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US Register of Copyrights Says DMCA Is 'Working Fine'
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Sep 18, 2007 04:26 PM
from the i-feel-a-lot-better-now dept.
from the i-feel-a-lot-better-now dept.
Linnen writes "CNET News.com writer Anne Broache reports that the head of the US Copyright Office considers the DCMA to be an important tool for copyright owners. '"I'm not ready to dump the anticircumvention," [Register of Copyrights Marybeth Peters] said in response to a question from an audience member who suggested as much. "I think that's a really important part of our copyright owners' quiver of arrows to defend themselves." The law also requires that the Copyright Office meets periodically to decide whether it's necessary to specify narrow exemptions to the so-called anticircumvention rules. (Last year, the government decided it's lawful to unlock a cell phone's firmware for the purpose of switching carriers and to crack copy protection on audiovisual works to test for security flaws or vulnerabilities.)'"
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Who do they work for? (Score:4, Insightful)
Its a lie (Score:5, Insightful)
These days, authors usually don't retain the copyrights on their works. Their publishers get them.
I don't know if this is true of bookwriting, but it is true of music. Also, chemical/scientific patents of any form are usually held by a large corporation that provided funding, rather than the scientist/engineer who created it. The same goes for most non-open-source software. Also, the wealthy production companies wind up owning the copyrights on movies....not the actors, musicians, painters, stuntmen, scriptwriters etc.
So....in general...the talent doesn't own the work, but rather the investor owns the work. Hence, it is the investor that gets special treatment (which seems to amount to control over the private property (hardware) of millions of consumers across the globe) So these laws do not protect the workers so much as the large businesses that pay them.
It's just another case of the rule of the rich.
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Re:Its a lie (Score:5, Insightful)
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It gets worse. (Score:5, Informative)
And this person is in charge of copyrights?
You know, there's a HUGE difference between a book and a DVD.
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Re:It gets worse. (Score:5, Funny)
You couldn't be more right. When you burn a book, nobody can read it. But when you burn a DVD, EVERYBODY can!
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Re:Who do they work for? (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as I've been following these stories, it all comes down to people not really selling you anything anymore but a very restrictive right to rent something.
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DMCA is indeed working fine! (Score:5, Insightful)
DMCA was designed to protect copyright, and it is protecting it.
The question we should be asking ourselves is whether or not copyright (the way it is righ now) is protecting public interest.
Incorrect (Score:5, Insightful)
First, the DMCA was designed not to protect copyrights, but to extend them... far beyond what was allowed by law before.
Second, it is not "working fine". I think most people agree that it has done a shitty job of "protecting" anything except Corporate interest in a defunct business model. Further, it has hurt the market, consumers, and industry in general. If you want to know how, see the "unintended consequences" report on the eff.org website.
Copyrights were established to encourage the arts and sciences, in order to further the public interest in these fields. Those are the words that were used when the laws were first established. Copyrights were allowed for a limited time, so that people would have an incentive to create original works. After that, the public gets them. But the main interest has always been that of the public! The problem was that the public could not just take what others created, because then individuals would have no reason to do the creating. Copyrights were a compromise.
Today, certain copyright laws exist in the interest of not the public, but of private interests who want to preserve those rights and profit from them forever. That is NOT in the interest of the public, and was NEVER the idea behind copyright or patent law. Until now.
The DMCA and similar laws passed since were always bad ideas. I would say that they have outlived their usefulness, but I think it is obvious now that they were never really "useful" to society in the first place.
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The True Legacy of the DMCA (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, and they have been using those arrows to shoot consumers and researchers full of holes. Look at how the DMCA has been used in practice since its inception: suing makers of compatible garage door openers, suing manufacturers of printer ink cartridge refills, suing university researchers, and basically causing substantial legal hassles for anyone that the copyright holder doesn't like (most of the cases are eventually thrown out). Meanwhile there are still 1-2 dollar DVDs available at flea markets, bazaars, and on street corners just about everywhere, downloads are still going full tilt, and legitimate customers are being harassed while the commercial pirates are not even inconvenienced. The bottom line is that we, as a society, have paid a high cost for this DMCA without achieving any noticeable progress towards the goals that it was designed to address. The DMCA clauses which make reverse engineering illegal under any circumstance which is not specifically granted an exemption for fair use need to be repealed. The burden should be upon the copyright holder to prove that the specific instance of reverse engineering is being used to infringe their copyright, not upon the reverse engineer to prove that whatever they are doing is not infringement.
Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA (Score:5, Interesting)
But this is *not* the whole story.
I'm a content creator. I make small downloadable PC games. Nothing big time or fancy, but it *just* pays the bills. Like anyone who produces content that can be representated digitally, I often encounter people pirating the stuff I make. When you work long hours for a year to make a game, and take your own cash and hire artists and other contractors to provide work for you, all 'on spec' hoping to one day make the investment back, finally produce some original content, and release it for sale (with a demo, a very liberal end user licence, and no intrusive DRM), and then you find some people deliberately copying the game and distributing it for free, you are NOT a happy man. Some of these people go out of their way to constantly reupload the pirated stuff, despite polite requests, and numerous attempts to get it removed. They actually go *out of their way* to try and wreck your business.
Like everyone, I have to pay the bills. I'm not a big evil corporate entity. If my games sell well, I can afford a holiday, If they don't, I'm not going anywhere, and fingers crossed, I can still pay the rent. Quite a few small software devs are in a similar position.
So how does the DMCA help?
The DMCA means that if I find someone sharing illegal copies of stuff, there is a well-understood and documented procedure to get that stuff removed. I've issued a number of DMCA requests, and they have mostly been successful (Don't kid yourselves the piratebay give a rats ass about content providers). I'd wager the *vast* majority of people who complain about abuse of the DMCA have never actually seen what's involved in issuing a takedown. I have to provide my real address, phone number and email address, identify a *specific* file that breaches, AND state that I am claiming that it infringes, knowingly on threat of perjury if I am wrong. This generally has to have a proper signature and be sent by fax. No anonymous web forms here.
You do not issue a DMCA request as a small time author unless you are damned sure that there is a clear-cut case of copyright infringement. Without the DMCA, it would be harder for me to get pirated content removed, and harder for upload sites and ISPS to verify I am the legit copyright owner. The DMCA simplifies and organises this process.
Have some big companies abused the DMCA? you bet they have. Does the fact that in a few cases the law has been abused and stretched to do bad stuff invalidate the whole basis of it? No way. The DMCA is absolutely necessary. People who file misleading DMCA takedowns should be prosecuted for it. And people who knowingly breach the DMCA by distributing other peoples work without permission deserve to be prosecuted too.
I will get modded down and flamed to death here at slashdot for giving the other side of the story. Nobody ever sticks their head above the parapet and challenges the idea that the DMCA is bad, but I feel it needs to be said. Unless you are an anarchist / communist who believes copyright should be abolished, then you have to accept that we need a law that spells out the way in which copyright can be enforced. It's not perfect, no law is, but right now, the DMCA is that law, and it's better than nothing. Most reasonable people who find that they agree that 99% of DMCA takedowns are entirely justified. The media, especially at slashot and digg and boingboing focuses 100% on that tiny abusive majority.
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Re:The True Legacy of the DMCA (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice job, there's now a smouldering crater where that straw man used to be. As far as I know, the conventional wisdom on Slashdot isn't that copyright should be abolished completely, or made unduly hard to enforce. Many of us are copyright holders.
Speaking only for myself, I object to the DMCA because it lacks concrete provisions protecting fair use; academic analysis, review, parody, copying for backup, time-shifting, transfer to other media. I submit that a copyright law which lacks those provisions is deleterious to the public interest far out of proportion to how much it might benefit copyright holders like yourself, and that it should be scrapped altogether until such time as a suitable law can be adopted.
We might even have an interesting debate on that point, i/e the relative value to society of strict copyright versus fair use. But to characterize the landscape of this issue as "Support the DMCA or support widespread, bald-faced piracy" is disingenuous.
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Marketing Tagline for US Gov't: (Score:5, Funny)
And In Other News... (Score:5, Funny)
Has It Ever Worked? (Score:5, Interesting)
I know the general opinion of the DMCA here on /. (and I tend to agree). That said, I have a question I wonder if anyone can answer. We hear lots about DMCA abuses (partly due to the standard thoughts on it). Can anyone point to one or more big cases where the DMCA helped and the person/people wronged would have been without recourse before the DMCA that aren't abuses?
Every time I hear about the DMCA it is being used to do something stupid or flat out illegal under the act (after all, just claim it as a reason for anything and many people will back off). Is anyone actually using it successfully and correctly where it provides a tangible benefit from before the act was enacted?
I think that is the litmus test of if it really was useful or good.
But as long as the RIAA/MPAA/whoever else get to "use" it to fix "problem" then it is "working."
Re:Has It Ever Worked? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's important in cases like these to differentiate between the DMCA's take-down/"safe harbor" rules and the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision.
The take-down rules probably ARE a reasonable balance between copyright holders and ordinary joes; certainly that's YouTube's position. Under the DMCA take-down rules, YouTube can't be sued for hosting illegal material, but rather the copyright holder (e.g. Viacom) has to send take-down letters specifying exact material to be removed. Users get notified that their material is taken down, and are allowed to send counterclaims to defend themselves.
It's not at all clear what would have happened in that case without the DMCA; the DMCA came into existence partly to make it clear/formal what should happen when people violate copyright online. In a material sense, I don't think YouTube could exist unless the DMCA existed, in the sense that I don't think they'd have big investors (e.g. Google) willing to risk their money without the DMCA's safe harbor provisions. (Without the DMCA, YouTube could argue in court that they ought to be treated as a safe harbor, but they'd be on considerably shakier grounds.)
The anti-circumvention provision is the one that totally sucks. That's the provision that says that you aren't allowed to develop and distribute tools to circumvent DRM. (It's also the one that impacts researchers the most.) The point of that provision is simply to discourage people from developing and distributing DRM cracks. Since it's supposed to act as a disincentive, you wouldn't expect to find a big public "example" of it working; you'd expect fewer cracks to be developed and for those cracks to be criminally penalized when they are made available.
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Unintended Consequences (Score:5, Informative)
I might disagree with the EFF in one respect, though: I do not believe that ALL the negative (from a consumer point of view) consequences were unintended. On the contrary, I think that industry lobbied Congress to put some of those provisions in there, with full knowledge of what it would do.
Prime Example (Score:5, Insightful)
Normally I think the headlines are inflammatory... (Score:5, Interesting)
FYI She still opposes DVD watching and she is a self-proclaimed Luddite and doesn't own a computer.
That someone who doesn't own a computer has been put in charge of regulating the high tech sector of the second largest economy in the world frightens me to the same level that the horse lawyer put in charge of terrorist and emergency response did after the Katrina fuckup.
Where do they find these people? Is it the same type of process by which they find jurors who have never seen or heard any news for years for high profile cases? Ms. Peters, have you even read a book? No. Have you ever seen a computer? No. Have you ever visited a library? No. Do you know what a library is? My papa said it's a den of reds! Yes quite correct, now the next question, do you know what a Television is? No. Are you sure? Yes. Ms. Peters, you're HIRED! But I'm just here on a field trip.. Never mind that, you are now in charge of the technology sector of our economy. Make sure you listen to this guy from the RIAA and this other guy from the MPAA, don't worry they will tell you exactly what to do. Yes, Sir Chaney, Sir! Whatever you say, Sir!
DMCA Protects the Little Guy (Score:4, Funny)
Copyright works for content creators, and the DMCA covers my back. I like the DMCA.
Unforseen Consequence (Score:5, Insightful)
I want to buy a DVD, take it home, and rip it to my hard drive, then store the DVD itself in my closet. Then I want to stream it to the media center connected to my TV. That is to say, I want to give them money and then use the video in my own home. I don't want to share it with friends, I don't want to sell it, and I don't want to waste my bandwidth sharing it with the world. I just want to watch it without having to deal with the physical disk.
Alternately, I could buy a movie download. But then I would still want to use my own media player, not whatever software they thought I should use, so I would still have to circumvent.
However, thanks to the anti-circumvention clause, I might as well skip the money-to-them part and just pirate my movies. I'm breaking the law either way.
Re:Duh (Score:4, Insightful)
eventually created a market where you *must* buy the product
Well, "must" might be going a bit far. I mean, we could all just live without music or movies. Of course, we could also live without the internet, computers, electricity, running water, houses, and civilization in general. A person could technically survive living in the woods, gathering berries from the local plant life and things like that... I guess.
On the other hand, I think you're right that people won't always be given the choice of a "better product". There are situations where it is simply not in the best interest of a company to produce a better product, particularly when a single entity (or several colluding entities) control a market.
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Re:Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately even that option is not possible. In what woods would this neo-primative live? I sure hope it's property that he owns, and has a fund setup to pay property taxes in perpetuity. I hope he doesn't ever what to have children, because the state would take them away. I hope never encounters the police, as they may well assume that he is some kind of homeless squatter and haul him away, perhaps after tasering him for resisting arrest. I hope the local county doesn't pass any ordinances on minimum house size, or lawn maintainence. One of the most annoying problems that the modern America has is that they don't know how to leave people alone, even on their own property or concerning their own property.
Living in or even beside society requires a steady stream of money, and that usually means a job, and that increasingly requires a mobile phone, and quasi-fashionable clothes, and transportation. Consumerism isn't entirely optional, and the more you have to deal with society, the less optional it is.
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Re:Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Duh (Score:4, Funny)
Tell that to the guy who designed Betamax.
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Re:stupid slashdot 'editors' (Score:5, Informative)
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