The power company used to have analog meters on the homes. These required a monthly visit by a meter reader. The analog meters were replaced by remotely read electronic DRM’d meters. Now there are no meter readers visiting the neighborhoods. As result the theft of electrical power has skyrocketed, offseting the savings in meter reading many times over.

Apparently the power company did not realize that the meter readers kept theft under check. An obvious thing.

To offset the theft (and rise in petroleum prices), the rates for consumption of electricity have been increased. This has further increased theft.

If you ask me, it is DRM gone haywire. It always does.

The far more likely future will be that at some point the work loses economic viability. At that point it will be thrown out of the back catalog and the storage vaults to make room for more valuable works to the cartels. However, no penalty is on the copyright holder to hold on to that work for public domain. The reason for the grant of copyright is to allow the holder a “limited time” protection to gain economic benefit. The copyright is the only reason it doesn’t start out as public domain and all works will eventually revert to this status. The most likely fate is that the original work will never survive intact to make it to public domain as it is now.

One of the points that should be part of the copyright law is that when it reaches the point of no longer being economically viable it should then become public domain. The holder should be required as part of the terms of copyright to maintain an original work for relinquishing into public domain libraries for public access at the end of the term of the copyright.

As it is today, nothing is making it into public domain unless the author willingly allows it.

“b) Attempts by copyright holders to encode their content so that they can only be accessed on devices which have specific TPMs applied to them. This should be understood as a violation of basic competition/anti-trust laws.”

Under these terms what kind of DRM scheme would even be feasible? Are we talking about the owner of a playback device having to agree to “install” a TPM on said device in order to access certain content?

If a file is “locked”, then anyone who is intended to receive it must be given the key for them to access it. Otherwise the CD that the locked content is on is just a coaster. This means that some people have the keys, and some people don’t. This is no different than books where some people have the book, and some people don’t. Those who don’t have the book just have to buy one.

Digital locks used in this way for content are no different than putting physical books in locked stores, something that should not be seen as controversial.

All of the problems with DRM, including what you mention, come from two things:

a) TPMs applied to devices by other than the owner of the device. This should be clearly illegal, as it is a circumvention of basic property rights.

b) Attempts by copyright holders to encode their content so that they can only be accessed on devices which have specific TPMs applied to them. This should be understood as a violation of basic competition/anti-trust laws.

If simple property rights on communications technology are protected, meaning that only the owner of the hardware is allowed to apply or authorize a TPM to be on their hardware, then none of the problems you mention can happen.

Check out the petition, and promote it to anyone you know who is a Canadian citizen or who is currently living in Canada.