A legal compromise on copyright: it's time again.
Free Culture just announced its winners for an anti-DRM video contest. For my mother: DRM, or digital rights management, is a collective term for measures that restrict the use of digital products—everything from the little tab on a VHS tape that keeps you from recording it to another tape, to computer programs embedded in a music file that “phone home” to its manufacturer to determine if the listener is violating its terms of use. DRM can limit the number of times a CD can be copied. It can force a DVD to work on only in a DVD player sold in the United States. It can allow a song file to play on your computer but not in your iPod. It can delete a TV show from your computer after an amount of time you have no control over. Or, if badly executed, can destroy your computer altogether.
DRM was created to combat copyright infringement, which it does, but poorly. Just like popping the tab off that VHS tape, a person can circumvent every kind of DRM with a little creativity and patience. The lucrative arms race to create unbreakable DRM, however, has led content providers to radically redefine what it means to “own” a piece of writing, music, or video, as illustrated in this Free Culture contest-winning video:
In their vigilance to combat copyright infringement, content providers created a cultural regression: for the first time, content that you purchased legally has had some of its fair legal uses stripped away. An example: just as it is legal to record a TV show on your VCR in your living room and watch it later with a VCR in your bedroom, it is legal to buy a song online and burn it to a CD—who wouldn’t want to listen to that same song in their car and not just on that one computer? But with DRM, that’s not possible. In the name of protecting copyright, a fair, legal use of a thing you own has been negated. Content providers are protecting their value in the product at the expense of yours, in some cases breaking your hardware or violating your privacy to do it.
The common response to this situation is, well, the rules of the game have changed in the digital era—yes, the value of the album I bought is lessened, but I’m happy to pay less for it in the first place. That’s how the economy works.
True, but culture doesn’t work that way, nor do the necessities of, you know, being human and needing to express yourself or listen to and share someone else’s expression. The use of DRM presumes that there are content providers and individual consumers (or “end users”). This has never been the case with art. Indeed there are providers—musicians, painters, photographers, and the thousands of varieties of distributors. But the consumer of art is not an individual; it has always been a group. Name a favorite song that you haven’t wanted to share and, doing so, didn’t find immensely more meaningful, more valuable? Subversion of this fact of life is the essence of DRM. It is the artillery in a war on community, a war waged explicitly upon the simple act of sharing. Again, as a Free Culture award-winning video demonstrates:
The History, and Future, of Copyright
What we have is a classic battle over the definition of copyright, one that goes back at least as far as the eighteenth century. My girlfriend just shared an excellent essay with me on the history of copyright (“Literary Property Determined” by Mark Rose) that covers how the English and Scottish created the modern concept of copyright—that creators own the right to produce and profit from their creations for the length of their life plus a number of years (at first thirty). The original English system granted copyright in perpetuity: Shakespeare held the copyright to his own works, for example, and his descendents inherited it, allowing, say, the words to Macbeth to be, in essence, physical property to be passed down or sold.
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