Well the other thread seems to be gone now. Why I don't know but please let's make it a priority not to let this thread go in the direction that other recent DRM threads have.
That being said, this actually could work out to be a good thing since we know about it before Sony has the legislative agenda ready to roll. Follow me out on this idea.
For over 200 years, copyright laws have sought to achieve a balance between the rights of owners and users of protected material. Keeping this simple, let's look at a book. I cannot copy off a book and sell copies of it on my own. Of course, in the past, that was quite hard to do with any chance of making any money at it but the point remains valid. However, I could do certain things with that book without getting the permission of the publisher. For example:
Fair Use states that I can copy small bits of the book for educational purposes. Now the courts have traditionally held that educational purposes required that I would have to limit what I copied to the smallest possible pieces. However, there is no accepted rule that states that you can only copy (for example) a hundred words or less. The courts have decided to leave that limit undefined.
Under fair use, I once copied a whole chapter of a book. Of course that was only a few pages of a computer book and the actual text that I copied was a series of one page descriptions of email/usenet/FTP etc. The information is generally available and I could have copied it in pieces from other sources. Also, I would add that I copied the cover of the book and stapled it together with the handout that the rest of the copies comprised.
The thing about fair use being that you do not need permission from the copyright holder **provided that you do not substantially reduce** the value of the work to the copyright holder. I would love to see the court that would entertain the idea that I had done that and made an obvious commercial for anyone who was sufficiently interested in the subject to go out and buy the book for themselves.
Archival Copying is also allowed provided that you only make a single copy as protection against your losing the original. This largely comes from the era of crappy analog recordings that could only be played a couple of dozen times. Frankly, there was not a whole lot to say about it as everyone who had the ability would buy a vinyl record (for the best possible quality) and then proceed to tape it so that they could only play the tape until that was dead.
Resale of a protected work is also covered. Under the “Doctrine of First Sale” the holder of a copyright only gets paid for the first sale of a work. After that, I can sell my used books, I can sell my old CDs, I can sell my copy of MSWord/95 (provided that I don't still have it installed) and I can sell my old games.
However, the recent history of DRM shows us that copyright holders would like to simply erase all of the above rights. A good example of this would be what happened with DVDs. The industry did get a law passed (the DMCA) that made it illegal to circumvent copy protection. Part of the reason for that was what went on with P2P.
Under the existing laws, while you are free to make a copy of a work for your own use, you are not free to make copies to give to your 3 closest friends. Of course with P2P, you were potentially sharing with your few million closest friends. Small wonder the powers that be had a problem and allowed the DMCA.
An analysis of how it fits with the old laws on the subject should provide that it is not unreasonable to make a copy of a DVD for your own use. However, as it stands, that too is illegal. Here is where my main objection to DRM comes into play. Manufacturers are attempting to remove existing rights from consumers by fiat. In so doing, they are according new rights to themselves that stand in contradiction with two centuries of established law.
Now, since the cat is out of the bag as far as this new patent goes, now would be a good time for us to all write our representatives and senators to ask them to hold the line on new technology until it is determined to be in accordance with existing laws. As far as the DMCA goes, that has already become law and any future battles that may bring that down are most probably going to be fought in the courts. That is expensive and time consuming. However, it only takes a few minutes and a stamp to write your legislator to ask that he stand for the traditional rights as protected by law.
Then, a year or two from now, when Sony is ready to try and buy the next version of the DMCA that would let them get away with this, your legislators would be informed on the matter and they would know that we the people stand for a return to traditionally allpied law and not new rights for content creators.
