p2pnet.net News:- I find it frustrating when I read articles like the one in The New York Times about how the French constitutional council, the country’s highest judicial body, has declared major aspects of the recent digital compatibility law as unconstitutional.

I suspect it’s based on some myth that this law was misappropriating some property right that Apple has when, in fact, it’s Apple that’s circumventing the property rights of its hardware customers.

Most non-technical people (and some technical people) have been misled about what so-called “DRM” does.

While there’s a technical measure that’s applied to digital content so the content can only be accessed on “authorized” hardware, the root of the controversy is about the hardware and not the digital content.

Device manufacturers believe they should be able to exert ownership rights (IE, control what people can or can’t do with the hardware) after it’s sold, and those of us who recognize the need to protect property rights believe that the rights of the manufacture must end at the point of sale.

I believe that where the technical measure is protected in law, what Apple is doing is state sanctioned theft.

This isn’t about copyright infringement of content that’s purchased from iTunes, which is the myth Apple has spread, but about the tangible property rights of those who purchase iPods.

Russell McOrmond – p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He's also the CLUE policy coordinator.]

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 31st, 2006 at 2:15 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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