Why Should I Care?
So you don’t have an iPod and you think this doesn’t affect you right? Well you would be wrong. You own a DVD player? Well, almost every DVD (if not every DVD) has some sort of DRM on it today, DRM that will prevent you from making a backup copy. I have a colleague that has a few small children. They love Disney movies and when they are release to DVD he buys them that day. Before he lets his kids watch them, he makes a backup copy and puts the original away. The kids inevitably destroy the copy and so he makes another copy from the original. By law, he has the right to make a backup copy of his media. This is called Fair Use and has been in practice for hundreds of years in the US. But wait, there is a new law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA). This law makes it illegal to circumvent anti-piracy measures built into digital media. This includes DVDs, Audio CDs, eBooks, any software package, etc. This law undoes what hundreds of years of Fair Use law enabled.
You don’t own any of those things so why should you care? These laws are not bound only by everyday media. There are cases where Lexmark, a computer printer manufacturer, tried to copyright the “software” in their toner cartridges that said when it was empty. They sued a 3rd party cartridge maker who made compatible ink cartridges saying they infringed on their rights. Luckily the courts found the defendant innocent but what if they hadn’t? You would be forced to pay high retail costs for proprietary ink cartridges with copyrighted software. There are cases where garage door manufacturers have claimed the software in their openers is copyrighted. Say goodbye to aftermarket openers. Car manufacturers are saying the software in their cars is copyrighted. What will the hot-rodder and modders think when they can't tweak their cars? The DMCA is being used as a tool to lock out competition. Being sued is an expensive undertaking and there are a number of companies that won’t even work on something they feel could potentially get them sued for DMCA violations. This law is not protecting rights holders and is not being used as Congress intended.
What about your right to sell the items you purchase? This is called Right of First Sale. It basically states that once a work has been purchased, it is yours, and you are free to sell that work. Ever try doing that with an iTunes song? You can’t. In fact, there was a recent case were someone tried to sell a single iTunes song on eBay. eBay removed the auction stating that it violated their digital distribution agreement. Why couldn’t this person sell the song? He paid for it. If he bought the CD he could legally sell it. Why should this be any different? The answer is that it shouldn’t but because of the DMCA, it is now illegal.
What about the region encoded DVDs? For those of you that don’t know, every DVD has a special “region flag” that says where it can be played. When you buy a DVD in the US and try to play a DVD in a US player, it checks the list of country flags that it will play and if they don’t match, it won’t play your DVD. Why? There is no copyright law that mentions anything about geography. It won’t play because the movie studios have invented this nifty business model and the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent it. Pretty sweet deal they have going. Create new business models and then enact laws to back them up.
As you can see, everyone wants in on this game. Everyone wants to secure their own private piece of the pie. History has shown us that the DRM technologies are becoming more and more restrictive not the other way around. They aren’t enabling users with more freedoms, quite the contrary; they are taking away those freedoms at an alarming rate.
DRM is not only bad for consumers but it is also bad for businesses. DRM trades long term success for short term sales. Cory Doctorow, who I consider to be the most outspoken and respected opponent of DRM, talks about how people will gravitate to Peer to Peer networks and other illegal download networks (Dark Nets) to do what they have “traditionally” been able to do with Fair Use; i.e. making backup copies or transferring from one format to another. It doesn’t take someone who is technically sophisticated; just someone who knows how to use any search engine on the internet. It’s hard to blame people for doing this because these illegal copies are easier to work with, they don’t have the restrictions of legally obtained media, and you can transfer them to whatever format that suits you best.
For these reasons you should care. As technology becomes a larger part of our daily lives, it will only be a matter of time before something that you know and love will be adversely affected by DRM or similar technologies. The difference is that by the time that happens, it may be too late to change it.
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