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DRM Creep: Fair Use Dies Not with a Bang, but with a Whimper
Posted by Rob Kendall on Friday, June 17 @ 22:10:00 EDT Copyright
This week it was reported that Sony BMG will start wrapping its U.S. CD releases in a copy protection scheme designed to limit consumers’ ability to make CD duplicates. The announcement itself is hardly surprising, as major labels have been experimenting with various forms of CD copy protection in a variety of markets for some time. What is of note, however, is that Sony itself will provide consumers with instructions on how to defeat its own copy protection mechanisms.

So why bother installing a lock if you are just going to leave the key in it anyway?

(continued...)

The reason for this bizarre formulation is that Apple has not (yet) complied with Sony’s DRM specifications and thus Windows, which respects Sony’s copy protections, prevents users from loading protected CD tracks directly from iTunes into their iPods. Sony’s fear of alienating members of the largest portable music player market has forced it to choose customer satisfaction and device interoperability over the enforcement of its newly crafted digital rights.

Well, that all seems fair (use) enough of Sony. But it does beg the question: just how reasonable will content providers continue to be as technology evolves and converges?

This question became much less academic last week after Apple announced plans to shift from IBM to Intel processors. Commentators are already rampantly speculating as to the DRM implications of the emerging Mactel world. The significance of the shift lies in Intel’s addition of baked-in DRM support to its new chipsets earlier this year, and hardware manufacturers’ growing reliance upon Trusted Platform Module security chips.

The upshot is that DRM is moving out of the OS and into the motherboard. As more software and media become usable in exclusively ‘trusted’ computing environments, compromises on DRM (like Sony’s) might just become a thing of the past and near perfect content control may become the way of the future.

The optimist in me wants to believe that intrepid programmers can harness technology to find ways of preserving fair use, consumer control, and scientific innovation in a world of generally open networking and computing standards, and that the tyranny of content controlling DRM can inevitably be hacked out of existence where it oversteps its bounds. The kicker here though, is that Congressional forays into para-copyright legislation, including the DMCA, and potentially the INDUCE Act or Broadcast Flag Bills, give legal reinforcement to the worst possible scenarios of abusive corporate IP policies. When legally reinforced ‘access controls’ reach down to the very hardware level itself, copyright holders are afforded inviolable property rights at the expense of the public interest as well as the competing rights of users and innovators. The specter of the pay-per-use society becomes real. Time and platform shifting become quaint notions. Cultural enrichment through scholarly and transformative uses of works become less possible. And the development of market transforming technologies comes under constant and chilling attack.

Somehow, this all doesn’t seem to add up to promoting the progress of the arts and sciences, now does it?
 
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