Live from Austin!

This is a copy of my comments to the Federal Trade Commission, who are asking for comments on DRM technologies for a Town Hall Meeting in March.

As you are doubtless aware, the Copyright Act of 1976 codifies the First-Sale Doctrine. This states that a purchaser of a copyright work has the legal right to sell or give away the copy, once it has been obtained–so long as no additional copies have been made.

One major issue I have with DRM technologies is that they deny the customer his legal right to resell the product on the second hand market. Also, in many cases purchased products may evaporate if the DRM provider goes out of business, yet still these products are described as being sold to the customer, with words like "buy", "purchase" and "on sale" being used.

Netflix will let me keep a movie indefinitely, but I can’t sell the disc, and they reserve the right to demand it back. Similarly, iTunes digital movies can be kept indefinitely, but I can’t sell the movie, and Apple can turn off my access to it, analogous to demanding the disc back. Netflix describe their service honestly, as rental. Apple describe their service as purchase, with the button saying "Buy now".

This seems to me to be confusing. Physical video stores like Blockbuster would not be allowed to say "Buy this movie for $3.89!" when the terms were actually rental with no due date for return, so I don’t understand why digital movie rentals are treated differently.

I have a simple proposal. It should be illegal to describe something as being "sold" or "for sale" unless the corresponding right of resale is available to the purchaser. Instead, a phrase such as "indefinite rental" should be used, as that’s what is really being offered.

In other words, when I "buy" a movie from the PS3 online store, I’m not really buying it, because I can’t resell it second hand when I’m done with it. So Sony should not be able to pretend I’m buying it; they should be legally required to describe the offering accurately, as an "indefinite rental".

I think this would go a long way towards making it clear to the average consumer that their DRM-protected purchased content comes with metaphorical strings attached, and that it might go away one day.

A few weeks ago I read on bOING bOING about a music industry royalties collection agency responsible for webcasting and satellite radio. After much reluctance they had finally put up a list of artists they owed money to, but said they had found it impossible to track down.

I decided to take a look at the list. Sure enough, there were a bunch of artists I’m a fan of. Of those, there were several I knew it would be trivial to track down on the web. People like Scanner, The Orb, μ-Ziq, Stephan Remmler, Westbam, Komputer, Georg Kajanus and a bunch of Warp Records artists. Oh, and RuPaul!

Although my normal policy is not to risk dialog with famous artists whose work I like, I felt that if some big corporate agency is claiming the right to collectpayments on artists’ behalf, it is important to make sure the artists actually see the money. So I wrote the various artists (or their agents or official webmasters) some brief e-mails pointing them at the web site of the collections agency, so they would at least know about it, and could make contact with said organization if they liked. I figured the worst case was that some folks would get a dozen fan e-mails telling them, which was better than no e-mail at all.

I can now reveal that in spite of my fears I got an almost complete lack of response. Except from Thrash (formerly of The Orb), who says they’re owed $50.

Meanwhile, the music industry execs are probably snorting lines of coke off of hookers and wondering if anyone’s heard of some guy named Chris DeBurgh who they owe money to.

I just discovered something interesting. Under US law, buildings constructed after 1990 are copyrighted. That means our house is subject to copyright, and as legal owner I can demand licensing fees from anyone who wants to take pictures of the street that happen to include our house.

The more corporate interests force ever-stronger copyright laws on us, the more I find myself questioning copyright. For example, the RIAA lawsuits against MP3 downloaders have made me wonder: why should artists continue to get money every time someone plays a recording of their music? I don’t get extra money every time someone looks at a web site I created; the very idea is laughable. Yet web sites are copyrighted too.

Bram Cohen’s official BitTorrent search engine is now open. To celebrate this event, I suggest we have a contest to guess (a) the date of the first cease-and-desist lawsuit from the RIAA or MPAA, and (b) the date when the site gets shut down due to crippling legal costs.

I’m predicting June 1st and October 1st, respectively.

I was told I couldn’t post a photo to an internal discussion forum, because the photo was copyrighted and we weren’t allowed to distribute copies.

So I wrote a quick embedded Java applet which downloads that one photo from the original web site every time someone opens the document, and displays it inline. I put the applet in my posting instead, end of problem.

Once again, stupid legal restrictions waste resources…

Tuesday: Orrin Hatch is quoted as suggesting that technology should be developed to remotely destroy the computers of copyright violators.

Thursday: Orrin Hatch is revealed to be using unlicensed software for his web site.

As of January 15th, the Supreme Court has ruled that it is legal for copyright to be extended indefinitely, and retroactively. It is likely that no work created after 1920 will ever enter the public domain. Justice Clarence Thomas was amongst those voting in favor of Disney in Eldred vs Ashcroft.

In totally unrelated news, on January 9th Clarence Thomas was offered a book publishing deal worth $1 million from HarperCollins, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

You can see what my web site was like in 1998. Is archive.org a copyright lawsuit waiting to happen or what?

KPMG are trying to claim that anyone linking to their web site needs to agree to their “Web Link Policy”.

Well, I have never visited KPMG’s web site, and I’ve never read their “Web Link Policy”, so I can’t possibly be deemed to have agreed to it. Let’s see if they send me a lawyer’s letter. What a bunch of buffoons.