Portugal Pushes Law to Partially Ban DRM, Allow Circumvention
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
That said, it's fairly mild: only says one can't use DRM to prevent users from enjoying their legal rights, and there's no penalty, except that the DRM breakers won't get fined by our (EU-mandated) anti-circumvention laws, if I'm reading it correctly. And they haven't revoked the bill passed by the previous right-wing government, which forced ISPs to block access to a bunch of "piracy" related sites (TPB, Kickass, etc).
Also, the private copying exception that they mention (and which already existed) doesn't come from free: we have an extra tax on storage devices that gets pooled into a fund to "compensate" authors for that exception.
That's... a surprisingly (and refreshingly) pragmatic way to deal with that percieved problem, to be honest. It'd be nice to see more countries going with solutions like that, rather than the old "Do as I say or I'll beat you over the head"
Who cares about due process and the market, just presume everybody is liable and tax them to guarantee profit to an industry? What a complete perversion of basic capitalism and rule of law.
> It'd be nice to see more countries going with solutions like that
It's nice to pay an extra tax to prop up a poorly-run industry?
>>> There will also be an exception for private copying.
While it's not clear precisely what is meant by "private copying", time-shifting was ruled a fair use in the Betamax case, without the need for a levy.
I'm pretty sure that was the whole point. Capitalism is not a magical faery solution to everything, it obviously was not working in this industry so they are trying someone new.
I completely agree, but the solution to that is not granting guaranteed profits to an industry. They are already granted a monopoly market with copyright. Why should they also get to skip the entire legal system and having to actually produce a product people want and jump straight to profits?
We're talking about luxury goods, not healthcare.
They still have to compete for profits to get a share, their sales are just worth a little bit extra to offset the cultural benefit of more freely available music. (Eg, for each dollar they take in, they actually get $1.01.)
In the sense you're using "luxury goods", they're still essential to human cultural and psychological well-being, even if not base survival.
Society's interest in the market for arts isn't to just make money, and adjusting the pay structure as part of balancing competing interests (in this case, mandatory free use) is reasonable.
Even people who aren't directly interested in a particular work have an interest in the overarching production of arts.
I think it's a valid alternative model that accommodates a lower transaction cost and higher overall welfare - more people can benefit from consuming art - provided that the income is sufficient to motivate its production. It's certainly not an open and closed case of anarchy; that's just as ridiculous to claim.
The Eurail / Interrail multi-day all-Europe train tickets have a similar mechanism. The basic requirement for travel is that you write your journey into the ticket's itinerary list (a multi-page lined space that you fill in manually); at the end, at your option, you send off the ticket to receive some kind of souvenir. Functionally this acts as a survey of which train trips were taken, so that the money from sales of the tickets can be distributed.
It's a solution to nothing and can easily turn into a bloated bureaucratic nightmare like in Germany. A private copying levy exists, regardless of that, there's a thriving business sector of lawyers sending out bulk cease&desist letters for the most absurd of copyright infringements.
Along with that come a number of "collecting societies" like GEMA (music), VG Wort (literature) or VG Bild-Kunst (video/art) which are responsible for collecting all kinds of levies and paying them out to the respective "artists", IF artists actually claim their share of the money.
In reality, these are bloated organizations where most of the collected money goes to the board of directors, of which most only sit in that position as some kind of political retirement plan/favor.
GEMA is the reason why many popular music videos on YouTube have been straight up blocked in Germany, they are also quite infamous for issuing admonishings to kindergartens and schools for singing/copying copyrighted christmas/birthday song texts.
Administrative costs of those societies are somewhere between 5% and 15%. The rest goes to the creators.
> board of directors, of which most only sit in that position as some kind of political retirement plan/favor
I just scanned a few biographies and it didn't look like anything out of the ordinary. They are elected by the members of those societies and not appointed by politicians.
That's the theory, in practice many members have to pay in more than they get out because they have to pay fees to GEMA even when playing their own works.
>I just scanned a few biographies and it didn't look like anything out of the ordinary.
For 17 years the CEO used to be Reinhold Kreile, a CSU politician, and lawyer for copyright. He wasn't the first and he ain't the last, it's part of the political culture in Germany.
> many members have to pay in more than they get out
That their payment table needs some work is out of question. However, membership is entirely voluntary. If someone is a member and pays more in than they get out there has to be some other value they get of it or they would not be a member.
Voluntary being a pretty funny word in that regard considering that according to GEMA rules all works are to be under their trust by default, unless proven otherwise.
>If someone is a member and pays more in than they get out there has to be some other value they get of it or they would not be a member.
Once you are a member and can't publish any of your works, wich you registered with GEMA, under any other licenses, so what good is leaving gonna do anybody when they still lost the rights to publish their own works?
Ain't helping that the German patent office has been preventing the legitimization of alternative organizations, putting GEMA in a de facto monopoly position. It's a prime example of overbearing bureaucracy gone totally wrong and as such shouldn't surprise anybody that there've already been over 1800 petitions against GEMA.
It's an organization that's supposed to act in the best interest of the artists it's representing, but still tried to fight off the digitalization of the music market until 2007, it's an organization that sends out bills for singings songs to kindergartens and retirement homes. Seriously, take a step back and think about that and tell me this ain't totally absurd.
Unfortunately, it usually results in collecting money based on people buying recordable media, regardless of what material they're going to record on that media, and redirecting that money to large, high-profile content providers, also regardless of whose material was actually recorded. In short, smaller content providers and the citizens who are enjoying that content (or using the recordable media for other purposes entirely) are being systematically ripped off.
The biggest problem with this is that if you have a blanket private copying exception to copyright and you also remove the rules about TPMs and anti-circumvention provisions, which is what seems to be proposed in Portugal, then you eliminate any business model more nuanced than selling a permanent copy of a work to each individual customer. No more pay-per-view, no more streaming libraries, no more volume sales or group plans, and no more much lower prices for customers who preferred some of these models to paying full price for a permanent purchase of everything.
Many people on both the production and consumption sides could lose out under such a scheme if it was compulsory, while if it could be overridden contractually then surely everyone's terms would just be updated to do exactly that, and then the new scheme probably wouldn't change much in practice.
I doubt this would actually happen. Netflix beat out piracy because it is convenient. People that want to pirate netflix content already do (by sharing accounts).
When the music industry abandoned DRM it wasn't a big disaster. I don't see why video would be different.
As someone with experience running somewhat similar services, I can promise you it does happen. Most customers seem to be honest, but the lengths that a significant minority will go to in order to take advantage of any access or exploit the system are almost unbelievable, and the excuses or arguments they make if you call them on it often read like parody.
When the music industry abandoned DRM it wasn't a big disaster. I don't see why video would be different.
One possibility you might like to consider is that music singles can typically be sold at sub-dollar prices, making an impulse purchase is highly likely, without undermining the commercial viability of the sector. Depending on the nature of the work, the same economics won't necessarily apply to other types of material.
Again, I don't know Portuguese law, so it may be completely different.
Until you realise that it means the HDDs in your servers pay a piracy tax.
This is also a travesty because you're supposedly being taxed for the privilege of enjoying something you are already paying for. In reality it's even worse because this is only relevant to extract money from those who are not buying your content. The ones who are buying your content already have a pricing relationship with you where more or less money can be exchanged for more or less service.
At the end of the day this was just a way for entrenched interests to extract money from the population that wouldn't normally be given to them because they don't produce content that interests them.
It would be easy to argue that Portugal is forcing them to lose profit because they are not allowed to collect fines for "unauthorized" circumvention.
This is sufficient for creating a market for DRM breakers. It's basically the same situation we have at Brazil, you can just take your stuff to a store and have someone remove DRM from stuff you own.
In others, you can rip DVDs for private use (private copies of copyright materials) by overcoming DRM technology is now protected by the law.
That reminds me of all the sites which sell PDFs of old equipment service manuals, many of which would've become public domain due to their age.
This isn't about banning DRM it's about not restricting your legal rights under ownership.
In both cases it can be "fixed" by changing the terms of sale to a lease.
How would the "lease fix" work? I don't think the law restricts itself to purchased products.
The US has something called the "first sale doctrine" that essentially outlaws such schemes by simply treating such leasing schemes as sales.
The first sale doctrine has been constantly under attack (for a century, at least) by vendors that want to shut down markets for used goods, avoid allowing their own customers a license to use patented products as they see fit. Printer ink manufactures like lexmark are a good modern example.
Arguably this is easier in Europe since first sale doctrine isn't enforced by law in most countries iirc.
Nope. Rules differ from country to country and even within EU-the-organisation each institution sets their own rules and guidelines as to how much lobbying they allow.
That being said, nowhere in the EU is lobbying anywhere near the levels seen in the US.