An online Magna Carta: Berners-Lee calls for bill of rights for web
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
An open internet doesn't mean we should be open to share people's hard work free of charge. DRM does little to stop piracy (we both know that), however to say it jeopardizes the freedom of the Internet is disingenuous.
How is this an argument for DRM?
All DRM does is improve the reverse engineering skills of pirates (making them more equipped to crack the next DRM) and serve as a crutch to end users, making them turn to piracy just to get DRM-free software, so they aren't treated as buffoons.
I'd say DRM jeopardizing the freedom of the Internet is very much true.
My biggest beef with DRM is that it makes no allotment for fair use. I'm sure most of us have encountered an irritating website that tried to block right click and ctrl-c, but it's trivial to get around it. What if it weren't?
For some reason, we've accepted the idea that video is a special thing that you can't easily grab snippets of and share. I think it's mostly because DRM showed up before there were consumer friendly tools to do it (like ctrl-c for text), rather than some special attribute of video as a copyrightable work.
If we accept DRM protected video, what do we say when a photographer comes around and says "Hey, why can't I protect my photos like that?" A lot of websites already try, but we have screenshots and noscript to work around it.
Or further down the line, what happens when writers start to ask "Video is protected against copying, why doesn't the browser disable copying from my article?" And all of a sudden I can't copy a quote out to email to my mom without either retyping it or taking a photo and running OCR. Easier than exercising fair use on an encrypted video stream, but still an annoying extra step for something that I ought to have the right to do.
In short, I don't think video should get to be special, and if you wouldn't accept DRM on every single piece of content then you shouldn't accept it on videos either.
That is assuming that all your other software hasn't evolved to the point where it recognises "copyrighted content" and stops you from doing that... this is worth reading if you haven't already: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
"if you outlaw freedom, only outlaws will have freedom."
So let's go to the opposite extreme and say "Sorry, but there's really no way to enforce copyright against individuals sharing copies." Let's say the industry of selling recorded performances collapses.
Are we going to miss it any more than we miss buggy whips?
That model, however, does not require an enormous marketing machine with a lot of centralized infrastructure. Artists could use ever-cheaper technology to record and self-promote.
The music won't disappear. You'll just have to listen to a lot more mediocre stuff (that has always been there, if you really cared to look) to find something you really like. What you really lose when the record companies vanish is the gold-plating and the bozo filters. That adds some value, but probably not as much as the amount they are demanding that we pay for their vetted and polished recordings.
At the heart of the EME/DRM discussions is to make certain browsers and OSes compatible with certain specifications, attributes, and elements. If there's EVER been a risk to the freedom of the Web and the Internet, this is it.
The purpose of DRM is to stop people copying and using digital content. The purpose of the internet is to enable people to copy and use digital content.
DRM's whole point is to limit internet freedom.
I put a note that I want you to read and keep secret into a box. Then I lock the box. Then I tape the key to the lid of the box, attach a sticky note with specific instructions on how you are allowed to use the key and the note, and give the whole package to you. That's DRM.
You open the box with the key, copy the note, put the original back in the box, lock it again, burn the key, and send the box back. You still have the copy of the note. That's reality.
You cannot send a message to an untrusted person in a trusted way, no matter how many trusted lock boxes you use. The instant you make it readable to the recipient, it is copyable. Your only options are to either not send secrets to strangers, or to assume that anything you send to a stranger is no longer secret.
As they say, three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
The true purpose of DRM is to raise the level of difficulty for copying above the median skill level of the recipients. That way, you can buy legislation to intimidate the smartest guys and limit the supply of copies. It is strictly to reduce the burden of law enforcement to a more manageable list of suspects, from "everyone on the planet" down to "anyone with a JTAG debugging workbench".
That said, because of the perverse corruption in each country, I'm afraid it'd look like this:
USA Version: People (=companies) have the right to protect their interests by suing/banning anyone who makes copies of any data. People (=companies) have the right to innovate by throttling, or inspecting packets, to extort or ban competitors.
Other countries might have better versions, but the USA, through TPP, World Bank, Aid packages & other secret trade pacts will assert their version to be dominant.
We really need election finance reform before we can take actions. Until then, I'm kind of fine with gridlock, to slow the corruption down a bit.
Europe's principles mean nothing if they don't stand up for them. Hell, Russia will take Crimea and Germany will barely bat an eyelash.
What makes you think governments are going to respect a Bill of Rights for the virtual world when they don't even respect the one for the physical world!
Since Berners-Lee's suggestion isn't backed by any political body at all (powerful or not), it seems like a completely useless suggestion.
Even if it were backed by a powerful political body, like, say... the US or the EU, I'm not sure how comforted I would be.
Edit: It's been a while since I've taken Latin, but "Magna Carta" essentially means "Big/Great Paper," so the tongue-in-cheek modern equivalent might be something like "Yotta Byte."
Even so, we have our own Bill of Rights across on this side of the pond:
There's some conflict on that, but there's precedent that the fourth applies to all citizens and whomever happens to be on US Soil, whether they're a citizen or not.
Politicians, realizing that only the citizens may vote, may exempt those folks from their otherwise unconstitutional activities, because others have no effective means to seek redress. My reading of the 4th is that it is a restriction on the conduct of the government, such that it applies to every natural person on Earth.
It may well be that the Supreme Court has not ruled this way because it is overwhelmingly staffed by politically-connected lawyers, rather than linguists and logicians.
The government is not allowed to search anyone, anywhere, without a specific purpose. Drawing a dividing line between foreign and domestic spying is a distraction from the notion that Uncle Sam is breaking the law when he listens in to Joe Terrorist's phone calls from halfway across the world to about 45% of the way around via dragnets and data mining.
We are willing to tolerate some degree of law-breaking when it is clearly in our own interest to do so, but it has gone well beyond that by now. Someone's wrist out there is just aching for a good, light slap.
Clearly though, not all rights in the bill of rights can be held to the same standard... for instance, voting rights should not as clearly be extended to non-citizens who just happen to be on American soil, but one's right to life had very well ought to be.
First, saying "things are worse in [some] other places that do not have a Bill of Rights" does not negate OP's point that "Far as I can tell, the first, fourth and seventh have all been forgotten about [in the US]".
> I speak and write freely, my personal possessions are safe from arbitrary seizure, and when I want a jury trial, I can get a jury trial. Many people around the world enjoy none of these freedoms.
You may enjoy those freedoms. But not all US citizens enjoy these freedoms.
On paper the Bill of Rights protects all US citizens, and all US citizens equally. In practice, that is very much not the case. As the saying goes, freedom of speech exists to protect those whose words critics want to silence, not those whose uncontroversial words have no critics. More broadly, the litmus test for the Bill of Rights is not whether your freedoms are being upheld, but whether all others' freedoms are being upheld.
It's not enough to simply say that "the implementation is imperfect" when the exact ways in which the implementation is failing are the exact ways in which it needs to succeed.
They are restrictions upon the US government. In practice, this usually protects US nationals to a greater extent than any other nationality, but in theory, it should protect everyone on the planet from just one (particularly powerful) government. People elsewhere have their own government nastiness to deal with; they don't need to worry about ours as well.
So the Bill of Rights works for you. Good job! Your environment is configured correctly.
But it has to work for everybody. You really need to look in to what is happening to the people in your municipality, county, state, and country that have less money and political power than you have.
What I see is that poorer people are being imprisoned at an ever-increasing rate, and that richer people are getting away with murder, sometimes literally. What I am seeing is less "rule by law" than "rule by money". It isn't quite "rule by men", but it certainly isn't equal justice for all.
You cant call for open standards and an international bill of rights whilst bending over for corporate content control.
I sure as hell hope you hold yourself to the same standard in your own life.
It's entirely unclear to me that Tim's web is better than whatever similar system(s) would have gained popularity in its place.
^ and I don't just mean the Disneys of the world. Independent photographers in particular are royally screwed by the web - though even DRM won't fix that.
DRM is a haphazard attempt to violate fundamental laws of economics - if a good can be copied and distributed at zero marginal cost[0], it's futile trying to prevent that by fiat.
Independent artists and musicians have always been "screwed" if they want to make a living selling their art itself, as opposed to performances of it (for musicians) or the service of creating it (ie, photoshoots, wedding photographs).
We can look at the business models that Shakespeare and Marlowe operated under, or even Bach and Beethoven - by and large, artists in this era were paid by patrons who essentially commissioned works. And this was still in an era in which copying the plays or sheet music still came at a significant marginal cost (whereas copying digital works has no cost).
I really, really hope you like love songs and terrible portraits.
These days, you don't need one person to pay your living expenses while you create. You can get 50000 fans to pay you $1 a year to make the stuff that they think is cool. With cryptocurrency, you can even get fans from other countries to pay patronage.
Sure, rich people will always be able to commission the crap that no one likes but them, but that's no longer the only way to go.
I don't believe that the law should be trying to protect the current business model of horse breeders/candlestick makers/cinema complexes simply because technology has made possible a cheaper and better equivalent.
Sad as that makes me, I do not see that happening anytime soon if at all.
Similarly, how would this bill of rights come to be acknolwedged and enforced by governments?
The Magna Carta was signed when King John's lesser nobles forced him to sign it.