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The digital lock is a matter of conflicting rights. They have a right to prevent infringement of their copyright; you have a right to make limited copies. The
by jfengel 2y ago
The digital lock is a matter of conflicting rights. They have a right to prevent infringement of their copyright; you have a right to make limited copies.
The lock on your door is not -- assuming that they don't in fact have some kind of claim on you, like a landlord to whom you have failed to pay rent. So the situations are not parallel, and it should be no surprise that the decisions would differ.
The job of a court is to decide which right prevails when rights conflict. There's often reasonable disagreement over it, and the distinction is often based on a complex and esoteric set of precedents, and on the specific wording of a law.
- L-four 2y agoSo a literal electric door lock would have the right to lock your door if they think you might break the copy right on the door lock you purchased from them.
- vkou 2y agoSometimes analogies are a useful tool for understanding a situation. This one is not.
- jfengel 2y agoAnalogies are sometimes useful for understanding, but they rarely seem useful in marking an argument. It always seems redirect the argument into the ways that the analogy is different. (If the analogy weren't different, then it wouldn't be any clearer.) If one goes into it with the intention of using the differences in the analogies to illuminate the domain, it can be helpful. But any argument of the form "X is like Y, and therefore since p(Y) is obvious then p(X) must also be true" is pretty much destined to shed little light but much heat.
- rpdillon 2y agoI find an analogies useful in argument. They allow me to apply the logic someone is applying in an unfamiliar domain to a domain that is familiar to all, as a way of seeing how the logic holds up. Naturally, if the domains are too dissimilar, that becomes the focus of discussion. Like all tools, analogies can be used poorly.
- immibis 2y agoIf the laws about actual doors were written the same way as laws about copyright: yes.
- prophesi 2y agoYep, I think the analogy would be better understood if it said they would stop the lock from functioning properly if the company had a suspicion that you were circumventing / reverse-engineering the lock.
- CobrastanJorji 2y agoThey do not have a right to prevent infringement. They have a right to make copies, and I have a right to make copies, and nobody else has a right to make copies, but that does not equate to a right to prevent others from making copies, especially me, a person who has a right to make a copy. That's not to say that copyright protection is illegal, it's just not a right.
- CamperBob2 2y agoThey do not have a right to prevent infringement. In the US at least, that right is explicitly granted in our Constitution. ("For limited Times," LOL.)
- eikenberry 2y agoThe right of a limited monopoly does not include a right to make that monopoly permanent by locking it up.
- CamperBob2 2y agoYes, rightsholders should be forced to choose between legal and technical protection. They should not be allowed to use both, because DRM on copyrighted material steals from the future public domain. No, that won't change while either of us is still drawing breath. The courts continue to maintain that rightsholders are entitled to make their monopoly permanent.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago> Yes, rightsholders should be forced to choose between legal and technical protection. This is not a serious argument because there is no doubt that they would choose legal protection, since the technical protection would never hold. It doesn't even hold as it is, when circumventing it is illegal. The answer is much simpler: There should be no legal prohibition on circumventing technical protection. It's completely inane. If the circumvention is happening in order to infringe copyright then the infringement is already unlawful and doesn't have to be separately unlawful as a circumvention. Whereas if the circumvention is happening in order to exercise fair use or because the DRM system is restricting a work no longer under copyright, it should certainly not be illegal to circumvent it then. So it has no legitimate purpose. Either the technical measure holds on its own (unlikely), or the legal protection should be coterminous with any resulting infringement and the technical measure should be irrelevant.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago> The digital lock is a matter of conflicting rights. They have a right to prevent infringement of their copyright; you have a right to make limited copies. So in this analogy you have a house with two rooms in it, you have a right to one room and they have a right to the other, but now they've put a lock on the door to the whole house. That puts them in the wrong, does it not?