Professor Ed Felton’s Freedom to Tinker weblog is an excellent resource for those of us concerned about copyright, Digital Rights Management (DRM), and the survival of Fair Use. As I noted before, rightsholders were pretty successful in getting the DMCA passed 5 years ago; this law tilts the playing field drastically in favor of folks like the RIAA. Here’s a real-world example.
Big Music hates the idea that you can copy your CDs to your computer and share those files. Actually, they hate the idea that you can even copy the files to anything, since every copy you make, to them, represents a lost sale (a wholly false assertion, but never mind that for now). Consequently, they’ve been working for years to figure out a way to copy-protect their CDs so that digital reproduction is, if not impossible, then very restricted. These efforts have not met with much success; quite famously, one copy-protection method tauted as “the best ever” a year or so ago turned out to be circumventable with a green sharpie.
Well, they’re not giving up (notwithstanding the “success” the software industry has had with copy protection; many of you may remember what a PITA that was with the likes of Lotus and dBase 15 years ago). SunComm has released what they insist is the most secure anti-copying technology yet.
As it happens, Prof. Felton cites a paper today pointing out that you can probably circumvent it by holding down the shift key in Windows when you load the CD. (He’s citing this, which is an interesting read.)
The not-so-interesting part? Publishing this paper may well be a criminal violation of the DMCA, since it contains information on how to circumvent a copy protection scheme. Does this sound right to you? No? Well, that’s the DMCA for you. It doesn’t matter what you plan to DO with the copy — e.g., putting tracks from a CD you own on your iPod is just as bad as uploading them to a thousand college kids via Kazaa. All they’d care about is that you circumvented their copy protection, and that’s illegal — and criminal, not civil.