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.
"
It should be obvious by now (Score:3, Insightful)
As for the RIAA, I strongly disagree with their methods and their tactics. But, in the end, they are protecting the companies who fund them. And quests such as not buying CDs in order to protest the RIAA only result in more justification for the RIAA to encourage cracking down.
In my opinion, the only legitimate option that the RIAA is pursuing is litigation. Litigation is where the Copywrite battle is fought, and it should have remained in the first place.
Re:I haven't read the article (Score:1, Insightful)
moderators, troll this luser.
Well, So What? (Score:5, Insightful)
The bathwater should be carefully checked to make sure no baby is contained therein before throwing it out. DRM often being overly restrictive, easily bypassed, or otherwise inneficient does not mean that there should not be some _Rasonable_ system in place that prevents misuse, and only mis-use. In the slashdot crowd-- and I find myself, as part of it, falling victim to this at times-- DRM is often spoken of in a context of its being inherently bad and undesireable. Truthfully, and effective and fair DRM system just might be what is truly needed.
Interesting comments wanted; trolls need not reply
ok so thanks (Score:1, Insightful)
Companies are serious about DRM. It's not going away.
As if.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It should be obvious by now (Score:5, Insightful)
No proposed technical protection measures are strong enough to sustain a determined attack. Only in combination with models where the incentives to circumvent are limited, can technical solutions succeed.
So, I read that to say that if you don't allow for reasonable legal alternatives (like, say, charging less than $20 for one decent song amidst some filler and/or providing some handy online distribution system), nothing you can do technically to prevent copying will work in the long run. Of course, that leaves legal recourse (as we've seen from the RIAA lately), but the fine article also addresses the (in)feasibility of that option.
Of course, I'm guessing the *AA will read it more along the lines of: we've gotta use the opposite approach by providing an incentive to NOT circumvent: (1) try to convince everyone that file sharing is the moral equivalent of eating the baby you just molested, (2) utilize ridiculous and broken copy protection schemes that hassle the honest-end users, thereby creating a peer-pressure factor, and (3) emit a constant barrage of shotgun-style lawsuits to maintain a nice atmosphere of fear.
I dunno why these nice smart folks bothered to make this fine paper. For some of us they are preaching to the choir, for others their words fall on deaf ears.
Re:It should be obvious by now (Score:2, Insightful)
Amen
There are places that could use that level of protection I am sure. But lem them choose for themselves!
DRM is nothing more vender lockin on a grand scale. Be it software or a distribution channel.
All this talk of DRM and IP are giving me heart burn. I remember when people in the "computer biz" and "software game" wanted to be better then then the common 1900's businessman. Well in that we have failed... we have take unethical to a new level. God help us all.
Wipe that meme: The EFF isn't promoting licencing (Score:4, Insightful)
Other EFF board members include John Perry Barlow [eff.org] [also associated w/the Grateful Dead] and John Gilmore [toad.com], neither of whom would endorse systems that require DRM. Beyond that, the EFF's general vibe of promoting online privacy and the right to anonymity would make the EFF incompatible with DRM systems.
I think that this bad meme (that the EFF wants C.L.) got into Slashdot a few months ago when an article covered the talk an EFF staff member gave on compulsory licencing. Talking about it or listing it as one method of compensating artists != endorsing it, but that confusion was made.
Re:Well, So What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but to be fair, it has to respect the entire letter of the law. Not just "you can't copy/modify this, its mine", but everything. From (mostly theoretical, these days) copyright expiry to provisions made for fair use exceptions and changing legislation.
DRM as often spoken of is useless at best and harmful at worst. There might be some gems hidden there, but I doubt that allowing Holywood and Microsoft to follow through with their Evil Scheme of the Month is going to bring them to the surface.
Re:As if.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Intellectual property is fascism.
Now, I'm sure we both realize that the previous statement was roughly meaningless and designed only to incite emotion. The point is that yours is the same. Copyright is a legal construct in the first place. It does not exist independent of the government's creating it.
But moreover, I don't see how it is socialism in any case. Socialism implies that the means of production are owned by the government. Umm, in this case I guess that would mean that the content producers were owned by the government? Or their equipment, perhaps? Nope, none of this is making any sense.
Well, you've made it quite clear what your opinion is, but you haven't really given any reason for anyone else to accept it. My point of view is that compulsory licensing has at least this benefit: it stops the "arms race" between file sharers / traders / copyright infringers (however you want to look at it) and the RIAA / MPAA. While I think the technological aspect of this "arms race" may actually produce technologies which are interesting and useful in their own respects, the legal "arms race" is much more troubling, as very questionable law is being enacted at the request of the side that evidently donates more money to political campaigns.
Compulsory licensing does mean that you can't "write a song and sell it at a price of [your] choosing", but the way I look at it, you didn't have a right to do that anyway. You currently have the ability, yes, but that ability is only justified (in the USA, by the Constitution) to be granted to you to "promote the progress of science and useful arts".
And yes, I realize you were probably just trying to get a rise out of me and the many Slashdotters who think as I do, but the point is that there are real, legitimate issues here. Most people accept copyright law because it's what they're used to, but the fact is that when you look carefully, the foundations for it--especially in its present form--are pretty shaky.
One interesting point raised by the linked-to article, which you did not address, is that in a compulsory-licensing system, the producers have an incentive to try to fake the system. That honestly hadn't occurred to me. I think this can be solved, say by having rankings signed with a public-key system, and I think the solution would be simpler and less Draconian in implementation than trying to get DRM on everything, but it is worth thinking about.
DRM - Damn Rapacious Marketers (Score:5, Insightful)
It really comes down to how much it will cost to do DRM and the cost of getting around it. The costs are not just monetary - but may include a complex tradeoff of penalties and benefits in many areas - including culture, the legal system, personal privacy, fundamental human rights and so on.
Since corporations and hence their hired thugs in government don't much care about things like human rights, personal privacy or culture (realisticly, things are not set up to encourage them to do so, so why would we expect it), they will always make their decisions on the basis of corporate self interest - which is usually short term profit these days.
There is almost certainly a place for DRM on some level - it encourages and rewards creative artists of all sorts (though the best artists seem to do their thing anyway). The problem is that as soon as we allow any serious IP protections (as DRM or whatever), there's no control on what the people who want to make profits can do with it.
I worked for a company whose game plan was to sell a product for less than $100 - the product was in large part IP of one sort or another. Once the marketers got hold of it, the price was inflated to the $1500 range. Not because it was worth that - but they thought they could charge that much and get away with it. I had figured out how to do a cheap DRM scheme that would be just hard enough to break to make it cheaper to just buy the product (at the $100 mark). Shortly thereafter I left the company - with the DRM scheme still unimplemented.
That kind of thinking "We can get away with charging that much" is pervasive. But its also problematic - just by charging that kind of inflated price, the marketers are providing higher motivation for people to find ways around paying the prices. Monopolistic practices (even in the small - one company holds the contract for the current top musical sensation) tend to exacerbate the problem. Now they want to impose DRM - worse yet they want to do it with the government's legal system - which means that they get the benefits (ability to raise prices, impose conditions...) but everyone else gets to pay the price.
If there were no serious DRM, but downloading a permanent copy of a song cost (say) a dime, there'd be no incentive to break DRM - and most people (I suspect) would go along with it and its not hard to believe that the music industry would be the better and with smaller distribution costs, the artists would probably be better off. But when we allow and legally support DRM it is both an incentive to the industry to charge as much as it can, and an incentive to consumers to find ways to break it.
Worse yet, we now have corporations that seem to have determined that they are owed a certain amount of money every year - and who are willing to pass laws to ensure that they get it. Essentially they want to tax us to ensure that their incomes stay where they'd like them to be.
Given all this, I see no reasonable alternative but to ban DRM completely - but I suspect the corporations will have their own way and we'll end up spending $10 to listen to a single song three or four times. The interesting thing is going to be the underground that springs up to counter them - who knows what that will result in? I do quite love the law of unintended consequences.
Re:It should be obvious by now (Score:2, Insightful)
3 words: publish or perish
It's how you get a job in academia and it's how you keep it. But, it IS interesting... often the results of research seem really obvious - but someone had to take the time to put it in such a way.
Re:Well, So What? (Score:2, Insightful)
but i think it would be wrong to condemn DRMS; sure, DRMS cause legal problems mainly relating to fair usage, but those problems should put in relation to the advantages DRM bring about. it is clear that private end users primarily see DRMS as a tool which makes them eventually pay more, but from a (more important?!) business perspective, DRMS and the separation of content from the (valuable) right offers whole new business models. for instance, rights to movies can be sold to investors even before the movie is made. ex-ante fund raising is just one of the vast possibilities that DRMS can be used for.
i think once we can solve the inherent tension between fair useage and DRMS (and we will), the latter will actually be a good thing.
P.S. please keep cursing to an acceptable level.
Sure, mandatory licensing (Score:5, Insightful)
Make the [MP|RI]AA sell non-discriminatory licenses for content that's already out there, rather than allowing them to throttle the channels of distribution. That's in the spirit of copyright law, because the intent of copyright law is to put content into the public domain... pause, think... and the mechanism for doing it is to reward rights owners. So by having Joe Public distribute the content, then reward the rights owner, everybody wins, right?
Well, sure, but there's a tiny problem. It's that nobody remembers that. The publishers have a vested interest in not remembering it. In fact, they've paid huge sums of money to Congress to forget it. The DMCA, and DMCA case law explicitely refutes it. The "exclusive rights" have become paramount, trumping the intent to make the content available.
So, you make the [MP|RI]AA license content. Fine. Does that mean they have to make it available without DRM? Nope. Does it mean that you get the right to break the DRM to use it? Well, technically, if you can do it yourself without obtaining or making available a tool to do it, so, de facto, no. DMCA case law has already made this clear. Congress said that it's not legal to obtain tools even for use on content that you licensed, and the courts have (astonishingly) upheld that.
So what good does licensing do, when you can only get crippleware content, and devices that will play crippleware content, and when you can't legally obtain tools that let you uncripple it?
I applaud the EFF's intent, but defeating rampant DRM is a pre-requisite to any shake up in licensing, not an afterthought.
Re:It should be obvious by now (Score:3, Insightful)
If people don't buy CD's long enough, the companies funding the RIAA shall go bankrupt and noone is left to fund the RIAA. Then the RIAA shall no longer have money to buy politicians and laws.
Re:DRM is flawed (Score:2, Insightful)