[LINK] Digital useright

[Michael Sims]

I see that the digital useright - not 'copyright' - debate has hit Link, 
and the same old canards are being trotted out to defend it.

A) "Other countries are doing it."  A very, very, common tactic.  If other 
countries jumped off the bridge, would Australia jump too?  If legislation 
was introduced requiring Australian women to never leave their homes 
except veiled and in the company of a male relative, would defenders jump 
up and say, "But Afghanistan is doing it!  We should too!"?  This is an 
incredibly hollow argument, even were the premise true - and it's not, 
everyone else is not, in fact doing it (only a few countries have these 
circumvention bans in effect).

B) "We're just trying to target pirates."  Au contraire.  The RIAA in the 
United States has admitted that the DMCA is intended SOLELY to target end 
users - the people reading this email message right now.  Mass duplication 
of music CDs or any other media is not an offense under anti-circumvention 
laws!  Mass duplication is accomplished by pressing an entire CD at once, 
an exact duplicate of a commercial CD, and so if you started with an 
encrypted work that could be decrypted by a special player you get a 
copied encrypted work that can be decrypted by a special player - and the 
player can't tell the difference.  There is no need to decrypt encrypted 
works in order to committ large-scale copyright infringement - DMCA-like 
laws don't affect such actions at all.  DMCA-like laws are intended for 
use against the home consumer.  That is their only purpose and reason for 
existence.

C) "Nobody objects except the lunatic fringe."  On the contrary.  Hundreds 
of organizations have opposed the U.S. DMCA, which is now being litigated 
in the U.S., ranging from librarians to academics to cryptographers to 
computer science professors to civil liberties groups to journalists.  
Follow the links in this story -

http://slashdot.org/yro/01/01/31/185228.shtml

- to read some of the briefs submitted in the court case opposing the 
DMCA.  This is, to put lightly, not a lunatic fringe.

D) "As long as I don't copy anything, this doesn't affect me."  Not so.  
DMCA-like laws are not about copying.  Their purpose is to give copyright 
holders the ability to control what end-users DO with lawfully obtained 
copyrighted works.  While no one can prevent you from reading a paper book 
while standing on your head, if your digital book contains a sensor that 
knows when the book is upside down and disallows reading in such a 
circumstance, it will be illegal under DMCA-like laws to turn off that 
sensor and allow you to read the book upside down.  This example sounds 
silly.  But this example generalizes to any situation where computer code 
can control the use of a copyrighted work - if you break that code to 
allow yourself to use the work in a different way - even if you never make 
a copy of the protected item, just USE it differently - you're breaking 
the new law.  And there are so many situations where code can be 
implemented to control usage that the mind boggles.  You already have 
several examples: DVDs that are region-limited, DVDs where you can't 
forward past the advertisements, Microsoft software that can only ever be 
installed on one computer - even if you remove it from one machine, you 
can never install it on another.  There will be many, many more.  None of 
these are beneficial to the end-user of copyrighted works, only to 
copyright holders.


I hope this adds a bit to the copyright debate.  Australia's citizen and 
consumer groups may be ignoring the impact of the law so far - perhaps 
they didn't realize, perhaps they tried and failed, whatever.  But what 
people are about to find is that a lot of the activities you do every day 
- none of them described by the word "copying" - are or will soon be in 
violation of the law.  At that point, you'll have to decide whether to 
fight for your right to use lawfully purchased copyrighted works in the 
manner of your choosing, or just knuckle under.

-- 
Michael Sims