Text 17513, 111 rader
Skriven 2007-04-28 07:37:56 av mike (1:379/45)
Ärende: Criminalising the consumer
==================================
From: mike <mike@barkto.com>


http://www.economist.com/daily/columns/techview/displaystory.cfm?story_id=90964
21&fsrc=nwl

===
IS IT legal to make a copy of that DVD you’ve just bought so the family can
watch it around the home or in the car? In one of the most watched copyright
cases in recent years, a judge in northern California ruled last month that
copying DVDs for personal use was legal, given the terms of the industry’s
licence and the way the copies were made.


The wider implication of the ruling remains clouded—not least because the DVD
Copy Control Association, the loser in the case, has 60 days to appeal. But
whatever the video industry may like to think, the writing is on the wall for
copy protection.

Copyright is a tricky thing. It protects only the way that an author, designer,
photographer, film-maker or composer has expressed himself. It does not cover
the ideas or the factual information conveyed in the work.

What constitutes fair use or an infringement is trickier still. Much depends on
the purpose and character of the borrowed material’s use. Limited reproduction
for the purpose of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship
and research is considered fair game. But the wholesale repackaging of the
content for commercial use is a flagrant infringement.

In America, the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 made it legal for people to
record copyrighted radio broadcasts for personal use. But while the act said
nothing about making digital recordings, ripping copyrighted music tracks off
CDs and storing them on an iPod has become an everyday occurrence. Despite the
number of iTunes downloaded for a fee, Apple would be in trouble if people were
prevented from transferring legitimately owned CDs to their iPods. The software
Apple gives away to iPod customers is designed to let them do just that.

Most people think it ludicrous that they can’t do the same with the DVDs they
own. Now it seems, despite squeals from the movie industry, the law is finally
moving in the video fan’s favour.

The issue in the recent case was whether Kaleidescape, a maker of digital
“jukeboxesö that store a person’s video and music collections and distribute
the entertainment around the home, had breached the terms of the DVD Content
Control Association’s CSS (content scrambling system) licence.

A Kaleidescape server stores digital content ripped from CDs and DVDs on its
hard drive. The content is then encrypted and fed to various screens and
speakers around the home by a secure cable. Kaleidescape claimed that content
distributed this way was even safer than it was on the original polycarbonate
disks. The judge not only agreed, but couldn’t find any breach of the
copy-protection licence either.

If the case ends there, to all intents and purposes the notion of fair use
would appear to apply to DVDs as well as CDs. The movie industry, which
nowadays depends as much on DVD sales as on box-office receipts, still seems to
think that making life difficult for its customers is a recipe for success.

After likewise shooting itself in the foot for ages, the record industry is now
falling over itself to abandon DRM (digital rights management) on CDs. A number
of online music stores such as eMusic, Audio Lunchbox and Anthology have given
up using DRM altogether. In a recent survey by Jupiter Research, two out of
three music industry executives in Europe reckoned that dropping DRM would
improve sales.

The latest music publisher to do so is EMI, which announced in January that it
had stopped producing CDs with DRM protection. “The costs of DRM,ö it declared,
“do not measure up to the results.ö

In an open letter entitled “Thoughts on Musicö, even Steve Jobs, Apple’s
charismatic boss and chief evangelist, recently called for the elimination of
DRM. From this month, Apple’s iTunes will sell EMI’s highest quality recordings
(those with sampling rates of 256 kilobits per second) without DRM for a small
premium.

Belatedly, music executives have come to realise that DRM simply doesn’t work.
It is supposed to stop unauthorised copying, but no copy-protection system has
yet been devised that cannot be easily defeated. All it does is make life
difficult for paying customers, while having little or no effect on clandestine
copying plants that churn out pirate copies.

Now the copy protection on DVDs is proving just as easy to bypass. The biggest
flop has been the CSS technology featured in the recent Kaleidescape case. It
was first cracked back in 1999 by a Norwegian programmer called Jon Lech
Johansen, who showed, in a few short lines of elegant code called DeCSS, just
how trivial such lauded protection systems really were. Since then, even the
DRM used to protect the new high-definition video disks (the Blu-ray format
from the Sony camp and its HD-DVD rival from the Toshiba alliance) have been
cracked wide open.

While most of today’s DRM schemes that come embedded on CDs and DVDs are likely
to disappear over the next year or two, the need to protect copyrighted music
and video will remain. Fortunately, there are better ways of doing this than
treating customers as if they were criminals.

One of the most promising is Audible Magic’s content protection technology.
Google is currently testing this to find the “fingerprintsö of miscreants who
have posted unauthorised television or movie clips on YouTube.

The beauty of such schemes is that they don’t actually prevent anyone from
making copies of original content. Their purpose is simply to collect royalties
when a breach of copyright has occurred. By being reactive rather than
pre-emptive, normal law-abiding consumers are then left in peace to enjoy their
music and video collections in any way they choose. Why couldn’t we have
thought of that in the beginning?
===

 /m

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