Tossed Salad

CNET News.com reported today on entertainment industry resistance to any changes to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and how this impedes everyone from researchers and educators right on down to you and I.

It is scary how quickly and unwittingly we give away our rights these days. Whether it is falling for the old “Remember 9/11″ ploy to gain our acceptance of domestic spying or simply forgetting the meaning of Fair Use in Copyright law. Although, I suppose that in the latter we are actually buying away our rights.

While record companies and movie studios cry to congress about how much money piracy takes out of their pockets on a yearly basis, we continue to indulge in their mostly substandard crap. Sadly enough, congress buys into their crap, passing questionable laws that make it legal for the recording and movie industries to install potentially damaging software on your computer and illegal for you to circumvent it. Not that it stops people. The fact is, these industries lose far more money spending millions to promote complete and utter crap.

So what does this have to do with Fair Use? Well, for starters, the RIAA is now postulating that if we want a CD on our iPod, we should buy the digital format music rather than rip the CD. According to the RIAA CDs can only be ripped or copied in order to create a backup in case of loss or theft. This is an complete 180 from five years ago when then said they had no problem with people ripping music for digital players. Why? Because with the sudden boom in online music sales they realized that they would be missing out on millions in sales from people ripping previously purchased CDs. Or, in one word, greed.

The DMCA has further implications on Fair Use in research, reporting, and education- several of the widely used copy protection schemes aren’t operable with all equipment, for instance some aren’t compatible with Apple’s Mac OS which is widely used in educational and research facilities. How do teachers copy an article from The New Yorker CD-ROM when it is buried in eighteen layers of copy protection?

It is abundantly clear that once again congress has sold away our rights to enrich the rich and fill their reelection coffers.

Want a better copy protection scheme? Stop concentrating on software and hardware devices that will always be circumvented (where there is a will, there is a way) and concentrate on shutting down operations that actually profit from the sale of pirated materials.

At the beginning of every DVD and somewhere on every CD is that ever amusing FBI Anti-Piracy Warning that states “The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.” What worries me more than Sony losing a few million a year to piracy is the fact that the FBI, which as we all know failed miserably at saving two thousand Americans on 9/11, spends as much time as it does making sure that MGM gets paid. And yes, I just played the 9/11 card.