bypass the copy protection, which is necessary in order to preserve the work until its legal status can be resolved (even if it's just waiting for copyright to expire).
CDs/DVDs and other physical media in which copyright works are distributed have limited lifetimes, and many won't last the many decades it takes for their content to enter the public domain (it's now lifetime of author + 70 years!). If archival copies are legally prevented by the necessity of having to break DRM, you're essentially ensuring that those works will be lost.
https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2015/10/28/2015-272...