I’d consider the possibility that things actually got better; so what makes things worse in your opinion? Doing something to protect property rights from the literally hundred of millions of rights-violators with computers out there who think “If I copy it, it doesn’t harm anyone” would be a good thing. Slamming the door shut on home-brew copyright violations is a positive move, and at least potentially, that is what this does.
You have to make sure that “doing something” doesn’t infringe the rights of anyone else.
It would actually be very easy for the government to set up a police force that surfed the internet just like everyone else – no special wiretapping or anything – and looked around for pirated media, just like any typical pirating kid would. Once they started to get a pirated file, they would have the IP address (or addresses) it was coming from, and it would be easy to start a legal proceeding. One problem is that the damages have to be high in order for it to be worth a court’s time – but why use a court every time? If these things were dealt with in the same manner as traffic tickets, it would get better results.
If the cops cannot be trusted to monitor the Internet, then let the good people turn the bad ones in. I think that much of our legal system, historically, used to be based on that sort of idea – that the government doesn’t have to monitor everything to discover crimes, because people will report suspicious activity. If a large percentage (like 90%) of the people are willing to tolerate piracy, such a problem cannot be solved by the government; it has to be solved by philosophy. But even 10% peer reporting would drive piracy far underground, as the pirates would have a hard time telling which peers were other pirates and which would turn them in. There can also be a bounty for catching pirates.
There is no need for the legal system to remove the “Record” button from people’s devices.
Is there some part of the law (please cite the actual law) that suggests that this is a possibility? I.e. is there now a statute that requires all OSs to contain copy-protection code? That would be a good example of an immoral aspect of the law.
I don’t think this is part of any existing law, but laws have been proposed (and defeated) that would have such an effect. The SSSCA was defeated.
Okay, so [the illegality of distributing open-source drivers for wireless networking cards] would be another thing I’d like to see evidence of.
Only certain wireless networking cards are affected. Some cards enforce FCC regulations in hardware, and therefore no driver can possibly cause the card to violate the regulations. In such a case, open-source drivers are okay. But some cards depend on software to enforce the FCC regulations. In this case, making the software open-source would allow users to tinker with the regulatory enforcement and possibly cause the device to no longer be certified (or maybe even be ineligible for certification).
It’s one thing if a radio transmitter, for example, has a variable resistor on the inside that, if the owner takes the device apart and adjusts it, puts the transmitter out of compliance with FCC rules. It’s another thing if the radio transmitter has a knob on the outside labeled “Do Not Touch”… A closed-source driver can be deemed part of the device, but an open-source driver is “outside” because it can be modified by the user.
This Slashdot thread mentions that IBM was interpreting an FCC regulation to mean that their Lenovo laptop wasn’t FCC-certified (and therefore shouldn’t operate) if it has an uncertified wireless network card attached to it.
This article on ars technica says that Intel is making that claim about one of its wireless networking devices.
I’ve read that technically the FCC regulations apply to the user, not the manufacturer; “modifications may void the user’s authority to operate the equipment.” But if the driver enforces FCC regulations, it is technically part of the device. It may affect whether the FCC can certify the device.
In this context, I was under the impression that we were discussing a specific law-driven move by MS.
MS may be moving in anticipation of a law that they think will pass. But it is possible that they expect no such law and that they are taking the business risk of pushing an unpopular feature now, in the hopes that people will eventually warm up to it. Microsoft has done that before. (For example, Microsoft pressured computer manufacturers to include CD-ROM drives in their computers before the drives were popular. People now like CD-ROM drives.)
I suspect that you’re right [that DRM cannot survive in the marketplace apart from laws that require it], because the urge for the unearned seems to be very strong these days.
It is not “unearned” to want to control the media and devices that you paid for.
Although MS could make money off of content-producers by helping to enforce the rights of the copyright owner, this will lead to legions of [whining?] customers who are unhappy with MS’s ham-handed implementation and their cooperation with evil money-grubbing industries, so I do think they will blink.
It is good and honest for a company to want to make money. I begin to worry, however, when it looks like they are willing to give up money in exchange for having power and control. This comes from different sources:
(1) The “political entrepreneur” type of businessman who is just more interested in having power over people than making money
(2) Product liability laws requiring businessmen to try to prevent their customers from doing activities that will get the business sued
(3) Government regulations and laws requiring businessmen to enforce rules against customers
All three are products of the mixed economy. Under pure capitalism, (2) and (3) would be illegal, and (1) would likely be driven out of the market by better alternatives.
To the extent that the laws require businesses to self-sacrificially protect the rights of others, those laws are wrong.
Even if the business would benefit from it, the act of forcing it on them makes it wrong.
Although I don’t think copyright itself is debatable, I think it’s debatable whether copyright should be extended (and it is an extension) to allow the copyright holder, or the government acting on his behalf, to control every aspect of every device that your copy of his work passes through, on the grounds that you must be totally prevented from being able to make a copy.
I don’t think such laws are implausible, I’m just not yet persuaded that such laws exist. Yet. If you know where in the Cornell compendium the statutes are, that would pretty much decide the matter.
Even if the laws aren’t on the books yet, they’re coming. It seems that nothing stands in their way except a bunch of hippies who want to eliminate copyright altogether.
It seems that the DRM debate is shaping up to be one of totalitarianism versus anarchy.