p2p news / p2pnet: Would you agree you can now buy digital versions of music and movies from a, "vast (and growing) online catalog"?

Half-vast would probably be more like it, but the claim comes in the intro to a The Wall Street Journal Q&A between ex-EFF staff lawer Wendy Seltzer (now a law professor specializing in intellectual property and First Amendment issues, and a fellow with Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society), and Fritz Attaway (executive vp and special policy advisor with Hollywood’s MPAA, Motion Picture Association of America).

Even if you accept the ridiculous assertion as being accurate, the "convenience has come at a price," says the WSJ, because, "Most of the digital content is packaged with technology called digital rights management, or DRM, a sort of copy protection that limits what users can do with the material."

Moreover, for those of you who’ve been labouring under the impression that DRM C.R.A.P. systems exist to stop so-called pirates from plying their wicked trades, you’re wrong. DRM exists to, “insure that most consumers will keep the deal they make with movie distributors”.

What deal? When you bought that over-priced DVD, do you remember signing anything? Or did you think you’d just paid good money for something you now owned?

Anyhow, the newspaper’s Online Journal asked Attaway to engage in an email debate with Seltzer and towards the end of the discussion, "I have not been asking for media free of charge. I have been asking for it free of usage and interoperability restrictions that go beyond copyright," says Seltzer. "The difference is critical - I fully support a market in which creators are compensated for their works, but not one in which a creative industry can monopolize cultural reference and the technology around its works.

"The copyright balance is that both creators and the public get the returns on investment, neither to the exclusion of the other. None of us creates from scratch, rather one creative work is input to the next.

"I’d gladly pay more for fully usable media. The problem is that I don’t just want to see my own creative output, but the works of the public around me. DRM hides the choices from us until we have a whole ecosystem of limited-use devices: iPods that need their songs re-purchased after one too many computer crashes; first-generation HDTVs that won’t work with the next generation of HD-DVD players; and movies you don’t realize you can’t re-mix until you have a flash of inspiration after Jon Stewart’s Oscar show.

"I would ask you how you justify DRM that does not stop the commercial pirates - we all know they use even more sophisticated copying than the still-available DeCSS - but does interfere with noncommercial transformation."

Attaway’s response? "Wendy, you have brought up what should be the key word in this discussion: balance. You are absolutely right - copyright is a balance. And DRM is essential to achieving that balance.

"Consumers should have a choice to either own a copy of a movie for multiple viewing, or to just view it one time for a much lower price. And movie companies want to provide that choice, and many more. But without DRM, every transaction would have to be priced as a sale, not just of one copy but of many copies, in order to account for unrestrained copying. Why would anyone purchase a higher-priced sale copy of a movie if he could simply rent, rip and return - that is, rent, make a copy and return the original?

"To repeat my refrain, if there is a problem, it is that DRM technology is not sophisticated enough to provide the optimum balance. The content industry is working hard with the technology industry to improve DRM and the options available to consumers. Good public policy will encourage that process by promoting the development and implementation of DRM.

"With regard to your comment that many DRM technologies can be circumvented by commercial pirates, you are correct, but DRM is not intended to prevent commercial piracy. It is intended to insure that most consumers will keep the deal they make with movie distributors. Like the lock on your door, they are not a guarantee against theft, but they ‘keep honest people honest’."

Attaway then discovers Oooops! his plane is about to take off, but, "This has been great fun," he says.

But not before Seltzer gets the last word.

"Thanks Fritz," she says. "We’re both talking about balance, but our equilibrium points are very different. You seem content if we can pay in lots of different ways to see the same movies on a constrained set of devices. I see balance in an ecosystem of big and small media and independent innovation of technologies around them. I want to see what iPod for movies and TiVo for radio look like, and not just from companies who can strike deals with the major movie studios and record labels before they start.

"DMCA-backed DRM lets the majors dictate the terms, well beyond price, on which we can use and interact with media. It makes copyright’s limited monopoly into a technology regulation, a gate on hardware and software development through which only "approved" devices can pass. More sophisticated DRM will not improve that problem, just make the approvals more onerous and the range of consumer electronics smaller.

"Nobody wants a door lock that locks its homeowner out too often. The law can support DRM in the short term, but as more and more honest people trip against its restrictions on their noninfringing activities, I predict they’ll press Congress to change the law to allow for creativity in media and technology again."

(Thanks, Brian)

Also See:
The Wall Street Journal - ‘DRM’ Protects Downloads, But Does It Stifle Innovation?, June 20, 2006
C.R.A.P. - Apple and its C.R.A.P., March 24, 2006

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 20th, 2006 at 3:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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