Media Center not yet a home run

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Very good post, agree on all points.

Another problem with DRM is that it allows the copyright holder to change the terms of the sale after the product is sold. But I do not believe that copyright holders are ethically entitled to do this, or that Copyright Law was ever intended to give the copyright holder this much power. (Evidence for the latter belief can be found in the law and case history, which is what the doctrine of First Sale was intended to prevent.)

Essentially, this sort of thing is what EULAs are good for: creating a legal fiction that one needs some "license" to use one's own property and that all sales of copies of intellectual property are not really sales of goods, but only sales of licenses. DRM, however, help the copyright holder enforce this paradigm technologically.

If you scan down various EULAs with varying onerous terms, most of them will state something to the extent of: "Vendor may change the terms of the EULA or conditions of use at any time and without notice."

That means that $15 you bought for a song might be for "unlimited play" one day, but suddenly reduced to "playable 3 times, any more requires further payment" the next. And you'll never win in Court since the copyright holder has so much power once contract law enters the game.

Basically, copyright holder will:

- Take away the fact that when you buy a copy of art, its your copy. Once the notion of property and ownership has been restated on their terms, they will
- Use contract law to remove any legal protections or rights to use the content that you currently enjoy now. ("Oh.. you legally and voluntarily promised that you wouldn't assert your rights to First Sale and Fair Use... I guess we'll just have to take away your right to use "our" stuff. No refunds, of course.")
- Use technological measures (DRM) to make it difficult for you to exercise your rights and freedoms. You might have that right to Fair Use, but most people won't be able to exercise it because most people aren't engineers that can unlock the DRM.
- Make unlocking the DRM illegal, even if you're doing it for legal reasons. The DMCA already does this.
- Make it illegal to sell players and recorders that give the user more functionality. Normally, market forces and capitalism will result in larger sales for devices that do what the customer and user wants. But since copyright holders are trying to go for monopoly rents, capitalistic society and behavior needs to be stopped legally.

No where in Copyright Law is there a moral or ethical reason that grants the copyright holder the power to say "I own it, you're only paying me for a limited permission to view it on my terms, and I can change the terms anytime I like." And I do not believe there are many people in the world who say that the creator of some intellectual work is ethically entitled to this much power. But DRM goes around all of this by technical brute force.

The end result of DRM is simply:

- Pirates will continue to break the system, rip the art, and mass produce it.
- Honest people, who realize they've been scammed of their hard earned money by onerous DRM schemes, start investigating how to unlock the content they legally purchased. (You already see this with cracks for computer games today, since people generally hate putting in the "original CD" every time to start a game.)
- There will be no increase in creative works. Like the parent mentioned, it isn't like creators are sitting on this huge vault of "stuff they would've released if piracy wasn't around or if DRM wsa available".)
- If DRM actually worked, there will be a decrease in creative works since the public domain will be non-existent. Do you honestly think the copyright holder will willingly give the keys to unlock the content once the copyright expires? (Assuming that copyrights will actually expire?)

Cheers!

Posted by: Root User   Posted on: 01/06/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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