michaelgeist.ca — A conference on music and copyright reform at McGill University and one of the speakers was none other than Bruce Lehman, architect of the WIPO Internet Treaties and the DMCA. He claims that that the DMCA has failed. Better yet, he says most of the blame falls on the RIAA for refusing to change their outdated business model.
Mar 24, 2007 View in Crawl 4
phr00tMar 25, 2007
I work at UMass Amherst, where I personally have to hand out RIAA "pre-lawsuits" to students. RIAA hope these students "settle" for about $4,000. I hate the thought of having to support the RIAA by handing these out... I hate the RIAA. There are few in the help desk who argue that file sharing will lead to the destruction of music (e.g. no monetary incentive to create new music)... but whatever the RIAA is doing with their old business models and lawsuits is destroying music more than any P2P activity. RIAA is just not needed now when music distribution and advertising is so easy, so it should just go away... however, they have too much money, and they want to use it to create laws to enforce future profits. It makes me sick. I wish there was more I could do. There are people within my help desk who go around campus and "educate" students on copyright law... I have yet to see their "educational" material, I'm hoping it is not propaganda.
thewriteguyMar 25, 2007
Frankly it seems like this guy is trying to cover his own ass and pass the blame. It's like creating a law to give gun owners the indiscriminate right to shoot anything that moves without reprecussion, then blaming them when they actually do so.
fkr3Mar 25, 2007
From the slashdot discussion:<a class="user" href="http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=227979&cid=18470607">http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=227979&cid=18470607</a>-----------What a load of crap. The RIAA hasn't used, for the most part, the DMCA. The two central tools the DMCA gave groups like those the RIAA represents were a legal backing to DRM (the laws against circumventing Access Control Mechanisms), and a set, established, procedure for taking down content hosted by third parties. Well, which have the RIAA used? In the former case, "DRM" used by RIAA members has tended to be of the kind of thing that isn't an Access Control Mechanism or a Copy Control Mechanism, instead a "Use bugs in certain popular CD driver implementations to make it easier to use the publisher's own special music software which causes all kinds of problems" variety. The RIAA and its members could, in the late nineties, have settled on an encrypted music format, just as the movie industry did with DVDs, and phased out CDs, but they didn't, and so their ability to use the DMCA to fight piracy was limited. (I might add I'm glad they didn't, because DVD CSS has proven only to be a burden to non-pirates, not pirates who copy it anyway. But the point remains that the DMCA is utterly irrelevent to the RIAA actions. The RIAA has never seriously tried to make use of the DRM related parts of the DMCA.) Then there's the take-down system the DMCA provides. Has the RIAA and its members made serious attempts to exploit this? Well, no, because they couldn't. The way the DMCA is worded means it doesn't really apply to distributed systems like the old Napster, and would, indeed, be toothless even if you could make it apply to Napster. So they've been unable to use it at all. So my question is: why are the words "RIAA" and "DMCA" being used in the same article? One might "criticize" (because, like, we'd all have been better off if the music industry had forced us to buy our music again for the umpteenth time, this time on encrypted DVD-Audio or something. Yeah. Right.) them for not making use of the DMCA, and thus the DMCA not helping them, but the implication they tried to, but it wasn't enough because of their business model or something is complete crap. The movie industry has made use of the DMCA, in both areas. DVDs were encrypted, much to the detriment of legitimate end users, and take down notices against groups like YouTube are frequent. If the DMCA is a failure, it should probably be measured on how much it has benefited the movie industry, without causing harm to the entire electronics industry, the customers of the movie industry, and other unrelated third parties. I think any reasonable person can call it a failure on the basis of all of these criterion.---------Although it was modded at +5 Insightful on slashdot I'm sure it's worth about -749 diggs here.
fkr3Mar 25, 2007
<a class="user" href="http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=227979&cid=18470459">http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=227979&cid=18470459</a> (different comment) is also very well written, logical and rational.Does anyone else sometimes feel like even though digg is mostly better than slashdot, sometimes it's nowhere near the same level?
dhuckMar 25, 2007
@fkr3heh. i supply a link to some good commentary - get digged down. you copy/paste (and cite) from my source, get +8. i'm not bitching, digg has spoken - but seriously, slashdot's meta-moderation does has some things going for it. it "diggs" up more serious discussion, while digg is more for those witty one liners (most of the time, obviously.)
chupatumamaMar 25, 2007
Cover his ass is right on the money.They tried pushing the internet child safety laws a few times, then the DMCA and now its.."Oops, my bad."Not that there is any difference between both parties allegiance to corporations as opposed to citizens but the dems get way too many 'oops.'The war on Drugs (which is actually the war on marijuana) was kicked into overdrive when Clinton got a general to become drug czar. Dying people where rousted by cops and the marijuana arrests DOUBLED during those years to their current 700 to 800,000 marijuana arrests per year. As soon as the d-head was out of office, "oops, my bad,..." in Rolling Stone magazine. 735,000 people got arrested his last year in office for pot (88% for simple possession),Im sure they were thrilled when they read that as they were being ass raped.Ask the democrats how deregulating the radio business in favor of their media friends has totally devastated radio across the country. Im sure you'll hear an Oops.And since blowback is a bitch; we allowed Osama and his head choppers free reign in the Balkans because it served our needs, then we armed and ran bombing runs for months for a terrorist organization which our own CIA called the 'largest and best armed terrorist group in the world." (its not a coincidence taht we then built our largest military base there because its geographic importance). Did we hear an Oops when we found out that 911 planners used Bosnia as a base? Or that the only suspect in the Madrid bombing was a moroccan arrested travelling from and to Bosnia regularly? Or that 3-4 of the last Al Quaeda leaders in Saudi Arabia have all been Bosnian holy war veterans, many coming back with their Bosnian passports?Of course not. Some oops are not good to know.We have a world where a man who owes his career to big oil interests (the 3 billion dollar plan Columbia had more to do with protecting the pipelines of Gore's friend at Occidental Petroleum than guerilla warfare) is now a global warming champion?The man is responsible for bombing more countries than Bush, dropped DU weapongs which are still causing serious harm to both civilians and US military personnel, not to mention the poisoninng of the Columbian fields and HE is our new environmental saint?Really?Passing the buck is not a new trick but we allow these a-holes to do these kind of things and just smile and hope people have forgotten about it. Considering the short attention span of most people: that aint hard.
fkr3Mar 25, 2007
To be honest I was expecting the comment I quoted to be dugg down to around the negative two digits (or lower). I'm just as surprised as you.
generalloyMar 25, 2007
"If the DMCA is a failure, it should probably be measured on how much it has benefited the movie industry, without causing harm to the entire electronics industry, the customers of the movie industry, and other unrelated third parties. I think any reasonable person can call it a failure on the basis of all of these criterion."Is he kidding? 'No harm'? How about how security researchers are scared from publishing their results, the whole Dmitri Sklyarov incident ( <a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Sklyarov">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Sklyarov</a> ) and how the copyright protection industry (like Macrovision and Intel's HDCP) can scam the MPAA into billion-dollar DRM 'solutions' that DON'T EVEN WORK? Somehow they've managed to convince the movie industry that we need these things everywhere, and integrated into computer operating systems.There aren't even any big free and open source conferences held in the United States anymore after Sklyarov was arrested.
laserdogMar 25, 2007
A valid point.However, trying to wrestle over what party is at fault for the DMCA doesn't really help. In fact, bringing up either party just guarantees that less people will be willing/interested in discussing how to fix it.The DMCA is a provably bad idea regardless of party affiliation, and is better treated as an example of how excessive lobbying relationships can result in non-sane laws getting passed, rather than trying to swing it as a partisan cudgel.