Digital "rights" mismanagement

"Digital rights" is as much of a misnomer as "right-to-work" or "compassionate conservative."

When you pay for a legal download of a song, it's rightfully yours to keep. Forever. Or at least until the sun expands and renders the Earth a useless, fried husk. A whole era of common law backs you up, as have other laws. And since the file is yours to keep, you can do what you want with it, as long as you don't distribute it without authorization. If it's for your own personal use, decades of law are on your side.

But the "digital rights management" Taliban wants to limit your use of music you paid for by using methods that aren't allowed by legitimate copyright law. It's a truism that many individual files are not able to be readily converted to other formats, but the DRM worshipers actually try to stop people from finding ways around this even for their own personal use.

Now the digital "rights" crowd is threatening legal action against a Norwegian hacker because he released software that lets you play music and videos you got from iTunes on devices other than iPods, such as mobile phones.

Gasp! It's the crime of the millennium!

Let me break this down for you. Meseems iTunes files are now designed so only iPods can play them. (I'm not too familiar with iTunes, so I'm unsure of whether this is so.) This practice is anticompetitive and a violation of antitrust laws.

Let's suppose that 25 years ago, RCA was releasing records that were designed with the intent of only being able to be played on RCA turntables. So you invented an inexpensive adapter that let other brands of turntables play Alabama and Rick Springfield. Could RCA sue you for distributing a product that let other brands of record players play RCA discs? I should think not.

The program that lets you copy iTunes songs to devices besides iPods may violate digital "rights" - but that's too bad. And yes, I contend the writer of the program can distribute it all he wants. The program itself does not contain copied iTunes songs, you see. All it does is let you convert iTunes files for your personal use.

The San Francisco-based distributor of this software says it's legal - which it is. But now it's believed that Apple may try to halt distribution of the program by claiming the law bans software that circumvents DRM.

Its legality - at least in the United States - would have been beyond dispute until just a few years ago. Can you guess what's standing in the way now? That's right, my friends, it's the fuckheaded Digital Millennium Copyright Act, one of the many Hitleresque payoffs from the Contract With America to Corporate America. But as I've stated before, the DMCA (passed by a rogue Congress) is not legitimate law. Furthermore, while the Constitution protects copyrights, trademarks, and patents, it does so only with limits.

Nonetheless, the states can and should pass their own laws restoring the law as it existed before the DMCA. The fact of the matter is, even if the software is illegal now, it was unmistakably legal until a few years ago.

But the best way I can think of to settle this issue in the long term is for Congress to repeal the DMCA. That way the DRM thought police and the "entertainment" industry can't keep trotting it out to push people around with.

(Source: http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3403705.ece)