Sole and Despotic Dominion: how a 20th century copyright law is abolishing property for humans (but not corporations)

boing
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Become a tractor manufacturer without DRM and put all those others out of business as all the customers flock to you. At least that’s the theory.

The reality is complicated. The main problem is that digital reality no longer allows us a middle ground. Napster, et al has taught us that having no DRM pretty much means that IP becomes pirated to the point of near extinction of the industry, while allowing DRM means that it will be utilized to seize freedoms that were previously in customer hands.

Honestly, I don’t see how one engineers a compromise, especially since the parties that might benefit from compromise are the ones least interested in pushing politically (or in politics in general - extremists are generally the ones willing to do the most work, the rest of us just want to get on with life).

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Scientology’s latest E-meters have, along with a heap of legal agreements, a timer to lock themselves if they don’t get a yearly acknowledgement from the mothership that the registered “owner” is still in good standing. They also control resales that way.

Their self-destruct is pretty clunky because the new meters were built in 2004 then warehoused (serial ports, lol). I expect that we’ll see IOT devices that the maker can shut down instantly if you don’t pay rent, or violate their terms, like perhaps by criticizing the company on social media. (We’re probably close on this one, if it hasn’t happened yet.)

Hopefully it’ll never come to pass that company owners can force their political or moral choices on their customers*. Technically, it would be easy to apply public data like registered sex offenders, registered voters, etc, to flip the off switch.

  • Oh wait, Scientology is already doing that, aren’t they? They’re such a trend-setter in abuse.
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I don’t disagree with your overall point, but the first part of this doesn’t actually seem to describe reality.

Not only has the music Apple sells in iTunes been DRM-free for years, but until very recently it has been utterly unremarkable for many non-digital industries (e.g. auto makers) to happily co-exist with industries whose existence depends on their use of those other industries’ “IP” (e.g. auto-parts makers).

Claiming that “DRM…means that IP becomes pirated to the point of near extinction of the industry” is the strategy some businesses use to “seize freedoms that were previously in customer hands.” The desire to employ DRM is what drives the claim, not the other way around.

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Making it legal to crack DRM might be such a compromise. Not like we’ll ever see it while the DRM maximalists have deep pockets full of lobbyists.

Really, when you get right down to it, DRM isn’t about “piracy” anymore anyway. If indeed it ever was. Leaving aside stuff like toasters and tractors, nearly every major media that rely on DRM were cracked from here to Tuesday years ago. Want to move your Kindle library to your Nook, or vice versa? (Or keep a copy of that ebook you “checked out” from the library?) Apprentice Alf. Want to rip your DVD or Blu-ray so you can watch your movies on your handheld without futzing about with Ultraviolet? AnyDVD + Handbrake.

(Yes, that’s right, even the DRM that paranoid Hollywood intentionally breaks every few months, necessitating new firmware for everybody and headaches for people whose Blu-ray player manufacturers can no longer issue new firmware, is effectively useless to prevent piracy.)

People who read ebooks or watch movies and want more power over the content they “buy” (ahem, license) need not let it slow them down for a second. Just like sex, nobody will be able to tell they’re doing it within the privacy of their own home. But so sad about all those security researchers or tractor mechanics who need to be able to do the act on an open stage for all to see.

And, honestly, do you think the publishing and media industries don’t know this by now? At this point, preventing piracy is just a thin fig leaf anymore. It doesn’t take everybody being able to crack DRM for piracy to flourish—just the people with the technical know-how to crack ebooks and rip movies and then upload them to peer-to-peer for everybody to download.

If it were really about stopping piracy, where are the pushes to throw out old, broken DRM formats and update them with new, pristine (for the moment) ones that will once again protect their stuff from casual cracking (until they get broken again)? I haven’t seen any lately. At a guess, the media providers know those will just be cracked, too, making all the time and expense put into implementing a new one nothing but a big exercise in reducing their own profit margins.

What it’s all about now is making it hard for the majority of their customers to escape their grasp. An ordinary person who is not a tech geek will have a hard enough time figuring that stuff out that they figure it’s less trouble just to go with the flow. You can’t have businesses pop up that migrate content professionally. And, as with the printer example in Cory’s article, it’s also about stifling competition.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think business interests should be able to write their own laws for the sake of stifling competition. Unfortunately, that’s what we got in the DMCA. Whether Cory will really be able to clear that up, however, is anybody’s guess. As I mentioned above, Lessig and Eldred struck out when they tried to knock down a terrible pro-media-business law.

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Bounce your knee off their pelvis a few times, then follow up with a headbutt to make sure they stay down.

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Obviously nothing is going to stop piracy dead. The best anyone can hope for is to throw some sand in the wheels so losses aren’t so bad. The more sand you throw, the lower the losses (and the more you freedom you cost the populace). Note, this is pretty much like any crime - you don’t ever expect to stop murder. But you can make it more difficult to do so and to get away with it, but again, the price is loss of freedom/privacy.

My point is that you cannot expect any side to be reasonable. My feeling is that DMCA has cut losses to piracy substantially as well as unleashing companies to expand it way beyond what was intended. More to the point, I expect any freedoms the consumers win back to be immediately exploited to maximize losses to the industry.

Admittedly, my views are colored by watching Napster drop music sales to my tech-averse company president from perhaps a few thousand dollars a year to zero almost instantly. Then talking with high-school students who made it clear that spending several thousand dollars on a computer entitled them not to pay for content, and attitude that persisted well beyond the demise of Napster. It was pretty startling to poll a class of upper-middle-class high-schoolers (the only ones who would own computers at the time) to find not one that had actually purchased music.

Even now, I see these switch-overs in my workplace where piracy hits a certain level of convenience, and suddenly (especially among the younger-but-not-tech-savvy set) it simply becomes stupid to pay for stuff you don’t have to. Then the popular/easy site finally gets closed down, and people go back to buying movies or series occasionally.

As far as I can tell, piracy no longer has any moral cost to about 70% of the population. The willingness to pay is strictly motivated by convenience, and if it’s only slightly less convenient to pirate, they’ll pirate (and pay a thousand bucks for computer + Internet good enough to do so).

In an atmosphere like that, the industry is left trying to use every tool at their disposal to make piracy just that little less attractive/convenient. (After all, their competition is literally free.)

And then, of course, use those tools that are passed to defend them to push for entirely unrelated restrictions…

As I said, I don’t see how there are many compromises available.

Well, if this graph is anything to go by, extinction is obviously an exaggeration (even the Hong Kong movie industry still exists as a shadow of its former self), but it’s not pretty. ($71bn to $26bn? Ouch!)

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My point is, the industry isn’t doing the sort of things you’d expect them to if their main use for DRM was to “stop piracy.” Their DRM hasn’t been capable of stopping piracy for years now, but they haven’t yet tried to fix it. (Well, except for Apple. Apple’s always been pretty gung-ho about keeping its DRM uncracked. That may well be part of why they wanted to go DRM-free in music; they wouldn’t have to keep pouring money into that particular arms race.)

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I’m not certain about that. The actual content owners are trying (and burdening us with), all sorts of DRM with respect to library books, breaking keys on Blu-Ray, video game DRM, etc. It’s obviously only somewhat effective, but as I said, it’s all about a little more sand (if a measure reduces piracy 1%, then its a win for them, not matter what the cost to us). Likewise, they prosecute high profile court cases to make people a little jittery (which works surprisingly well given the number of non-techies/informed I’ve heard express some sort of concern.)

I’d say the industry is taking most of the practical (and a fair number of impractical) steps to reduce (not prevent, reduce) piracy.

The main exploiters of DMCA aren’t really about protecting content at all, but about inventing new revenue streams. Honestly, I don’t think most of the content industry is technically savvy enough to introduce whole new revenue streams based on DMCA and DRM. It’s printer, tractors, etc. where we’re seeing some real abuses of the original intent. (To be honest, I think DMCA is pretty much irrelevent for the music industry. It’s movies (and perhaps books) that gain a little from DMCA at the cost (which they don’t care about) of enabling all sorts of other abuses.

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Wait a marmite, wasn’t a ruling by the LOC set to give security researchers a 2 year reprieve?
https://threatpost.com/dmca-exemptions-lift-hacking-restrictions/121782/ (Hack ya car, hack ya mobi.) No. No, it was the Copyright Office. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2015/10/28/2015-27212/exemption-to-prohibition-on-circumvention-of-copyright-protection-systems-for-access-control
Everything else still in the IoIT (Internet of Inhumane Things?) Seemed like some measure of Cory gloating was due, but it’s a 2-year measure only (to DMCA section 1201, says,) so far. Promised to gloat on new adult audiences book, Overclocked, I guess.

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It probably depends upon what one hopes to use ownership to facilitate. I see the goal as being the management of our collective resources. So, from this perspective, the models I encounter of ownership tend to be quite static and self-centered. This makes property “utopian” from a certain perspective, because it will never accomplish what I need it to do.

Your question presupposes a bit when you refer to property as “our” current world paradigm. A common assumption with regards to such systems seems to be that they are naturally one-size-fits-all, so one system needs to be put forth which fits “everybody”. I think that is neither likely nor desirable. A plurality of paradigms seems more realistic.

So long as human’s systems for managing the planet “just happen” to resemble instinctive primate desires and hierarchies, the results will be destructive. Because the traditional models of property and territory are exteriorizations of the human psyche instead of the needed awareness of the world itself. The real priorities are ecology first, society second, and individual third. The only ideology behind this is that we move from supersets to subsets. An individual can hardly survive without their society, and certainly not without their ecology, so that prioritization has no future to it.

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