Point 6: What legal protections DRM systems should have from those who wish to circumvent them?
Should DRM be legally protected? What would the consequences of this be? What are the ramifications?
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December 5th, 2005 at 4:46 am
It should be the other way around. A DRM system is designed to enforce the law. To circumvent it can allready be done illegaly or legally within the framework of the laws it is designed to enforce.
see: http://www.edri.org/campaigns/copyright
Quote:
18. EDRI therefore proposes a fruit-of-the-poisoned-tree clause. If a rights-management mechanism infringes a consumer’s rights, then its anti-circumvention protection must cease. Furthermore, all copyrights protected by an offending mechanism should become unenforceable for so long as the offence persists. This `abuse-it-and-lose-it’ clause will cause mechanism owners to think hard before letting them be used for unlawful purposes. They will take care to enable consumers and others to exercise their fair-use and fair-dealing rights and privileges under the established laws of the European Union and its Member States.
19. EDRI further advocates that the poisoned-tree principle should extend to cases where rights-management mechanisms are used to contravene or circumvent competition law. Even if the European Parliament is content to delegate to arbitrary software writers its power to regulate copyright, it acts ultra vires if it thereby gives a software writer in Redmond the power to override the Treaty of Rome. Where a rights-management mechanism has the effect of removing a constitutional right, the legal protection that was granted to it by Parliament and the Commission was granted without lawful authority, and is therefore void. For example, we would argue that DVD region coding is clearly abusive, and therefore the DVD CSS mechanisms are not subject to protection by the InfoSoc Directive.
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I couldn’t post this using Epiphany 1.9.2 (firefox based), complaining about java script not beeing enabled.
December 5th, 2005 at 9:17 pm
I think there has been a move to legally protect DRM, by making it illegal to circumvent, regardless of whether the restrictions the DRM system enforces are in line with Copyright law or not.
I think the principles above (nos. 18 and 19) are much fairer. At very least DRM ought not to be permitted if it enforces restrictions above those in law. (Unless the customer has given enformed consent to be so restricted).
December 6th, 2005 at 10:46 am
DRM should not have legal protection. The content already has legal protection against misuse. DRM is practical protection. If people want to practically circumvent DRM, and then use the content in legal ways, that should remain legal. For me, this is the heart of the issue, and the most important single point with regard to DRM.
December 19th, 2005 at 12:18 pm
Whilst you can continue discussing this post, any comments posted after this one will not be included in the ORG public consultation paper.
December 21st, 2005 at 12:42 pm
None. My computer is mine; it is not owned by people trying to sell me media. They should have no control over what I do with it. This is prior restraint that reverses the presumption of innocence, and makes the increasingly false assumption that individuals are passive viewers of media, not the creators they evidently are. Penalties for actual copyright infringement are severe enough, let those suffice.