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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 s
by Johnny_Brahms 10y ago
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.
- neikos 10y agoThat's an interesting thought.
- Johnny_Brahms 10y agoHeck: Let's change copyright while we are at it. I have never heard any good arguments why copyright should be longer than 20 years. That is of course never going to happen, but I have a compromise: 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.
- chris11 10y agoI'm also bothered by the fact that most copyright extensions are retroactive. If something is going to lose its copyright protection in a few years, that work should lose it even if copywright protection is extended.
- Klathmon 10y agoThat's what bothers me the most. If the purpose of copyright is to incentivize new creation, applying changes to it retroactively only serves to hurt the public.
- tagrun 10y agoExtension of copyright law been "sponsored" by MPAA and corporations. So better yet, they should make lobbying illegal again, and treat it as a form of bribe.
- tacos 10y agoWhy should breadth of distribution affect rights status? You don't even need to publish something to gain copyright protection. 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.
- anonymfus 10y ago>could provide it's own lesson/warning to future generations. If we already know what lesson it would be, why wait?
- tacos 10y agoBecause libraries are full of tomes written by cocksure counterculturists. If we knew what the future of media distribution looked like we'd be making billions pushing it there, not bullshitting about "how it's obviously gonna be, just you watch" on HN.
- icebraining 10y agoHasn't been an issue? As the Copyright Office itself reports[¹], millions of orphan works have been lost or are inaccessible, and the DRM exacerbates the issue by preventing archivers from legally making copies to ensure that these works will be available in the future. 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 http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/reports/orphan-works2015.pdf
- tacos 10y agoYou linked to a 234 page report that does not contain the phrases "copy protection" or "DRM" or "digital rights management." You did an amazing job making my point for me. 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.
- geofft 10y agoWell, circumvention of DRM by technical means is currently forbidden by copyright law. This isn't great, but I suspect it has an effect of moderating just how bad DRM is. 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_rootkit_scandal 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.
- Johnny_Brahms 10y agoThose laws are, like DRM, made in the interest of companies. They'd have to go as well.
- geofft 10y agoI'm not sure what your proposal here is. You want companies, which are government-created structures with the ability to acquire large amounts of funding, provide employment, etc. to have a free-for-all on just how strong their DRM can be? Why?
- Johnny_Brahms 10y agoAnd then people would find out just how locked in they can become. And hopefully demand something else.
- chatmasta 10y agoInteresting point, but easy counter argument: program the DRM scheme to expire once the work legally enters the public domain.
- organsnyder 10y agoHow would that be implemented? What's to stop me from simply changing my computer's clock to a future date to disable the DRM?
- mseebach 10y agoYou require rights holders to place the DRM key in escrow with the copyright office.
- tamana 10y agoEven better, TSA can hold it, next to the luggage keys
- schoen 10y agoGwern analyzes some ideas at http://www.gwern.net/Self-decrypting%20files http://www.gwern.net/Self-decrypting%20files
- chatmasta 10y agoWhat's to stop you from changing your computers [fill_in_the_blank] in the current status quo? 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.
- riprowan 10y agoThis is a great idea, but is there an analogy in meatspace?
- organsnyder 10y agoCompanies do this with trade secrets and patents all the time. Rather than obtaining a patent, they guard the information closely, so that the implementation details aren't disseminated to the public. Otherwise, the information would be fair game after the patent expired.
- Angostura 10y agoI'm not sure that would work with a Hollywood blockbuster.
- mikepurvis 10y agoThe "trade secret" analogy would be only showing the film in a room where you surrender recording devices upon entry. What would be the point in copyrighting what the viewer sees, if there's no way for them to leave with it?
- mpweiher 10y agoAnd vice versa, a lot of companies had (not sure they still do) "disclosure journals" that would publish results that they couldn't or wouldn't patent, so that nobody else could patent them later (which is otherwise perfectly possible).
- amelius 10y agoWhat if somebody makes an analog "cam" copy of the work?
- saulrh 10y agoThen their DRM isn't up to the task of protecting their stuff, and that's their fault. They were the ones that decided to put it there.
- tamana 10y agoThat's inconsistent thinking. Weak protection is equivalent to no DRM on the part you are able to copy.
- TheCoelacanth 10y agoIt's not equivalent. Intent matters in the law. If you attempted to deprive the public domain of your work, why should you be given the privilege of copyright protection just because you failed.
- bduerst 10y agoYou've got it backwards. You should be entitled copyright protection for first making your work public domain, because you incurred costs in generating it and the public benefits from it. The intent is to distribute the costs of the IP to consumers, in which circumventing the DRM defeats.
- shawn-furyan 10y agoYou're putting words in saulrh's mouth. saulrh didn't claim that the copy, once liberated from the DRM wasn't equivalent to the original, so you are injecting the inconsistency into the argument. 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.
- Silhouette 10y agoThat might be a reasonable argument if it were balanced by having meaningful and practically enforceable penalties for people who treat any work that is under copyright but not DRM'd as if it were already in the public domain today.
- simcop2387 10y agoI don't think that'd work well for the reasons others have stated. I do think a balance could be struck. Reduced length of terms (half? quarter?) of protection, and a requirement that a copy of the media be placed in the library of congress, along with some amount of money earmarked for the preservation of it until it's in the public domain. I think something like that would work better as it avoids the problems with the analog loophole rendering the whole thing completely inert, but still makes it less attractive for most cases.
- awqrre 10y agoa quarter of forever is still forever... hopefully this copyright term extension non-sense stops soon.
- 6stringmerc 10y agoIn this universe, how are creators compensated for works of art? Who is the regulating authority? Details, please, this would be most enlightening as a thought exercise.
- 3pt14159 10y agoEverything should default to Creative Commons Non-commercial no-commercial derivatives. That way paid platforms like Netflix can exists and we can use images of Drake sitting on top of the CN Tower for memes.
- 6stringmerc 10y agoThat doesn't remotely include any notion of compensation, so that's an unsatisfactory answer I have to say. Why should Netflix take money and provide a service and not pay the creators of the material they wish to make revenue from?
- bduerst 10y agoI think they're conflating the purpose of the two, as your questions point out. - 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?