5 ms·

How did the DMCA ever get passed? It's an absolutely insane, ludicrous set of laws. I'm going to start selling shirts that say "Today I Broke The DMCA". No mat

How did the DMCA ever get passed? It's an absolutely insane, ludicrous set of laws. I'm going to start selling shirts that say "Today I Broke The DMCA". No matter who wears it, it's probably true.

redial 10y ago
Only if you don't get sued out of business using the DMCA before even selling your first shirt.
userbinator 10y ago
The power which the pro-DRM industry groups have is immense.
cmurf 10y ago
It's the aftermath from inventing intellectual property. Patents were once called monopolies. What I find amusing is, you get this staunchly anti-government/libertarians who are also incredibly pro-IP. And yet IP is all based on governments granting monopoly power over ideas, with violations enabling the owner to engage in all kinds of punative behavior with the government as the strong arm. Ironic. I think there's something valid about a government protected temporary monopoly. But in the case of copyright, for example, it's life plus 70 or more years. It is ridiculous, as in, worthy of ridicule. Medical patents are 20 years, which itself is too long, but it's made worse by rather permissive ways in which they can be effectively renewed by barely changing the medicine. You know what it is? It's a way to get white collar work to continue to pay out more than, and longer than, the actual amount and duration of work on a thing takes. It's an incentive to do that kind of work. But I agree that it's grossly lopsided when you can't do repair or research on that same material - that's one of the original points of patent and copyright law. Put your ideas on paper so that you not only get protection for a while, but others can create derivatives that are better, and thereby we learn more about it all.
- tiglionabbit 10y ago
  I thought patents were an incentive to invest in research and development. Without patents, anyone who invests in research is at a disadvantage because when they come up with something good, their competitors can copy them at no cost.
  - fnj 10y ago
    No, both they and their competitors are equally advantaged once the invention has been made. What paents give them is not freedom from disadvantage; it is an artificial advantage to justify making the investment. Society/the government is ostensibly afraid nobody will invent if they are not artificially advantaged. Those with working intellect consider that trade secrets are enough of a protection against competition.
    - ryandrake 10y ago
      It's a good thing too, because as we all know, nobody ever invented anything before patents existed.
      - type0 10y ago
        Of course not, that's why Einstein worked at the patent office.
    - didibus 10y ago
      I remember reading that the idea behind patents was to improve the knowledge transfer that trade secrets didn't offer. In exchange for a temporary exclusivity right, you are required to make public your discoveries and advancements. The article went further into how trade secrets allowed a company to have its employees sign non disclosures and actually sue the employee and whoever else used the employer's "stolen" knowledge in criminal court, while patents changed this to be only civil and prevented employees from being sued at all. As everything in life, a balance between the two is probably the most optimal. So I agree patents might have started going too far one way, but I doubt trade secrets would be any better in addressing OP's complaint that patents prevent the free transfer of knowledge and limits innovation. While I never lived when trade secrets were the norm, I believe most people supporting it in favor of patents suffer from the same problem a lot of younger programmers suffer from. We keep reinventing the wheel and making the same mistakes over and over. It's all a cycle, we'll go back to trade secrets and then their issues will become more "apparent", people will have forgotten the inherent issues with patents and we'll move back to patents again, repeating the cycle. So I personally disagree with both, you rarely solve issues by reverting back to older ways which the people before us had already tried in vain. We have to try something else, maybe a hybrid, maybe something totally different.
- kybernetyk 10y ago
  >you get this staunchly anti-government/libertarians who are also incredibly pro-IP. Actually most libertarian are strictly against any form of IP and patents. They prefer trade secrets over state regulation. But then again I don't know if you mean real libertarians or just crypto-statists calling themselves libertarian because they don't know better...
  - 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
    Granting that the Venn diagram of "libertarian" and "Objectivist" is a contentious matter, Ayn Rand was very outspoken in her support of copyrights and patents, and one of the plots of the villainous collectivists in Atlas Shrugged was to nationalize all patents.
    - Hyperborian 10y ago
      That Venn diagram has little to no actual overlap at all. The objectivists just find it to be to their advantage, these days, to make it appear that they might. The controversy that you suggest is as manufactured as the controversy about anthropomorphic climate change.
      - ncote 10y ago
        Anthropogenic. And also, idiot.
        johncolanduoni 10y ago
        CLIMATE CHANGE ANGRY
    - syshum 10y ago
      Ayn Rand was also very outspoken about not being called a Libertarian, she create Objectivism to be separate and apart from Libertarianism, one of the differences between Objectivism and Libertarianism is copyright/patents
  - cmurf 10y ago
- alasdair_ 10y ago
  To be fair, most forms of property come from government-granted rights. The very idea that you can own land is kind of weird when you think about it.
  - jasonkostempski 10y ago
    It's not really weird when you think about ownership just being a bunch of people agreeing to mess up anyone that tries to take something you've claimed. It takes a lot of work to maintain such an agreement, so people have to be compensated for it. If they aren't compensated to their liking, they'll take that thing and maybe other things you've claimed and maybe ruff you up for good measure.
    - e12e 10y ago
      "A bunch of people agreeing" is what a government is?
      - Fargren 10y ago
        Almost. A governments is a bunch of people agreeing plus the power of those people to punish those who do not agree, without being punished back.
        e12e 10y ago
        I'd argue the "power to punish without being punished back" stems from "being a bunch of people that agree" - ie: a bigger bunch of people than any one sub-group they might want to punish for being in disagreement. Then there's the shift in power that comes from control over weapons and infrastructure ... but AFAIK the coordinated masses still have power on their side - partly from the assumption that given enough "external" disagreement, some people on the inside are likely to cross over. Indeed, one could argue that the most terrifying part about the Snowden disclosures on mass surveillance, is that the current government is poised to deploy counter-measures long before any opposition consolidates and organizes. This might take the form of buying out individuals - or "dissappearing" or taking out individuals that are perceived to be in the process of becoming important.
s_q_b 10y ago
>I'm going to start selling shirts that say "Today I Broke The DMCA". That actually happened with DeCSS. Many many years ago, in an internet far far away, some clever hackers determined how to decrypt DRM-protected DVDs. They even built a decryption program and named it DeCSS. Several court cases followed, usually based upon WIPO CC, the treaty that the DMCA implements. In DVD CCA v. Bunner, a California court issued a preliminary injunction against a website owner for hosting DeCSS. As an entirely predictable result, the internet responded by disseminating it far and wide. Some people even put it on t-shirts: http://www.design-reuse.com/news_img/20080804_1.gif http://www.design-reuse.com/news_img/20080804_1.gif
- userbinator 10y ago
  A clear example of the Streisand effect in action. More recently, this happened with the decryption key that starts with 09 F9...
  - s_q_b 10y ago
    I'm trying to conceive of a t-shirt that would, merely by reading it, cause the reader to violate a copyright law. That one's difficult. Maybe one with a custom EULA, "By talking to me you acknowledge that you are agreeing to these terms. Should you not agree, say nothing further."
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      With facial recognition, we could make a t-shirt that makes you violats the DMCA: every time a face is detected looking at the shirt, it breaks some sort of "digital lock." I'm thinking we have it decode an ISO of a DVD, but it could be almost anything.
      - otakucode 10y ago
        It could be literally anything. The lawsuit by RealNetworks against Streambox over the Streambox VCR software established as legal precedent that one single bit, undocumented, is adequate to qualify as a "copyright control mechanism" and that if you ignore that bit, whose purpose you need not even be capable of knowing, you have circumvented it and broken federal law. (There is some sweet irony in the fact that the DMCA, which the Realnetworks v Streambox suit first established the legitimacy of in the courts (due solely to Streambox running out of money - they won every case until they could not afford to respond to an appeal, handing Realnetworks a default judgement) was later used against Realnetworks when they enabled their users to backup DVD movies.)
rtpg 10y ago
So my understanding is that the DMCA introduced safe harbor, which lets platforms like Youtube exist. You can now run a social network and not get sued into oblivion for users putting up copywrighted content, so long as you're not too complicit in the behaviour. Safe harbor is a win for the internet in my book. Without safe harbor, Google would be liable for re-distributing movies that people keep on uploading to the site. Takedown requests get a bad rap, but it's not the worst possible scenario IMO.
- izacus 10y ago
  I don't understand - Google would be liable ONLY because there's another law saying they would be liable. Why not change that law instead of enact another set of crazy laws which demands that you keep proving you've done nothing wrong when some corporation sends a form?
  - rtpg 10y ago
    If you have the most basic copyright law, then Google is liable, because they are distributing content they don't have permission to. So tech companies want Safe Harbor. Media companies understand that safe harbor will enable some shadier businesses like megaupload (where the site owners are complicit in the content and hide behind safe harbor). So they say " OK for safe harbor, but we want a bit more protection for us, the content producers, as well." Thus a compromise is formed. Most laws are comprises to get most people at the table, this seems like one of them.
    - syshum 10y ago
      Compromise: Taking the worst parts of 2 ideas and make an even worse singular idea.....
- syshum 10y ago
  On paper this is true... In reality this is only a win if you have the deep pockets of google and are able to implement all the things that Safe Harbor Requires, respond to all of the Automated and primary bogus requests in a timely fashion, and are willing to have to your platform censored to the extreme. YouTube can withstand it because of its inertia, many new platforms have tried and failed. Safe Habor, as written, ensures YouTube's dominance in online self uploaded video. Further Safe Habor does not protect you from being sued, it simply gives you a defense should you be sued. See the YouTube vs Viacom case. AS such one will still have to pay lawyers to defend them, this results in many content platforms being shutdown, or never being created in the first place No in reality Safe Habor only seems like a good thing on paper, and then only if you are a Copyright Maximalist that believe the current copyright law is acceptable or does not provide enough protection.
shmerl 10y ago
Corrupted undemocratic policymaking. See here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/ustr-secret-copyright-agreements-worldwide https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/ustr-secret-copyright-...

How did the DMCA ever get passed? It's an absolutely insane, ludicrous set of laws. I'm going to start selling shirts that say "Today I Broke The DMCA". No matter who wears it, it's probably true.

redial 10y ago

Only if you don't get sued out of business using the DMCA before even selling your first shirt.

userbinator 10y ago

The power which the pro-DRM industry groups have is immense.

cmurf 10y ago

It's the aftermath from inventing intellectual property. Patents were once called monopolies. What I find amusing is, you get this staunchly anti-government/libertarians who are also incredibly pro-IP. And yet IP is all based on governments granting monopoly power over ideas, with violations enabling the owner to engage in all kinds of punative behavior with the government as the strong arm. Ironic. I think there's something valid about a government protected temporary monopoly. But in the case of copyright, for example, it's life plus 70 or more years. It is ridiculous, as in, worthy of ridicule. Medical patents are 20 years, which itself is too long, but it's made worse by rather permissive ways in which they can be effectively renewed by barely changing the medicine. You know what it is? It's a way to get white collar work to continue to pay out more than, and longer than, the actual amount and duration of work on a thing takes. It's an incentive to do that kind of work. But I agree that it's grossly lopsided when you can't do repair or research on that same material - that's one of the original points of patent and copyright law. Put your ideas on paper so that you not only get protection for a while, but others can create derivatives that are better, and thereby we learn more about it all.

tiglionabbit 10y ago
I thought patents were an incentive to invest in research and development. Without patents, anyone who invests in research is at a disadvantage because when they come up with something good, their competitors can copy them at no cost.
- fnj 10y ago
  No, both they and their competitors are equally advantaged once the invention has been made. What paents give them is not freedom from disadvantage; it is an artificial advantage to justify making the investment. Society/the government is ostensibly afraid nobody will invent if they are not artificially advantaged. Those with working intellect consider that trade secrets are enough of a protection against competition.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    It's a good thing too, because as we all know, nobody ever invented anything before patents existed.
    - type0 10y ago
      Of course not, that's why Einstein worked at the patent office.
  - didibus 10y ago
    I remember reading that the idea behind patents was to improve the knowledge transfer that trade secrets didn't offer. In exchange for a temporary exclusivity right, you are required to make public your discoveries and advancements. The article went further into how trade secrets allowed a company to have its employees sign non disclosures and actually sue the employee and whoever else used the employer's "stolen" knowledge in criminal court, while patents changed this to be only civil and prevented employees from being sued at all. As everything in life, a balance between the two is probably the most optimal. So I agree patents might have started going too far one way, but I doubt trade secrets would be any better in addressing OP's complaint that patents prevent the free transfer of knowledge and limits innovation. While I never lived when trade secrets were the norm, I believe most people supporting it in favor of patents suffer from the same problem a lot of younger programmers suffer from. We keep reinventing the wheel and making the same mistakes over and over. It's all a cycle, we'll go back to trade secrets and then their issues will become more "apparent", people will have forgotten the inherent issues with patents and we'll move back to patents again, repeating the cycle. So I personally disagree with both, you rarely solve issues by reverting back to older ways which the people before us had already tried in vain. We have to try something else, maybe a hybrid, maybe something totally different.
kybernetyk 10y ago
>you get this staunchly anti-government/libertarians who are also incredibly pro-IP. Actually most libertarian are strictly against any form of IP and patents. They prefer trade secrets over state regulation. But then again I don't know if you mean real libertarians or just crypto-statists calling themselves libertarian because they don't know better...
- 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
  Granting that the Venn diagram of "libertarian" and "Objectivist" is a contentious matter, Ayn Rand was very outspoken in her support of copyrights and patents, and one of the plots of the villainous collectivists in Atlas Shrugged was to nationalize all patents.
  - Hyperborian 10y ago
    That Venn diagram has little to no actual overlap at all. The objectivists just find it to be to their advantage, these days, to make it appear that they might. The controversy that you suggest is as manufactured as the controversy about anthropomorphic climate change.
    - ncote 10y ago
      Anthropogenic. And also, idiot.
      - johncolanduoni 10y ago
        CLIMATE CHANGE ANGRY
  - syshum 10y ago
    Ayn Rand was also very outspoken about not being called a Libertarian, she create Objectivism to be separate and apart from Libertarianism, one of the differences between Objectivism and Libertarianism is copyright/patents
- cmurf 10y ago
alasdair_ 10y ago
To be fair, most forms of property come from government-granted rights. The very idea that you can own land is kind of weird when you think about it.
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  It's not really weird when you think about ownership just being a bunch of people agreeing to mess up anyone that tries to take something you've claimed. It takes a lot of work to maintain such an agreement, so people have to be compensated for it. If they aren't compensated to their liking, they'll take that thing and maybe other things you've claimed and maybe ruff you up for good measure.
  - e12e 10y ago
    "A bunch of people agreeing" is what a government is?
    - Fargren 10y ago
      Almost. A governments is a bunch of people agreeing plus the power of those people to punish those who do not agree, without being punished back.
      - e12e 10y ago
        I'd argue the "power to punish without being punished back" stems from "being a bunch of people that agree" - ie: a bigger bunch of people than any one sub-group they might want to punish for being in disagreement. Then there's the shift in power that comes from control over weapons and infrastructure ... but AFAIK the coordinated masses still have power on their side - partly from the assumption that given enough "external" disagreement, some people on the inside are likely to cross over. Indeed, one could argue that the most terrifying part about the Snowden disclosures on mass surveillance, is that the current government is poised to deploy counter-measures long before any opposition consolidates and organizes. This might take the form of buying out individuals - or "dissappearing" or taking out individuals that are perceived to be in the process of becoming important.

s_q_b 10y ago

>I'm going to start selling shirts that say "Today I Broke The DMCA". That actually happened with DeCSS. Many many years ago, in an internet far far away, some clever hackers determined how to decrypt DRM-protected DVDs. They even built a decryption program and named it DeCSS. Several court cases followed, usually based upon WIPO CC, the treaty that the DMCA implements. In DVD CCA v. Bunner, a California court issued a preliminary injunction against a website owner for hosting DeCSS. As an entirely predictable result, the internet responded by disseminating it far and wide. Some people even put it on t-shirts: http://www.design-reuse.com/news_img/20080804_1.gif http://www.design-reuse.com/news_img/20080804_1.gif

userbinator 10y ago
A clear example of the Streisand effect in action. More recently, this happened with the decryption key that starts with 09 F9...
- s_q_b 10y ago
  I'm trying to conceive of a t-shirt that would, merely by reading it, cause the reader to violate a copyright law. That one's difficult. Maybe one with a custom EULA, "By talking to me you acknowledge that you are agreeing to these terms. Should you not agree, say nothing further."
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    With facial recognition, we could make a t-shirt that makes you violats the DMCA: every time a face is detected looking at the shirt, it breaks some sort of "digital lock." I'm thinking we have it decode an ISO of a DVD, but it could be almost anything.
    - otakucode 10y ago
      It could be literally anything. The lawsuit by RealNetworks against Streambox over the Streambox VCR software established as legal precedent that one single bit, undocumented, is adequate to qualify as a "copyright control mechanism" and that if you ignore that bit, whose purpose you need not even be capable of knowing, you have circumvented it and broken federal law. (There is some sweet irony in the fact that the DMCA, which the Realnetworks v Streambox suit first established the legitimacy of in the courts (due solely to Streambox running out of money - they won every case until they could not afford to respond to an appeal, handing Realnetworks a default judgement) was later used against Realnetworks when they enabled their users to backup DVD movies.)

rtpg 10y ago

So my understanding is that the DMCA introduced safe harbor, which lets platforms like Youtube exist. You can now run a social network and not get sued into oblivion for users putting up copywrighted content, so long as you're not too complicit in the behaviour. Safe harbor is a win for the internet in my book. Without safe harbor, Google would be liable for re-distributing movies that people keep on uploading to the site. Takedown requests get a bad rap, but it's not the worst possible scenario IMO.

izacus 10y ago
I don't understand - Google would be liable ONLY because there's another law saying they would be liable. Why not change that law instead of enact another set of crazy laws which demands that you keep proving you've done nothing wrong when some corporation sends a form?
- rtpg 10y ago
  If you have the most basic copyright law, then Google is liable, because they are distributing content they don't have permission to. So tech companies want Safe Harbor. Media companies understand that safe harbor will enable some shadier businesses like megaupload (where the site owners are complicit in the content and hide behind safe harbor). So they say " OK for safe harbor, but we want a bit more protection for us, the content producers, as well." Thus a compromise is formed. Most laws are comprises to get most people at the table, this seems like one of them.
  - syshum 10y ago
    Compromise: Taking the worst parts of 2 ideas and make an even worse singular idea.....
syshum 10y ago
On paper this is true... In reality this is only a win if you have the deep pockets of google and are able to implement all the things that Safe Harbor Requires, respond to all of the Automated and primary bogus requests in a timely fashion, and are willing to have to your platform censored to the extreme. YouTube can withstand it because of its inertia, many new platforms have tried and failed. Safe Habor, as written, ensures YouTube's dominance in online self uploaded video. Further Safe Habor does not protect you from being sued, it simply gives you a defense should you be sued. See the YouTube vs Viacom case. AS such one will still have to pay lawyers to defend them, this results in many content platforms being shutdown, or never being created in the first place No in reality Safe Habor only seems like a good thing on paper, and then only if you are a Copyright Maximalist that believe the current copyright law is acceptable or does not provide enough protection.

shmerl 10y ago

Corrupted undemocratic policymaking. See here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/ustr-secret-copyright-agreements-worldwide https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/ustr-secret-copyright-...