The Good & Bad of DRM (Digital Rights Management) Technology on Future Video Formats (1 Viewer)

[Aaron_Brez]

You're right. My wording was clumsy.

 

[AaronMK]

That same arguement could be used to conlclude that any technology that allows even a single copy to made is against the law. Can any MP3 player know whether a track was legally ripped from a CD? Does that make MP3 players illegal even with laws that prohibit copyright infringement?

No technology can have oracle like capabilities!! The government is not so stringent that when it determines whether a product fits within the law, only products that could not possibly be used to break a law are legal.

Hollywood has laws and court precedents to prevent new technologies from posing a threat of mass infringement when they can't contract in DRM measures. Consumers should have the same kinds of protections to their ability to make non-infringing uses or their purchased content. On those basis, I think laws that prevent protection measures from impeding on non-infringing uses are very reasonable. While I can agree to disagree on whether there should be such laws, I think your claims that protection measures could not possibly exist within them are extravagant.

 

[JeremyErwin]

If it doesn't infringe, it's not a violation of copyright, and hence no breakage occurs. Now, you may have to argue your case quite strenuously, but if you prevail, the court will have recognized that the boundaries of that particular copyright do not encompass the contested acts.

Fair use is not just a permissible violation. It's not even a violation at all.

 

[ChristopherDAC]

I do have something of a handle on the history of broadcasting and recording, thanks. Did you know that some of John Logie Baird's TV broadcasts have been preserved in the form of such home recordings?

Anyway, what I'm trying to point out is that the broadcaster has a contractual relation to [or is] the programme provider, but has no contractual relation to the the home listener/viewer, or to the manufacturer of broadcast recievers. This may be different in the case of cable/sattelite TV &c., but it's a good rule for over-the-air TV. What I am suggesting is that the programme producer may have the power to require the broadcaster to certain terms, such as the inclusion of anti-copying notices [including machine-readable notices], but that does not require the end user or the reciever manufacturer to observe the terms of such notices, and I don't see any clear justification why it should.

 

[John Whittle]

The problem is, you're already in court! That means you've already had to spend a small fortune just to get that far.

I think this is one reason why the court cases on fair use are so few and far between, that's just the way the MPAA wants it. They dread any binding legal precedent that would laydown rules for fair use.

As long as it's vague--that's fine--you'll never know when the snake will strike.

The same thing happened with 16mm film collectors back in the 1970s. Everyone pointed to a legal case, but when it was researched, the appeal court had just sent it back to the lower court and at that point it was "settled" and there was no clear precedent on whether first sale had been involved or not.

The point being, in the current SMPTE/EBU standards on digital video, there are methods to id every bit of a video stream such that a compilation documentary (like we used to make at Metromedia/Wolper) would carry the id of each clip and anyone who copied it would have to pay every individual rights holder. Much cheaper for the producer than clearing the entire program through out the universe in perpetuity.

John

 

[John Whittle]

Right now this is included by contract and licensing. The DVD standards included Warner Bros. which hold several patents and the group didn't want to create the same problems they felt they had with Beta/VHS. So they were involved in the creation of the format and the manufacturers went along because without program/software there would be no market for the hardware.

The CGMS-A as used by HBO (which is Warner Bros) prevents recording of the pay-per-view product.

The companies lobby so that individuals can't reverse engineer the protection and provide teeth for enforcement. There is a lobby group for consumers, the Home Recording Collation.

(And yes I knew about John Baird's discs. Unfortunately they were to be played at an SMPTE meeting and for some reason they couldn't be shown that night).

John

 

[Kevin M]

ReplayTV basically did and look at what happened to them...well..actually they died for an entirely different reason but it sounded good.

 

[JeremyErwin]

For a glimpse into just how murky fair use is, see David Nimmer "Fairest of them all, and other fairy tales of Fair Use." 66 Law & Contemp. Probs. 263 (2003).

 

[Nils Luehrmann]

In case anyone missed the news, the hearings on the Digital Transition Content Security Act of 2005 (DTCSA) held by the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property authorized the introduction of the bill to the US House Judiciary Committee, which occurred last Friday.

H.R. 4569 would require all consumer electronics video devices manufactured more than twelve months after the DTCSA is passed to be able to detect and obey a rights signaling system that would be used to limit how content is viewed and used. That rights signaling system would consist of two DRM technologies, Video Encoded Invisible Light (VEIL) and Content Generation Management System—Analog (CGMS-A), which would be embedded in broadcasts and other analog video content.

(CLICK HERE for specific details about DTCSA)
(CLICK HERE for information on both Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) & Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the sponsors of the bill.)

 

[Aaron_Brez]

Thank you, Nils. Same bill, slightly different font.

Analog-to-digital copy protection, doesn't affect analog-to-analog or digital-to-digital.

 

[Aaron_Brez]

Suggest a copy protection method which would fit your idea that it could exist (and do it's job: protect the content) and still be legal under the law you've proposed. I'll bet I can find a "fair use" argument why it prevents me from non-infringing acts, or else point out a way the protection would be rendered useless by its very legal violability.

 

[AaronMK]

If protection means prevention at the time of attempted infringement, then I would have to concede that outlawing copy protection measures that prevent non-infringing uses would have the effect of banning all protection measures. I think assurances that infringing copies can be phased out and infringers brought to justice qualifies as effective protection.


If it is for the purposes of constructive criticism, I would welcome it. Your initial response at the time, while it dealt more with why such a solution is "Not gonna happen", made a lot of valid points, as have most of your posts IMO. I would be curious to hear your thoughts on it based on whether it would be effective in providing content owners with enforcement measures without providing them rule making authority.

What combination of technology and law do you yourself feel would maintain the best balance between the interests of copyright holders and purchasers of content?

 

[JeremyErwin]

I'm in favor of the technological arms race approach to copy protection. The strength of the cop protection would lie in the strength of the underlying algorithm, and not some namby-pamby "law". This would have the side effect of encouraging technological innovation-- an important component of the American approach to copyrights.

 

[Aaron_Brez]

Your proposal was about as close as you can get to workable, and I admit that most of my objections to it are philosophical in nature and as such have no place in this debate. My biggest issue with it is the very unwieldiness of using the courts for key access, and the subsequent free-for-all once world+dog goes to court to get a set of keys. When you can choose who you give keys to, you can ensure there is a money trail and contingencies if something goes wrong; when that choice is left up to others, you have no power to make decisions based on their history or future prospects, and I (personally) think that's a violation of the "free association" clause and illegal (many judges, especially ones who are convinced that the "interstate commerce" clause trumps the 1st Amendment in this regard, would no doubt disagree).

Revocation works decently for a while, but once a significant number of keys are "in the wild", as it were, it becomes easier and easier to discover the master key, and entire regimes of copyright protection would be undone relatively quickly. While I don't see a problem with this happening naturally, in principle, I do have a problem with forcing Hollywood by law to slit their own wrists in this manner.

I would reword the description of your law, were you to propose it, from "prohibit copyright protection measures which interfere with non-infringing uses" to "prohibit copyright protection where exclusive agreements between private parties prevent other private parties from introducing interoperable devices for noninfringing uses".

The former is a blanket statement that would have the effect of making all copyright protection illegal (because regardless of whether I could buy a legal device to exercise my fair use rights, "interference" is satisfied by the very existence of something I have to surmount in order to engage in an activity), whereas the latter, while I personally think it is unconstitutional, would likely pass muster with most judges, and would accomplish what you want it to.

 

[Nils Luehrmann]

The Entertainment Software Alliance appears to have busted yet another retailer selling modded Xbox's with bootleg games:

 

[Damin J Toell]

Although this may be theoretically true, criminal copyright and DMCA infringement prosecutions are pretty much a rarity. In practical terms, civil litigation (and the threat thereof, etc.) is almost the exclusive means of enforcement of copyrights and related DMCA rights.

DJ

 

[Aaron_Brez]

Indeed. And I'd like to keep it that way (without the DMCA "rights").

 

[Cees Alons]

This may look reassuring, but I tend to cringe whem I hear arguments like that.
If it hardly ever happens (and if that very fact serves as an argument in favour), then why have the law in the first place, I'd say?
Apparently it's hardly necessary.


Cees

 

[Damin J Toell]

Well, my post wasn't meant to defend anything, really; I just find that the criminal portions of the Copyright Act get rather outsized criticism in light of their practical applications.

On the other hand, if you want me to play devil's advocate, I can tell you why those criminal provisions exist in the first place: to give the FBI an opportunity to investigate large (or even not-so-large) organized infringement rings. No individual copyright holder could or should bear the burden of investigating such organized activity, especially given that such a ring would typically be infringing the rights of numerous copyright holders. It makes perfect sense for the Federal government to criminalize the activity such that the investigatory and prosecutorial resources of the Department of Justice can be used to solve a problem that is too big to be sorted out in little civil lawsuits.

There's also surely some thought within the DOJ that high-profile prosecution can have a wider impact on the behavior of others via the publicity generated.

Civil litigation works great when, say, Dreamworks puts out a summer action film that might rip off the plot of a low-budget late-70s cult film. The majority of the information needed to pursue such litigation is literally being projected on thousands of screens around the country at one point in time. This method of protecting copyrights becomes less effective, however, when the nature of the allegedly infringing activity would require an investigation on the level of something only the FBI could realistically pull off (no matter how big, rich, or all-encompassing we typically accuse movie studios of being).

DJ

P.S. If the DOJ is reading this and is looking for copyright prosecutors, I can update my resume.

 

[Cees Alons]

Who knows he is!

This I find a very bad reason. Taken to the extreme: why not simply make everything illegal by law, to make things easier for the FBI, the police and the DA? Then don't prosecute anything the government doesn't deem a real crime, to some standards, but at least they can reasonably investigate anything they want to.

If it's their intention (and the intention of the law makers) to prohibit large-scale copyright infringement, then find a way to formulate that in a law and do not pester (threaten) individual citizens.


Cees