FCC Commissioner Wants To Push For DRM 337
RareButSeriousSideEffects writes "Techdirt reports that 'Newest Commissioner Deborah Tate has apparently announced that while she knows its outside the FCC's authority, she's a huge fan of copy protection and hopes to use her new position as a "bully pulpit" on the topic.'"
time for the FCC to get a D I V O R C E! (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, I guess it's her prerogative and privilege to use the bully pulpit to endorse, embrace, and encourage DRM, but it makes me nervous when the government and its actors role play about technology and how it should be meted out. Their original responsibility (at least the FCC's) is to fairly and equitably maintain the distribution of the commodity that is radio spectra.
It's troubling when someone with no apparent business background and understanding of technology to the depth necessary to grasp what DRM has done and will do gets a bully pulpit this high and this visible. I don't know one of the referenced articles is accurate in describing how Ms. Tate love for DRM really is a result of:
but, "love of country music" seems anemic justification and mostly a non sequitur in justifying something of magnitude DRM.Sometimes government just doesn't seem very representative any more, and sometimes it just doesn't seem just.
Make as much noise as you like... (Score:3, Interesting)
Just so long as you remember this:
she knows its outside the FCC's authority
In other words, have any hobby you like. Just don't confuse your hobby with your job.
How about a noose instead? (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm a firm anti-copyright believer, I see no reason for copyright anymore now that information is so readily available (high supply, low demand, zero price). DRM is merely an attempt at the media distribution cartels to try to strangehold the market of the various media.
The FCC is no longer useful. I don't believe it is even Constitutional. Technology has completely replaced EVERYTHING that the FCC is mandated to regulate, but because of the regulations, we can't let technology grow to meet the needs of the hundreds of millions of citizens in the U.S.
If we want to be at the forefront of technology, it is time to disband the FCC and let companies find ways to take advantage of all the bandwidth being wasted on analog TV, radio, HAM, CB, and other ancient/antiquated technologies. Re-read the Constitution, see that the FCC is merely a pawn of the media cartels, and dump it along with every outdated law that they provided input on.
I don't need them, and I fail to see a need to continue to pay for them.
If they want to noose my data, I just want an equal opportunity with my noose.
A short note (Score:3, Interesting)
Dear Commissioner Tate,
I have read that you are in favor of DRM. I do not like having my freedom to tinker with technology and enjoy media I have purchased hampered by government intervention and paternalism.
Please let DRM succeed or die on its own merits -- on market forces alone.
From a concerned citizen who both authors and enjoys media.
Re:time for the FCC to get a D I V O R C E! (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, most definitely irrelevant. Can we find someone whose love of country music has brought them to the studied position that "only money-grubbing assholes want DRM"? Just to even up the balance and demonstrate how useless her reasoning is?
Re:Not really news (fortunately) (Score:5, Interesting)
The FCC does have a lot of power, especially for an organization who's original intent was simply to allocate RF spectrum. They could force DRM in other ways, or could decide that DRM was not outside the FCC's authority after all -- or perhaps Congress could decide that it should be under their authority. Who knows? As long as this is a hobby of hers, I won't complain, but I hope it remains so.
As for her `love of country music' being what led her to this, well, how many cds (probably not copy protected, I might add) and records/tapes (not even digital, so DRM does not apply) did the RIAA have to give her/sell to her to bring her to this conclusion? How many hours of listening to the radio (no DRM, but under the FCC's juristiction) did it take to realize these two loves of country music and DRM?
Or was it satellite radio that lead her to this? DRMed, and under the FCC's juristiction, but it's that DRM (encryption) that causes the FCC to lighten up on them a bit and allow swearing and such?
Extremely unethical (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine if the head of the Electoral Commission announced that he "was a fan" of a particular political movement, and was going to try to use his "bully pulpit" to promote it. That would be utterly intolerable.
I think that, although less serious, this is an equivalent situation - a public official announcing an intention to promote a corporate movement, possibly even hinting at using her department's sway with private companies to further her agenda. Even if it was something less controversial than DRM, it would still be completely out of order.
I found helpful in the past, with the FCC (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting? (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh... huh? How has technology replaced, say, monitoring content on public broadcasts?(1) How has technology eliminated the need to regulate the radio spectrum so devices dont stomp all over each other? How has technology ensured that every manufacturer will somehow produce devices which accept interference?
HAM and CB are both still useful technologies. Look no further than your favorite natural disaster to see HAMs at work helping organize efforts when all your high-tech technological solutions have broken down. They ARE pushing to force a change to all-digital TV, but there are still a whole lot of analog TV's out there. You propose forcing the entire population to go out and buy new sets to fit with your idiotic view of how the spectrum should be used. Don't you think THAT would be benefitting the manufacturers of TVs more than anyone else?
If you don't regulate the spectrum, all that will happen is companies will build devices to stomp all over each others' devices. If you don't regulate the spectrum, there will be nothing stopping someone using the same frequencies as air traffic controllers. Disbanding the FCC has got to be one of the most idiotic ideas I've ever read on slashdot. Restructure it, sure. Fire everyone working there, fine. Try to remove the corruption, absolutely. But to suggest we don't need any regulation of the radio spectrum is absolutely ludicrous.
(1) - not that I believe their monitoring is right, but it's what they do, and technology sure hasn't changed that in any way.
Re:A short note (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, what you can do with this copy is often restricted in certain ways by copyright law. For there to be a license, there would have to be elements of a contract:
Well, with CDs and DVDs, we're missing at least two elements. Firstly, most CDs don't have any sort of agreement printed in them. Secondly, if there were, what would be the consideration? You already purchased the CD! This is the fundemental problem with click-through licenses (even if courts haven't recognized this yet).
With online services like iTMS, this is probably a little different. But the fact remains that for most purchases, you are in fact purchasing a copy of the content. Common law recognizes exceptions from the restrictions in copyright statute, exceptions that are lost when other statutes enforce digital restrictions.
-Paul
A response email (Score:2, Interesting)
The FCC was originally set up to regulate the Radio airwaves. Then you took it upon yourselves to regulate the TV broadcast spectrum. Following that, you decided that censoring programs was within your mandate as well. (Lets ignore all the 1st amendment issues right now).
Now you have decided to enter the fray on the side of DRM. Either pro or Con, this should be a completely business decision. There is nothing that needs regulating via the FCC with regards to DRM.
I respectfully request that you and your fellow commissioners keep your noses out of this. The majority of us are quite sick and tired of the FCC trying to expand your mandate coverage. It is and has not been welcome.
Sincerely,
Keep the government out! (Score:3, Interesting)
The danger comes from when the government starts arresting people who post DRM circumventing software on their website... or mandates that DRM must be built into hardware (it is very easy for hobbiests to distribute software to the people, but not hardware)... Or prohibits public libraries from circumventing protection.
If companies want to use DRM, so be it. That should not be where we focus our attention... because DRM is a joke. We need to stop the government from enforcing DRM at all costs!
Re:What's not to like? (Score:1, Interesting)
From a security perspective it's a laughable exercise in encryption since you hand over the ciphertext, the plaintext and the key to your adversary - of course you are right in
that everyone should be allowed to persue their own foolishness, however, I, then, should be allowed to show that the emperor has no clothes by breaking it to, for example, play legally purchased content on my computer with software i chose.
DRM should stand on its own (it can't, it's a broken concept), backing it up by making it illegal to break it even for legitimate purposes is stupid (and one wonders how it should be enforced if they can't enforce simple copyright).
The thing that gets wiped out first by such legislation are the legitimate purposes, alternative players and so on. The ones who use them to archieve illegal things don't care, their work was already illegal and their tools are spread underground far and wide while the alternative player can't spread because its target audience does not know how to acquire "illegal software" and opening a legitimate website get them sued.
DRM and the US Constitution (Score:5, Interesting)
This clause lets the government assign exclusive rights of a work for a limited amount of time (to encourage science and art).
Currently, No DRM has an expiration or time limits of any kind, so by protecting or mandating DRM, the government is in effect allowing exclusive rights of a work and unlimited amount of time ( with no regard to the effect of this on art and science ).
What does that mean? (Score:3, Interesting)
"The market will decide what is good" is false; the market makes dumb, short-sighted decisions all the time. The market doesn't care about "good" the market cares about "profitable", in the very short term.
"The market" is just the collective decisions of lots of people, deciding things for various reasons, presumably including the FCC commisioners endorsement of an idea. So implying it doesn't matter if the FCC commisioner steps outside her authority to push a particular idea because "The market will decide", is crazy. The market is deciding; Government officials using their offices to push something, and others calling them on it is part of that process.
DRM will succeed if it is profitable for device/content creators in the very short term. If the next gen of DVD players is the only way to watch movies for even a short period, people will take it's cumbersomeness as unavoidable and we'll be stuck with it forever.
This whole article may be baloney (Score:3, Interesting)
Either Way (Score:3, Interesting)
As background, there are 5 Commissioners, 1 of which is designated as the Chairperson by the President and only three Commissioners may be members of the same political party.
If she actually does follow through on pushing for DRM, it means at least 4 other people + Pres. Bush (actually, whichever people he has advising him on the matter) don't care if she spouts off.
Re:DRM vs Copy Protection (Score:3, Interesting)
That is, encrypted DVDs allow full copying of content after expiry of Copyright period, allow for easy copying of individual snippets for use in other media presentations and for fair use, etc.
If my rights were being managed properly, I'd be a lot happier.
Re:What's not to like? (Score:3, Interesting)
I would go farther than that and say that any copy protection mechanism, including DRM is a laughable exercise in human stupidity. It is what happens when a bunch of executives whose company isn't doing well financially gets sold snake oil by a sleazy copy protection company with the promise that it will help their struggling company to not lose most of their sales to piracy.
It won't. It won't help at all. If your product is popular enough for people to want to pirate it, they will find a way around it. Even hardware-based mechanisms like dongles and TPM are provably fundamentally ineffectual. As soon as your computer can decrypt the data/software/audio, there is an unencrypted version floating around in RAM. It is, therefore, possible to gain access to it. In the worst case, you need a bus analyzer. In the best case, you can get around it with software alone.
Either way, there are people who do this all day every day for the purposes of selling pirated copies of software in developing countries. These "warez" copies inevitably make it onto P2P sites, and it doesn't matter how hard the protection is to crack; if someone cares enough, it will be cracked. Period. All you do by using such protection is make it harder for legitimate customers to protect their investment by making backups. (Ever try to make a backup of an iLok? You can't. You also can't insure it for the value of its contents.
That's why I will never buy any software that requires a dongle, no matter how incredible the software, no matter how useful it might be. Never. And yes, I have spent about $2000 on software from competitors to companies whose products require a dongle which would have been spent on the products that required a dongle, had they not required one. Thus, for people who care about this (who seem to be quickly gaining in numbers, at least among audio engineers), you are losing sales by using copy protection, not gaining sales.
But what makes DRM an even bigger folly for music is its lack of universality. Consumers will never accept DRM on their CDs. They will never accept having to find some magical way for their car radio to "phone home" to get authorized to play a CD (or worse, their friend's car radio/boombox/discman when they carry the CD on a camping trip). Therefore, we will ALWAYS have a pristine, unprotected data format.
With that knowledge, it requires very few brain cells to understand that even if DRM could be perfected to the point that it is impossible to crack (which, as I have mentioned, is provably impossible), it would have no effect on piracy. Why? Because people naturally take the path of least resistance. Why would any pirate try to crack the DRM on a reduced-qualtiy download when they could just as easily buy the physical CD (which, as mentioned, CANNOT EVER HAVE DRM) and rip that?
Therefore, not only is perfect DRM impossible, it also does not achieve the stated goals in the slightest. The only thing DRM does is harm the consumer by forcing people to buy things multiple times or break the DMCA. The problem is that it only forces them to buy it twice. The second time, they'll think twice about buying DRM-protected content, and will instead buy an unprotected CD (probably used), and the music industry suddenly cuts off a major revenue stream, all because they were too clueless to realize that DRM is and always will be nothing more than snake oil.
If copy protection does not significantly deter piracy, and if it only significantly harms legitimate users by limiting or preventing backups, why, then, do companies still use it? I blame PACE and the BSA. These two companies/organizations have done more to harm the software industry than everyone else put together---PACE for selling their buggy snake oil and the BSA f
Re:time for the FCC to get a D I V O R C E! (Score:2, Interesting)
"while she knows its outside the FCC's authority, she's a huge fan of copy protection and hopes to use her new position as a "bully pulpit" on the topic"
Knows it's not within her job but is going to use her power to "bully" the point
what part of Extortion must we spell out for these people
Re:DRM leads to monopolies on... everything. (Score:2, Interesting)