July 11th, 2007
Fair Use
According to an article over on Ars Technica, today is the 3rd annual Fair Use Day. On the project website for the event, advocates celebrated EMI’s dropping of DRM from its digital music sales and the cracking of AACS, though they also for some reason threw net neutrality into the mix (not interested in touching that discussion right now)
I’m of two minds about fair use. On the one hand, I want to be able to copy all my DVDs to a computer so that I can make them available through a Media Center PC (as an example). I’m a writer, and I regularly lift whole paragraphs from other people’s articles (with references, of course). Citations are common in the printed word. If I wanted to play a segment of a popular song or a snippet from a copyright-protected movie in a low budget film I create, however, I would need to license the rights to those snippets from the copyright holder. Worse, copyright lasts 70+ years…an eternity in media.
I want to be able to play my media on any device. Since DRM is a hindrance to that, DRM is a problem.
On the other hand , DRM was created to stem a problem in digital media, which is that it is incredibly easy to make millions of perfect copies and distribute them to anyone with a connection to the Internet. Organizations such as “The Pirate Bay” are exuberant in their flouting of copyright laws. Such groups aren’t advocates for fair use. They are advocates for theft, shrouding themselves in the legitimate demands of media consumers everywhere as they distribute music, video and software, for free, to anyone who knows how to access it.
What is the solution? Given the demonstrated impossibility thus far of making bulletproof DRM, there are a couple of options.
A) Culture: Basically, create a culture that respects copyright, within normal limits, such as the ability to lift - and alter - portions of a created work, or copy it / consume it on any device.
It’s not a one-way requirement. Copyright holders would need to agree to limit the scope of copyright, not just in use, but also in time. 70 years is simply way too long.
That’s a tall order. Ignoring for the moment that companies aren’t likely to agree to shortening copyright periods, changing habits is hard to do. Rule-abiding Sweden and Germany are in the vanguard of a pirate culture, and even if subliminal messages all around the world worked in concert to insinuate respect for copyright, they would be rowing against the tide, as barriers to access to pirated copies of digital works are incredibly low.
Picket fences keep miscreants off your lawn, even as it doesn’t stop those who really want to walk barefoot through your flower patch from doing so. Modern technology deprives copyright holders of even that much protection, given the record speeds at which the latest DRM technology gets broken.
B) Give up: In other words, accept that musicians will make most of their money from concerts. No credible option has been suggested as to what moviemakers are supposed to do, as movies can’t be live events (We don’t need no steenking big budget films, so says the millions of people who made the premier of Transformers the highest grossing weekend opener, ever).
A sea of middle fingers from content creators and companies is the likely response. This, I think, is the silliest of the alternatives, though every time I write a blog on this topic, someone brings it up as a serious consideration.
C) Advertisements: You can’t escape them anymore. If a threshold is ever crossed and copyright infringement starts to threaten the survival of media companies, I expect to never see content without advertisements interwoven into the fabric of a movie / music clip. This would not be removable (though it may be possible to overlay it with something else) as the content it replaces simply no longer exists.
I’d prefer option A. Option C is more likely, however, unless someone makes a super-DRM that can’t be cracked. Of course, that would interfere with all the user-friendly fair use principles I advocated at the start of the blog.
What a stupid tug-of-war.
John Carroll has delivered his opinion on ZDNet since the last millennium. Since May 2008, he is no longer a Microsoft employee. He is currently working at a unified messaging-related startup. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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