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RIAA lawyer: DRM’d music shouldn’t have to work forever
July 30, 2009 | 4:12 am
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By Chris Meadows
Ars Technica provides yet another great example of the fundamental disconnect between the mindsets of media producers and consumers when it comes to the issue of Digital Rights Management (DRM).
The DMCA exemption hearings (which Ars earlier quoted a copyright attorney calling a “theater of the absurd”) have moved into their next stage, and Steven Metalitz—an attorney representing a number of rightsholder groups including the RIAA and MPAA—has responded to copyright office questions as part of the process.
The responses concern the way consumers can lose access to DRM’d media they purchased if the company that sold the media leaves the business and shuts down its authentication servers. An outcry arose over Wal-Mart’s plan to shut down its DRM servers last year, and as a result Wal-Mart extended the servers’ life—but they will still be shutting down in October, 2009.
One of the requested exemptions to the DMCA is to allow consumers to crack the DRM on media facing this kind of obsolescence. Metalitz doesn’t see any reason this request should be granted.
"We reject the view," he writes in a letter to the top legal advisor at the Copyright Office, "that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works. No other product or service providers are held to such lofty standards. No one expects computers or other electronics devices to work properly in perpetuity, and there is no reason that any particular mode of distributing copyrighted works should be required to do so."
It is strange that Metalitz does not consider that we do expect paper books, phonograph records, compact discs, and all other un-DRM’d forms of media “to work properly in perpetuity”—at least failing physical damage to the media. We do not lose the ability to read the printed books in our library if their publishers suddenly fold.
How much longer will consumers tolerate this sort of “let them eat cake” attitude before fomenting a revolution?
Technorati Tags: riaa,mpaa,dmca,drm,hearings,copyright,wal-mart,Metalitz,Steven Metalitz,Ars Technica
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Comments:
Perhaps this shows the real motivation behind DRM schemes?
With physical objects, they can rely on normal wear&tear to lead to repeat purchases.
For digital data, they may feel they have to force the equivalent through DRM, so that they can sell the same thing to the same people over and over again.
The things Mr. Metalitz is comparing DRM’ed content to, there is a subtle difference. Electronics have grown in capability and decreased in value and price over time. My first desktop PC had a 1 Gigabyte hard drive, a pentium 90 cpu and cost around $1800. Today the closest comprable item to that I can come is http://www.pacificgeek.com/product.asp?ID=106617&C=220&S=1176 and its $29.99. That means a comprable item holds a retail value of 1.6667% of what it once did. When I was the same age I could buy a cassette of my fave band for $7.77, given the average album then had about 10 songs thats $.777 each song. taking our 1.6667% to that means that now the typical album of 10 songs should cost $1.295. Thats right because the content isn’t necessarily more valuable because I could be buying that same album.
So please by all means if you’re going to compare your commodity to another then accept the good with the bad. Modern electronics are cheap and disposable, as are the contents protected by DRM.
The lawyer’s arguments are egregious but his central assertion is interesting and deserves some thought. He says that perpetual access to content should not be required because, “No other product or service providers are held to such lofty standards.” It is true that physical damage to media is inescapable, and it happens much more quickly than the thermodynamical law of entropy dictates.
Physical books deteriorate and become unreadable over time. Acidic paper discolors and becomes brittle; book pages fall out of inexpensive glue bindings. Librarians and preservationist are still working to find good solutions to these problems. For example, books can be chemically treated in batches to neutralize the paper. Also, books can be scanned to create digital files.
The time-frame for book deterioration is long enough that most consumers ignore the problem. Some books I acquired early in my life now have discolored pages and useless bindings. Yet, books that use “acid-free” paper (that is neutral or alkaline) are available and these books demonstrate superior longevity.
Other tangible media forms exhibit problems of decay. Cassette tapes jam and the spindles refuse to rotate. The magnetic tape in cassettes snaps or twists. 8-track tape collections are abandoned when players become scarce. LPs scratch and grooves wear. Old video games are discarded when next-generation incompatible gear appears.
In 1995 Bruce Sterling wrote a manifesto calling for the creation of a book about “Dead Media”. The resulting “Dead Media Project” website is located at http://www.deadmedia.org. Right now it is unreachable from my computer. Is this a temporary glitch? If the website is dead then its demise is both ironic and self-validating.
On the other hand, there are countermeasures to move embedded content forward along the time stream. Audio content can be converted from decomposing analog instances to digital files that are DRM-free. The digital content in old video game cartridges can be extracted from ROMs. The recovered data can be resurrected and played in video game console emulators. Books can be scanned.
With assistance enormous longevity is possible for content. Hence, intransigent lawyers and rights-holders must not straightjacket efforts to conserve and transform content. It must be legal to preserve ones personal collections and to preserve history itself.
Existing consumer protection law ought to be perfectly adequate here, surely? If I am told, before I buy, “You have access to your content just as long as we happen to feel like maintaining our authentication servers and not changing the rules”, then I have nothing to complain about.
On the other hand, if the seller is intentionally giving me the impression that what I am buying is a book, with all the reasonable expectations of permanence through the years that that implies, and is in fact giving me something conditional and impermanent, that is fraud.
Note that the fraud is committed at the time of sale and not at the time of switching off the servers.
Actually bringing it home to them would be another matter, of course…
Again, the RIAA stakes out a risky position, one that is likely to further alienate the demographic who is most likely to pirate material in the first place.
I think part of the problem here is that the RIAA has a fantasy that most users will repurchase the same media over and over again in a life time. I think they were spoiled by the the Vinyl to CD and the VHS to DVD transition where people happily replaced their entire libraries with the new media.
It doesn’t work that way anymore. Whether we are talking about cloud computing, or storing the media on your computer, a music or book file is just a computer file and there is no reason to believe that such files will still be readable 20, 100 or even a 1000 years from now.
If the RIAA insists that vendors should not be required to protect customers investments, nor that customers should be allowed to protect their own investment, they simply justify, in the minds of many, the pirarcy that they engage in.
If the members of the RIAA insist on DRM for their products, then they should be required to provide some sort of key escrow service that protects the customer. This is particularly true when you consider the fact that the customers who will be hurt the most by a company shutting down DRM servers are probably the best customers. A customer who bought one book and a few mp3s probably cares a lot less than one who bought hundreds.
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Bill
I think there is a misreading of the statement. Metalitz did not say consumers should not be able to keep their DRM’ed material forever. What he said was service providers shouldn’t have to provide perpetual access to something which was already purchased. If you buy a sofa from a furniture store and it later goes out of business, you still have the sofa.
I believe the issue here is that many DRM schemes restrict your ability to move the files around after purchase, so that the files may become useless at some future time. To me, this is the real issue. If I already have a DRM’ed file, but buy a new computer, e-reader, mp3 player, etc. and cannot move the file to the new device, then I have a problem if I cannot redownload the file from the service provider. This is where cracking the DRM makes sense, since it would be the only way I could continue to use something I had purchased.
I’m not really concerned with DRM schemes like eReader’s, since I am limited only by my ability to remember which credit card I used to purchase the ebook. Mobipocket’s DRM, on the other hand, is a real problem. We’ve already seen what happens to their ebooks when a server no longer provides access.
*some*body hit his or her head *really hard* getting out of the car that morning.
um. don’t people create works of music and literature in great measure *in order* to achieve a measure of immortality??? wtf!?