Copyright law is a mess
Copyrights were originally intended to encourage authors by granting them a limited monopoly on their creations. In a nutshell, if one creates an interesting work, one has the right to earn money from it - you can prohibit others from copying and selling your work, you receive the proceeds from sales and distribution.
With the advent of media giants, copyrights have become something else entirely. The interests of a company are very different from the interests of an individual, and companies never die. This has led to laws such as the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act), first enacted in America and subsequently in many other countries. First of all, the DMCA criminalizes copyright infringement (which used to be a purely civil matter). Second, it prohibits attempts to circumvent copy-protection methods - even where these methods restrict legitimate uses of the work. For example, if you purchase a CD, it is completely legal for you to copy the music to your MP3 player. But if the CD has some sort of copy protection on it, the DMCA calls you a criminal if you have circumvent this to make your copy.
What needs to be done, to return sanity to copyright law? Let's take a step back and look some underlying principles:
One important principle that has been forgotten (or deliberately ignored) by the lawmakers is this: while it is right and proper for the government to regulate what happens in the town square, the government has no business trying to control what you do in privacy.
If you take great pleasure in intricate programming, why shouldn't you crack a copy-protection scheme? If you do this at home, affecting no one else, why should anyone care. Of course, if you start distributing the result, it's a different matter - a straightforward case of copyright infringement, for which the old laws were perfectly adequate. But the DMCA is not really about copyright protection, but rather about coming into your living room and telling you what you can and cannot do on your own computer.
The second tangent: a fundamental principle of our legal system is that we are to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. And yet, on every DVD-recorder, on every copy machine the purchaser pays a fee. This fee is supposedly to recompense artists for copyright infringement. If you purchase such a device, you are presumed guilty. You cannot possibly prove yourself innocent - you must pay the fee!
There is now serious talk (at least in Europe - if it's not in the States, it will be soon), that there should be similar charges on any device capable of storing and replaying music or films. If this presumption of guilt is not offensive enough, think of the counterproductive effect. Imagine: if a teenager pays a $40 per gigabyte fee (that's the proposed amount) on a new MP3 player, said teenager is going to be damned sure to pirate at least $40 worth of music!
To summarize: the law - and enforcement of the law - should respect our basic rights. In particular:
With the advent of media giants, copyrights have become something else entirely. The interests of a company are very different from the interests of an individual, and companies never die. This has led to laws such as the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act), first enacted in America and subsequently in many other countries. First of all, the DMCA criminalizes copyright infringement (which used to be a purely civil matter). Second, it prohibits attempts to circumvent copy-protection methods - even where these methods restrict legitimate uses of the work. For example, if you purchase a CD, it is completely legal for you to copy the music to your MP3 player. But if the CD has some sort of copy protection on it, the DMCA calls you a criminal if you have circumvent this to make your copy.
What needs to be done, to return sanity to copyright law? Let's take a step back and look some underlying principles:
One important principle that has been forgotten (or deliberately ignored) by the lawmakers is this: while it is right and proper for the government to regulate what happens in the town square, the government has no business trying to control what you do in privacy.
If you take great pleasure in intricate programming, why shouldn't you crack a copy-protection scheme? If you do this at home, affecting no one else, why should anyone care. Of course, if you start distributing the result, it's a different matter - a straightforward case of copyright infringement, for which the old laws were perfectly adequate. But the DMCA is not really about copyright protection, but rather about coming into your living room and telling you what you can and cannot do on your own computer.
The second tangent: a fundamental principle of our legal system is that we are to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. And yet, on every DVD-recorder, on every copy machine the purchaser pays a fee. This fee is supposedly to recompense artists for copyright infringement. If you purchase such a device, you are presumed guilty. You cannot possibly prove yourself innocent - you must pay the fee!
There is now serious talk (at least in Europe - if it's not in the States, it will be soon), that there should be similar charges on any device capable of storing and replaying music or films. If this presumption of guilt is not offensive enough, think of the counterproductive effect. Imagine: if a teenager pays a $40 per gigabyte fee (that's the proposed amount) on a new MP3 player, said teenager is going to be damned sure to pirate at least $40 worth of music!
To summarize: the law - and enforcement of the law - should respect our basic rights. In particular:
- Privacy. As long as our activities do not directly impinge on others, they should be of no interest to the law. In your own house, you should be able to do anything you like with copyrighted material: copy it decrypt it, encrypt it, nail it to the bathroom wall. As long as your activities remain private, they are of no interest to anyone else.
- Innocent until proven guilty. No law or regulation should presume that we are going to behave illegally. We should pay no fees for infringement we haven't done. Content providers should not prevent us from making private copies (i.e., DRM) without notifying us in advance on the outer packaging so that we can choose not to buy their product. Our computers should not be able to disable our hardware because some hacker somewhere pirated content using the same model.
- A fine but important point that follows from both of the above: merely possessing illegally copied material should not be punishable. The punishable activity is the distribution: the person who copied and passed out the material. Too many end-consumers have been sued for downloading something in good faith - this should not happen.
posted by bradley13 at 03:12
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home