Quote:
Originally Posted by Harmon
The thing that needs to be remembered is that copyright is not some sort of natural right. It is a statutory right created by law. It can be abolished tomorrow.
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More precisely, copyright law represents a contractual agreement between the publishing industry (authors, publishers, resellers) and the general public, assigning most (but not all) of the right to economically exploit the value, if any, of creative work over a limited period of time. The public retains some of that right, included under the general umbrella of "fair use."
DRM must be considered in terms of whether it supports that contractual agreement, or not.
Now, the publishing industry would have us believe that the purpose of DRM is to prevent people from getting around copyright. But there are facts that show that it is actually being used for other purposes.
First, it is a fact that DRM, as implemented, diminishes the public's right to fair use. It does this on a preemptive basis, and it permits publishers to restrict legal fair use of the creative work.
Second, all the risk surrounding the definition of fair use is placed on the public, because the publishing industry is not punished if it oversteps the bounds, but the end user is.
In other words, it is being used by the publishing industry to violate the contractual agreement embodied in copyright law.
Further, the publishing industry is using DRM for an unauthorized purposes. One is to restrict competition.
But another is to force people into making multiple purchases in order to use the same content on different platforms. This is an abuse of the law. If you want to read the latest Thriller Book on your Sony and your Kindle, you must buy two copies of the same book because of DRM (unless you are sophisticated enough to strip DRM, which is not prohibited by the DRM law. What is prohibited is selling the necessary tools.)
The burden should be on the publishing industry to implement DRM in a fashion that does not violate the public's rights. It has not done this.
It does not matter that DRM might prevent theft of the content if, at the same time, it violates rights that the end user has under fair use. If DRM cannot be implemented without violating those rights, then it is DRM that must go, not the public's rights.
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This is what I find frustrating, the position by DRM advocates that anyone who has concerns with DRM is just a thief. It is time a less draconian copyright protection process is pursued, one that considers legitimate concerns of end use consumers and addresses some of the abuses you have detailed.