Doing the DRM Dance
DRM - Digital Rights Management - is nothing more than a way to ensure that people must buy the same electronic audio & visual products over and over again as technology - the equipment - changes over the life of a copyrighted material. Items can now remain under copyright protection in the USA (and worldwide via the treaty) from a minimum of 70 years to and effective average of 130 years for an individual. Companies can own it from 75 to 105 years.
Lets play their game - through Congress - to ensure that their "products" abide by the same rules that they put onto people.
1. All DRM enabled products must be fully supported by the copyright holder until the copyright runs out on the item.
a) authentication schemes, registration databases, methods of authentication used at time of initial disbursement must remain available though all methods ever employed - including phone, e-mail, automatic (Internet), and other registration methods
b) Any company that fails to support past methods of DRM looses copyright to said material and item #2 is then invoked.
2. All DRM enabled products at the end of copyright period must be exchanged for a non-DRM item at that time by the copyright holder without any embedded advertisements, DRM, on the media choice of the returnee.
3. The manufacturer of DRM enabled products must support all the equipment till the end of copyright that it designed to be played on if it is specific to a technology which is required for it to play or operate on (be it players, computers, mechanical items).
4. Products advertised on DRM media (think of the ads on DVDs) must be sold at the price advertised on the original media until the copyright expires.
5. Companies that create DRM and subsequently go out of business without transferring rights to another company relinquishes all copyright protections immediately
6. Companies buying out other companies inherit all DRM obligations of the purchased company
a) authentication schemes, registration databases, methods of authentication used at time of initial disbursement must remain available though all methods ever employed - including phone, e-mail, automatic (Internet), and other registration methods
b) Any company that fails to support past methods of DRM looses copyright to said material and item #2 is then invoked.
2. All DRM enabled products at the end of copyright period must be exchanged for a non-DRM item at that time by the copyright holder without any embedded advertisements, DRM, on the media choice of the returnee.
3. The manufacturer of DRM enabled products must support all the equipment till the end of copyright that it designed to be played on if it is specific to a technology which is required for it to play or operate on (be it players, computers, mechanical items).
4. Products advertised on DRM media (think of the ads on DVDs) must be sold at the price advertised on the original media until the copyright expires.
5. Companies that create DRM and subsequently go out of business without transferring rights to another company relinquishes all copyright protections immediately
6. Companies buying out other companies inherit all DRM obligations of the purchased company
How would big media companies like a liability trail of 100 years to support DRM of a corporate item? An individual can go LIFE of the individual PLUS 70 years - so if they distribute something it could be 150 years of maintaining DRM for one item!
If we could get everyone to write Congress who owns ANYTHING with a DRM embedded to pass a law that guarantees that any product MUST be supported by those same people until the copyright expires and must exchange them with NON DRM version - there would NOT be any DRM around.
posted by Tom Philo at 9:06 PM
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