[opendtv] Death by DMCA
- From: Monty Solomon <monty@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: undisclosed-recipient:;
- Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2006 23:51:34 -0400
Death by DMCA
By: Fred von Lohmann and Wendy Seltzer
IEEE Spectrum
June 2006
A flood of legislation released by the passage of the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act threatens to drown whole classes of
consumer electronics
In 1998, U.S. entertainment companies persuaded Congress to make
dramatic changes in its copyright code by passing the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA gave copyright holders new
rights to control the way people use copyrighted material and new
protection for technologies designed to restrict access or copying.
The movie and record companies argued they needed these new
restrictions to fight increased piracy threats in the digital era.
In the eight years since the DMCA's passage, however, piracy has not
decreased, and hurdles to lawful uses of media have risen. The
Motion Picture Association (MPA), the international arm of the
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), estimated worldwide
losses because of piracy to be US $2.2 billion in 1997 and $3.5
billion annually in 2002, 2003, and 2004.
Meanwhile, entire consumer electronics categories have been wiped
from retail shelves. If three or four years ago you didn't buy a
digital video recorder that automatically skips commercials, you're
out of luck; that feature is not in such products today. Television
executives brought litigation that bankrupted the company offering
DVRs with these user-friendly features, because skipping commercials
potentially undermines their ability to sell commercial time.
You're likewise out of luck if you're looking to buy software that
lets you copy a DVD onto your laptop's hard drive; it's no longer
for sale, at least not in the United States. Even if you want to put
the movie you bought onto a pocket-size video and game console, such
as Sony's PlayStation Portable, which allows users to watch video
stored on flash memory or a miniature hard drive, you can't legally
do so, because you'd have to "rip," or decode, it to make the
transfer-and the studios claim that this action violates the DMCA.
When you rip a CD, be it to an audiotape or an MP3 file, you're not
breaking any laws. But to rip a DVD you need to somehow get around
the encryption technology built into a standard disc, and since such
circumvention is forbidden by the DMCA, if you rip a DVD, you are
breaking a law. Under the DMCA, legality doesn't depend on how the
copy will be used but rather on the means by which the digital
content is copied.
Now, in an even more vexing situation, U.S. entertainment companies
are successfully spreading the copyright code changes established by
the DMCA around the world. Laws similar to the DMCA now exist in
Japan, Australia, and much of Europe. At least nine additional
countries, including Chile, Guatemala, and Singapore have also been
pressured to enact DMCA-like laws as part of a devil's bargain with
U.S. trade negotiators, who say the copyright change is necessary to
secure free trade pacts with the United States that would govern all
sorts of commerce. And in Europe, the body charged with defining the
European digital television standards is mixing in
content-protection obligations, responding yet again to pressure
from major U.S. movie studios.
Emboldened by their successes, U.S. entertainment companies are
pushing for another wave of even more restrictive legislation.
"Broadcast flag" legislation could require that all consumer
electronics devices recognize protected television broadcasts and
potentially refuse to copy them; a so-called "radio flag" bill would
prevent or restrict the manufacture of hard disk recorders for
digital radio; and an "analog hole" closure would restrict the
connections new digital devices can make with analog devices.
As the entertainment industry expands copyright law, the rising tide
threatens to completely wash away many types of innovative gadgets.
...
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jun06/3673
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