Portugal Bans Use of DRM to Limit Access to Public Domain Works | Hacker News Reader

Portugal Bans Use of DRM to Limit Access to Public Domain Works

eff.org

247 pointsDiabloD318 comments

As a side note, in my opinion, this is a result of our current governmental situation, which is unprecedented: the center-right party won a relative majority, but the center-left party got the Communist Party and the Left-Bloc (an anti-capitalist left-wing party but without just a single guiding ideology) to support it in Parliament and allow it to form government.

This has had many effects, but this bill in particular was introduced by the Left-Bloc, and then voted favorably by all the left (and by the single representative of the party "People, Animals and Nature", which doesn't consider itself left- or right-wing).

Fun fact: current governmental situation has been dubbed `Geringonça` (something akin to a Rube Goldberg machine) due to its complicated and convoluted structure.

“Contraption” roughly captures the spirit of it

> As a side note, in my opinion, this is a result of our current governmental situation, which is unprecedented: the center-right party won a relative majority, but the center-left party got the Communist Party and the Left-Bloc (an anti-capitalist left-wing party but without just a single guiding ideology) to support it in Parliament and allow it to form government.

In Portugal? It seems to be a pretty common result in central and northern europe, it's also the result of the very recent NZ elections (the right-wing Nationals got 44.45%, Labour 36.89, NZ First 7.2% and the Greens 10.7%, NZF announced a coalition with Labour with confidence and supply from the Greens).

Yes, in Portugal. We're a pretty young democracy for an European country, and historically there was a lot of bad blood between the left-wing parties.

When you say "relative majority", do you mean a plurality (50% or less, so not a majority, but more than any other party), or is this situation more complicated than it seems?

It's a plurality. "Relative majority" is a direct translation from the Portuguese expression "maioria relativa" .

Curiously, I actually searched for the term rather than directly translate. Seems it's (at least somewhat) used in the UK, even if not in the US.

The right wing party (actually a coalition of 2 right wing "mainstream" parties) was the most voted party but fell way short of a majority (they control 102 seats out of 230) and failed to get parliamentary support.

My local library uses Overdrive/Libby, and they appear to have sucked in all of Project Gutenberg and wrapped the books in DRM. Completely unformatted, just a straight text dump, and it's still going to disappear in 21 days.

"If there's a shortcoming to the law, it's that it doesn't include any new exceptions to the ban on creating or distributing (or as lawmakers ludicrously call it, "trafficking in") anti-circumvention devices. "

Sounds very similar to the approach Portugal has taken with drugs: de-criminalize the use but not the (large scale) distribution.

That sounds a reasonable law to me, I wish this would be implemented EU-wide.

It is reasonable but it's kinda against an EU directive. The problem was that it was shown that the means to unlock drm were not being provided to authorities thus were not available for users upon request. So we took our own mesures.

I'm not completely convinced that this is such a good thing. Main idea behind PD is that you can do basically anything with PD work. Now suddenly PD works can become liability when used if not cleared specifically, which seems counter-intuitive.

I don't think this case comes up in the Venn diagram of realistic scenarios.

If the work is yours, you can use DRM.

If the work isn't yours and it's copyrighted and you know who the author is, you ask permission to use the work, and permission to apply DRM.

If the work is public domain, you don't apply DRM.

The scenario you describe is works for which you don't know the copyright status. Your choice is to either go ahead and use the work without DRM, or apply DRM and potentially face consequences.

In this last case, the case you seem so concerned about, what purpose would DRM serve? It isn't your work, you should not care if anyone copies it.

And if you don't know the copyright status, you've got bigger problems.

I highly doubt anyone will be able to answer this, but I'm curious if this law would also apply to iOS apps. Of course, copyright on an app can't have expired, but it could be developed or sponsored by the Portuguese government. If Apple were forced to not apply DRM to one app, how far would they have to go? Allow sideloading of just those apps? That would open a can of worms. I highly doubt they'd do all that work, they'd probably just pull those apps and ban them just like how GPL licensed code is.

Good, they should ban DRM in general.

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