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Opinion

House should give DRM facelift

Jim McCormick
Opinion Columnist

On March 9, a bill was introduced in the House of Representatives to modify copyright law, making it legal to circumvent digital restrictions management measures in order to perform otherwise legal tasks with the information that such DRM protects. 

For example, at this time, record companies can make it impossible for you to rip a CD that you purchased onto your iPod. Getting around this restriction is currently illegal, despite the fact that ripping a legally purchased CD is legal if such software mechanisms are absent.

This bill is a welcome breath of sanity to American copyright law, which has been written primarily for the economic interests of media distributors, not the artists or the audience. Currently, there is also a committee meeting to determine what exceptions should be made to current copyright law, an event that happens every three years. 

Consumer advocacy groups have petitioned this committee to exempt people who are circumventing DRM measures in order to prevent hazardous situations that could threaten critical infrastructure and possibly endanger lives. However, the media distributors (the much reviled Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Business Software Alliance -- read "Mircosoft") are opposed to such measures, putting the value of data above the value of human lives. 

The fact is that DRM is inherently malicious software, as it is intended to restrict access to data that you hold the rights to access by virtue of having paid for a copy of the data or by having generated that data, an act which is essentially theft. 

Yet because the thieves are large corporations with far more money than you have, this act of theft is condoned and even encouraged by the law. 

However, it must be known that a law that allows for the legal circumvention of DRM is only a single step in the right direction in regard to laws affecting the flow of information. In addition, patent law needs to be fixed so that things implemented in languages, and not through a physical apparatus, cannot be patented. In other words, current law could theoretically be used to patent ideas for stories. 

Imagine what the world would be like if someone (let's say Viacom, as they own Star Trek) patented stories involving any form of faster-than-light travel. That would mean that most space-borne science fiction in this country would either come from Viacom or it would be contraband.

Currently, such a patent has not been issued, but without reform, it's not a huge stretch to say that such a patent could be issued in the next few years. Companies have already patented such things as one-click shopping, methods to compress music so that you can put it on your iPod and ways of viewing video clips over the Internet, which are all things that are implemented not through some new apparatus, but through a collection of text files, much like a book or movie script.

The government's role in the process of invention is not to ensure that being an inventor is profitable, but to encourage innovation. This recent bill proposal can be the start of a new trend: one to encourage creation and innovation, not one to make sure that rich people can stay rich by stealing from everyone else.

McCormick, an opinion columnist for The Daily Cougar, 
can be reached at thephotoman@gmail.com.