Accidentally or manually breaking the DMCA

I wonder, does copying out the contents of a copy-protected PDF by hand constitute a breach of the DMCA? Also, taking photographs of an on-screen document doesn't trigger any copy protection software at all, and requires no special equipment. Technically, it is circumventing a digital lock, but if that's what you were going to do anyway, how would you know the lock was there in the first place? And if the lock fails somehow, you might be able to make a copy in a perfectly ordinary way without triggering it, and again you wouldn't know you had done anything wrong. So what, according to DMCA, actually constitutes circumventing a digital lock, if it might be possible to do so without any intention of bypassing copy protection?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Ignorance is usually no defence.
PPS - So they tell me.

AFACT vs iiNet in appeal

If the AFACT is so convinced that internet providers can and should stop all copyright violations on their network, they should start their own ISP. People on this ISP would be subject to all the restrictions that AFACT can dream up, and would furthermore be immune from prosecution for copyright violation, since AFACT is in total control of what happens on their network.

My guess is that this would result in two things. One, some copyright violation would still take place, which would leave AFACT in a tricky position. Two, most people wouldn't bother signing up, because they'd realise that increased surveillance, decreased bandwidth and increased cost is not worth the flimsy assertion that no prosecution will take place.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I mean, would you pay extra so your internet provider can spy on you?
PPS - Even if you're doing nothing wrong, it's a bad deal.

Mortmain as applied to copyright

I've learned a new word today: "mortmain". It refers specifically to the continued ownership of land by the church (therefore never reverting back to the crown and incurring no inheritance tax) and in general of the way the past can dictate the present in an oppressive way. The word literally means "dead hand", like a deceased owner still gripping a contract.

It struck me that such a concept applies very well to current copyright. After the term of copyright is over, artists are assumed to have been adequately compensated for their efforts in contributing to our culture, or it is similarly assumed that they will never quite make their money back. The work then reverts into the public domain. Currently, we have corporations owning perpetual copyrights (because they never die) and continuous pushes for extending copyright terms. This is all keeping works from going into public domain even long after the original creator is dead and long since compensated for his or her contribution to society through the arts. Mortmain. The dead hand of artists still grips their works from beyond the grave.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If copyright were intended to be perpetual, that's how it would have been formulated in the beginning.
PPS - The optimal copyright term has been calculated at 14 years.

Copyright and a bounty hunter metaphor

My own ideas on copyright law and intellectual works rights have been challenged by an essay (or, rather, a short book) at http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters/bountyhunters.htm. It explains copyright law and the surrounding history in terms of a wild west bounty hunter metaphor. The key concept to get out of my head is that copyright and patent law exist to reward the labour of producing intellectual works. The works so produced do not amount to a physical product, but are to be treated as such for the purposes of rewarding the creators, and that only for a limited time. The reason we do it that way is because it's easier than deciding to pay an author in advance for a book that might turn out to be rubbish. If authors were salary workers, there wouldn't be any intellectual property law.

These laws exist as a way of smoothing out a quality curve in supply and demand. All artistic works are not made equal, and those that are more worthy are to be rewarded more. The way we decide what is worthy is by deferring payment until the work is complete and letting the market sort it out. In order to do that, though, we need to have something to sell, and that is the reproduction rights to the work in question. That creates an easy misconception in some authors that the works they create are physical things.

Intellectual works are treated as physical things to reward the labour of producing them. If you've waited 42 years and not heard peep about your magnum opus, chances are good that you should have become a doctor like mother wanted. If you spend two years writing a mediocre book and over the next 42 years you make enough to pay back what you lived on during those two years, you've broken even, although it did take you 42 years to do so. If you spend two years writing a book and start making back enough to pay for a comfortable life, chances are that you'd want to protect that income stream rather than work some more. That's where the problem lies: laziness and greed.

Good authors should be rewarded. Mediocre authors should be rewarded too, but not as much.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Bad authors need not be actively punished.
PPS - The market will do so passively for us.

Compensating philosophers

I had a thought about copyright and artist compensation. The whole system is a bit like rewarding philosophers. If we have a pack of philosophers sitting around thinking, we could pay them all a salary, but we don't actually know they're doing anything valuable. Therefore, we delay their payment until later. They struggle to survive in the meantime, but we know we're getting quality product. Then the whole thing becomes a bit more popular, so we take the payment scheme to the people and let them decide whether to pay the philosophers, because what we're really after is popular philosophy.

Now we have to realise that the philosophers are not producing anything that can be controlled. It's thought, not things. Therefore we are paying them not for what they produce, but for their productive labour. That's what paying for music is about - rewarding artists for their efforts, not (directly) for the music they produce.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Paying for copies of the music is, however, the easiest way to pay artists for effort.
PPS - The same goes for books, movies and television.

HD-DVD key suppression

What happens when the HD-DVD folk win the key revocation war? That would mean that people stop being able to crack the HD-DVD encryption, which is something they very much want to do, mostly in order to (a) back up their discs or (b) play their legitimate discs on their legitimate players. The only way it will stop is if people don't want to crack HD-DVD encryption anymore. If people stop wanting to crack your encryption, you've lost, because nobody cares about your format any more.

This is what happened with the Playstation Portable. People figured out how to run their own software, so Sony started a firmware patch race against the cracks. In the end, they won: nobody bothers running their own software on PSP any more. In fact, nobody bothers running much of *anything* on a PSP any more. So was it worthwhile? What were they even achieving? At least the HD-DVD key hoarders are "stopping teh PYRATES!!!1!".

My main point is this: the copy protection doesn't work, because it has been cracked. Then the coping mechanism - revoking the key - doesn't work, because that was broken before it could even come into effect. If they "win" this one, nobody will buy or watch HD-DVDs.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not bothering with HD-DVD or Blu-Ray yet.
PPS - I don't need them.

Copyright on one-run preaching DVDs.

I bought DVDs from a conference in Adelaide where they were careful to point out that (a) these DVDs will never be produced again and (b) orders will only be accepted at the conference itself. Fair enough, because I wouldn't want to keep going back and producing more on my own, so I don't think they would either. The problem is this: they have a copyright notice at the start that forbids all copying. So, technically, if I want to share these non-profit Christian messages with other people, I'm breaking the law. I can't copy them even for people who couldn't afford to go to the conference or didn't know about it.

Why copyright? It was probably just a choice based on the fact that DVDs have copyright notices elsewhere, so these DVDs need them too. It wasn't motivated by protecting profit or recovering costs because there was no profit and the costs were all covered already by conference fees (for the cameras and editing) and the DVD order price (for blank discs and burning effort). The message should be allowed out as freely as possible. Putting the copyright notice on there was a tad short-sighted in my opinion.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It might have been put there by external editors.
PPS - And it might just have been part of standard procedure at that company.