UCB Researchers Critique DRM, Compulsory Licensing 158
An anonymous reader writes "
In this
paper, Berkeley researchers critique a host of cockamamie DRM schemes, and
they also question the compulsory
licensing approach recently being promoted by the EFF. They get into some
of the practical details about compulsory licensing that no one else seems to
be talking about like technical feasibility, incentives to cheat, monitoring for compliance, efficiency of collection and distribution of funds,
privacy, fair use, feasibility of legal enforcement... Anyway, it's worth
a read and is a useful contribution to the debate, whatever side you're on.
"
Re:I haven't read the article (Score:5, Informative)
which is GPL'd.
So you probably won't go to GNU/Hell for reading it, in your friendly local xpdf or konqueror or whatnot.
Text of the PDF paper (Score:5, Informative)
As someone who hates that disgusting Adobe PDF format (why people can't publish in HTML after all this is the web right ?) here is the text of the pdf..
A Framework for Evaluating Digital Rights Management Proposals
Rachna Dhamija
UC Berkeley, SIMS
rachna@ sims. berkeley. edu
Fredrik Wallenberg
UC Berkeley, SIMS
fredrik@ sims. berkeley. edu
Abstract
In this paper, we analyze the strengths and weaknesses
of the various solutions to compensate intellectual property
rights holders. Specifically we look at digital rights manage-ment
(DRM) based systems, extensions to DRM to support
fair uses, monitor-and-charge schemes, compulsory licens-ing
schemes and alternative business models.
Our main contribution is to provide a framework from
which current and future proposals may be evaluated. In
order to realistically evaluate any compensation scheme, we
suggest that the following questions are important to ask:
Is the proposal technically feasible? What are the incentives to circumvent legal and techni-cal protections for all parties in the transaction?
What is the burden of monitoring for compliance in the system, and on which parties does this burden fall?
What is the efficiency of the collection and distribution of funds from consumers to rights holders?
What are the impacts on user privacy and fair use? What is the feasibility of legal enforcement, both do-mestically and internationally?
1. Introduction
Over the last few years the debate over protection, or lack
thereof, of copyrighted works has flourished. Proposals on
how to reimburse the creators of these works range from
strict proprietary encryption locks to new business mod-els
that rely on revenue streams from ancillary products.
Each new proposal points out the shortcomings of previ-ous
schemes and highlights the benefits of its own solution.
However, no consistent framework exists for analyzing the
different solutions.
In this paper, we analyze the strengths and weaknesses of
the various solutions. Specifically, we look at DRM based
systems, extensions to DRM to support fair uses, monitor-and-
charge schemes, compulsory licensing schemes and al-ternative
business models. From this comparison, we extract
important dimensions such as technical feasibility, incen-tives
to cheat, burden of monitoring, privacy, and the feasi-
bility of legal enforcement. Our main contribution is to pro-vide
a framework from which current and future proposal
may be evaluated.
Digital Information as a "Public Good" Economists
sometimes refer to certain goods as public. This does not
imply that they are in the public domain as defined by intel-lectual
property law. Rather, a public good is a product or
service that has two properties. First, it is non-rival, which
simply means that consumption by one person doesn't limit
consumption of the next. Second, it is non-excludable, im-plying
that once the product exists, the benefit cannot be
limited to those that have paid for it.
Ideas and information captured in physical media tradi-tionally
fall into some middle ground. While the informa-tion
itself certainly has the characteristics of a public good,
the physical media that it is tied to is rival and exclud-able.
This gives rise to business models involving the sale
of physical artifacts whose only value is the embedded in-formation
such as books, CDs and DVDs. These business
models have taken a serious blow with the introduction of
information in digital form combined with communications
media such as the Internet. The question at hand is whether
or not it is possible to devise a scheme under which money
can be transferred from those consuming information goods
to the providers of the same.
We use the characteristics of a public good to distinguish
between the following classes of proposals to compensate
intellectual property rights holders:
In case of slashdotting... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wipe that meme: The EFF isn't promoting licenci (Score:4, Informative)
Compulsory licensing is not DRM, so your comment doesn't make sense. Compulsory licensing means that license holders (the "evil" record companies) are compelled to license their material - and compensated for it, of course. It is basically what makes radio possible.
How it would work in P2P is that there would be some measure of which songs are being shared, a sort of Nielsen Ratings for P2P. Then the license holders for those songs would get paid in proportion to how popular they were.
What would fund them? Possibly the good old modem tax, or some similar measure that charges people who do a lot of file sharing more than people who do less. Read this article by EFF attorney Fred von Lohmann [dailyprincetonian.com] to hear it from the horse's mouth.
You are totally off base in thinking that the EFF does not support compulsory licensing. They have been pushing that "solution" for quite a while now.
Personally, I think it is a terrible idea, and I'm glad to see someone has finally given it a good public roasting. Hopefully the concept will die a quiet death and the EFF can get back to protecting people's privacy instead of forcing them to pay a modem tax and putting the government in charge of paying artists.
HTML version now available (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Text of the PDF paper (Score:3, Informative)