Jennifer Urban and Cory Doctorow spoke in tandem at the December 14 DIY Media seminar. I will post separate entries, although their presentations were closely related.
“DRM is broken,” Urban declared, at the beginning of her talk about “Bits will never get harder to copy: the limits of copyright online.” (Apparently, according to a separate report, Bill Gates agrees) The problem, as the graphic below illustrates, is that until DRM started building legal restrictions on the use of cultural products into the hardware used to access those products, the relationship between technological capabilities, laws, and social changes was flexible enough to allow copyright laws to evolve with the times. When radio came along and enabled the broadcast of music that had previously been accessed through live performance or sheet music, the legal remedy of compulsory licensing enabled rights owners to be compensated and for a new medium for musical performance to grow. DRM, together with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which criminalizes circumvention of DRM measures, puts an end to that flexibility by instantiating in technology a social agreement that used to be mediated by courts: “DRM stops the change process” that been evolving since the establishment of copyright laws.
“Fair use,” fundamental to education, scholarship, and the arts, is broken because the rights holder, not a legal process, determines the boundaries, and “DMCA makes breaking DRM to enable fair use illegal.”
In addition to the social damage caused by cutting the legal system out of the process of determining the limits of licenses for cultural products, Urban pointed out that DRM leads to disasters like the Sony rootkit fiasco, in which hundreds of thousands of Sony CDs were distributed with DRM protections that installed malware on the computers of people who simply wanted to listen to music — compounded later by the exploitation of the malware by hackers.
Jennifer Urban is a Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center and a Clinical Associate Professor of Law at USC. She teaches Intellectual Property and classes related to Technology Law and Policy. She also is the Director of the USC Intellectual Property Clinic, where students learn intellectual property law through hands-on work with cutting-edge, real-world projects. She is a faculty member of the USC Center for Communication Law and Policy.
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The Berkeley Center for Law & Technology (BCLT) and the Berkeley
Technology Law Journal (BTLJ) announce our 11th annual symposium,
“Copyright, Digital Rights Management Technologies, and Consumer
Protection.” The symposium — hosted by the UC Berkeley, Boalt Hall
School of Law — will take place on March 9-10, 2007 at Boalt Hall.
We are excited to bring together distinguished members of academia,
industry, and government from around the nation and abroad for this
year’s symposium. We hope that such a diverse gathering will raise the
level of discourse on DRM law, technology, policy, and consumer
rights.
The conference website is located at
http://www.law.berkeley.edu/bclt/copyright/
Registration by fax is now open. On-line registration will begin in January.
Please direct questions to David Grady at bclt@law.berkeley.edu or
(510) 642-3702.
Good argument, and one which complements the now-classic Darknet model.
I’ve been thinking that we need to rename “fair use,” because it’s not a very evocative term. “Unauthorized use”? “Unauthorized access”?
Sony BMG settles suit over CDs
Over-limiting DRM management (such as the Sony rootkit or the new Vista rules) will always only really hurt the legitimate buyers who won’t be able to transfer their music or videos (for their own use) from device to device.
The pirates will be able to crack anything eventually (I’m sure they’re working on the terribly broken Zune as I write) but those who choose not to crack are crippled.