The Federal Trade Commission is requesting comments regarding DRM for a Town Hall meeting on the subject to take place on March 25th in Seattle. The deadline for comments, however, is Monday, February 09, 2009.
Here is a brief description of the request for comments from this form:
Digital rights management (DRM) refers to technologies typically used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, and copyright holders to attempt to control how consumers access and use media and entertainment content. Among other issues, the workshop will address the need to improve disclosures to consumers about DRM limitations. Interested parties may submit written comments or original research on
this topic.
What follows is my comment, submitted shortly before I posted here.
There are many problems with copyright law as it currently stands, and DRM in particular. I am sure that you will be getting many long and detailed comments, so I will keep this one short and try to cover only my main objection to DRM and especially the special status granted to DRM under currently copyright law (i.e. the DMCA).
First I must state that DRM is an attempt to mechanise law enforcement. This basically abrogates the presumption of innocence under the law. However, philosophical objections aside, DRM fails in two ways. In statistics, these are called “type I error” (or “false Positive”) and “type II error” (or “false negative)”.
As applied copyright protection, this means that DRM both fails to prevent the determined criminal — strike that, the even halfway competant criminal — from making copies (type II error) while at th same time it prevents law-abiding citizens from actions that would otherwise be allowed under basic copyright law (type I error).
Basically, it fails to accomplish it’s stated goal of preventing piracy, and it prevents citizens for excercising their fair use rights regarding the material. DRM is doubly deficient and the additional protection for DRM mechanisms themselves over and above the protection of the material granted by copyright is a gross violation of … well, sanity with regard to copyright.
It is past time for the protections granted to DRM mechanisms by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) to be scrapped.
There are certainly many other problems with both the current copyright law, and DRM, but you can't cover everything in one comment, and to attempt to do so dilutes the impact of the points you are attempting to make.
If you have thoughts on the subject, please submit your comments here:
https://secure.commentworks.com/ftc-DRMtechnologies/
So as someone who can and does use the various P2P sites I suppose me and the others fall under the 'halfway competent criminal' definition. I find this vaguely gratifying. All this DRM anti piracy hysteria also fails to take into account those people like me who use these sites to download music we want to try before buying. I've got a list a mile long of cd's to buy..its freakin scary. And finding music that is hard to find anymore outside of p2p sites and used bookstores. Of course the p2p sites have their own foibles and problems..downloading any software is likely to get you an uninvited guest in the form of assorted virii. Which is why I don't do video that much anymore and software never.
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