Copyfight

Donna has been very busy recently because she's been working at the EFF on an endagered gizmos campaign, where they have generated a list of technologies in three categories - extinct, endangered and saved - and given a background on each. Nice idea. The things that originally got me interested in intellectual property was the RIAA's attempts to get a digital music player called the Rio outlawed in the late 1990s.

I was irritated at the time that the music industry wanted to ban a neat bit of technology and hadn't given any thought to the complexity of the issues surrounding intellectual property and the anxieties induced in the industry by the evolution of digital tehnologies.

I started to look into what exactly was going on with that case and nearly 6 years later I'm still absorbed. It's a fascinating and crucially important area for the future of our information society and as an added bonus, you come across all kinds of interesting people and ideas. And just looking at an extract from one of those links, Cory on drm again:

"But counterfeiting gangs who engage in "illegal copying" and
"piracy" -- that is, the sophisticated criminal enterprises that
operate in the former USSR and elsewhere to stamp out billions of
fake CDs and DVDs -- are unfazed by these systems, because they
are, in fact, sophisticated attackers. They are, in fact, not
average users. This commercial piracy is the only activity that
clearly displaces sales to the studios and the labels, and it is
precisely this kind of piracy that DRM cannot prevent.

As to average users engaged in file-sharing, they, too, won't be
foiled by this. Rather, they will be able to avail themselves of
songs, movies and other media that have had their DRM removed by
sophisticated users. They need not know how to hack the DRM
wrappers off their music, they merely need to know how to search
Google for copies where this has already happened.

And that is exactly what they will do: they will bring home
lawfully purchased CDs and DVDs and try to do something normal,
like watch it on their laptop, or move the music to their iPod,
and they will discover that the media that they have bought has
DRM systems in place to prevent exactly this sort of activity,
because the studios and labels perceive an opportunity to sell
you your media again and again -- the iPod version, the auto
version, the American and UK version, the ringtone version, und
zo weiter. Customers who try to buy legitimate media rather than
downloading the unfettered DRM-free versions will be punished for
their commitment to enriching the entertainment companies. That
commitment will falter as a consequence.

Finally, these systems are *never* limited to "illegal copying
and piracy" -- rather, they contain measures to enforce
non-copyright restrictions like region-coding (movies bought in
the US can't be watched on UK DVD players) and restrictions on
backup and format-shifting. These activities are *not* illegal or
piracy, but they are just as readily restricted by these systems
as indiscriminate file-sharing."