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Our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently filed a lawsuit challenging Section 1201 of the US's Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which provides legal reinforcement to the technical shackles of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). Defective by Design applauds this lawsuit and agrees with the EFF that Section 1201 violates the right to freedom of speech. We hope that excising Section 1201 from US law can be the beginning of the end for DRM.
DRM is regularly cracked, or "circumvented," by skilled technologists. Many of them make tools to automate the process, which, in the hands of the public, can be used to defang DRM on a mass scale. Frustrated by this challenge to their authority, the media lobby and their friends in government created anti-circumvention laws like Section 1201 and others around the world, to make it illegal to circumvent DRM or share tools for circumventing it. Since the 90s, these laws have propped up DRM. Hopefully, when 1201 is gone, circumvention tools will spread more widely and it will be so difficult to restrict users with DRM that companies will just stop trying. To make this a reality of course, others around the world will have to take up the torch from EFF and eliminate anti-circumvention laws that play the role of 1201 in their own countries.
It's certainly easier to implement bad security and make it illegal for anyone to notice than it is to implement good security.
Bruce Schneier
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by MrGuy on Saturday August 20 2016, @03:08AM
I'm not a fan of DRM at all. And I'm very much a fan of the EFF.
That said, their challenge here seems incredibly weak, and feels like a challenge to copyright in general as opposed to just DRM enforcement. Which, OK, if you're against copyright on principle, power to ya, but copyright has never been held to be unconstitutional per se, and I don't see a unique argument here.
Here's their example, as I understand it. A broadcaster (who presumably has copyright on the content) streams some content protected with DRM. The plaintiff wants to make it possible to "mix" that content in real time with other content (for example, with a live twitter comment stream), but is prevented because of the DRM. He (and the EFF) claim this is a violation to his right to free speech.
This isn't an argument about the technology. This is an argument that the plaintiff should have the right to do whatever they want with the broadcaster's copyrighted stream on free speech grounds. That's pretty much a straight-up argument that copyright should be illegal. Because one of the rights granted to a copyrightholder is the right to decide where and how to make their content available. It's not different from arguing major league baseball's prohibition on rebroadcast/retransmission should be illegal because my first amendment right to free speech trumps the content owner's right to decide what can be done with the owner's content.
That's an argument that is only tangentially related to DRM, and has a mountain of precedent to climb.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Immerman on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:32AM
I think you may have misunderstood. I believe the argument is that the plaintiff made a tool that can strip DRM from his videos, (lets say so he can transcode them into a format to play on his phone). He then wants to tell people how he did it, and share the tool so that others can do the same thing. In neither case is he looking to share anyone else's content - just the results of his own work. But, under the current law, sharing such information is illegal since it circumvents a DRM system.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Saturday August 20 2016, @12:06PM
The trouble is that DRM can prevent copying that is explicitly permitted by copyright law.