========================================
ED FOSTER'S GRIPELOG
The Reader Advocate Column
========================================
Meet Up to Save Your Fair Use Rights
Thursday, March 11, 2004
By Ed Foster
As the music, movie, and software industries inexorably work on depriving us of our rights, it sometimes seems like there's nothing we can do about it. But there is, and it's just a matter of you and me getting together a week from tonight to talk about it.
At 7 PM local time on March 18th, 321 Studios is sponsoring Meetup.com discussions on digital rights at sites across the country (
http://digitalrights.meetup.com ). I just signed up for my local meeting, and, while it looks right now to be a small group, I'm going to be there anyway. The longest journey must begin with a single step, so why not take this one?
If you've missed the recent news stories (
http://www.321studios.com/321news.asp ) about 321 Studios' legal battle with Hollywood, two courts have now ruled that the company's DVD-copying products violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by circumventing DVD copy protection. 321 Studios argues that it enables customers to make backup copies of the DVDs they purchase, a clear fair use.
Of course, there are a lot of fair use issues revolving around the DMCA, so why do I think this one is worth getting together to talk about? In part it's because the 321 Studios situation reminds me very much of Central Point's CopyIIpc, a backup-enabling product that was around in the early days of the PC business. During the period when Lotus and many other software companies were using copy protection that forced you to run your program from a key disk in the floppy drive, CopyIIpc and similar products became quite popular.
As with 321 Studios' products, CopyIIpc originally struck some as being a tool that would really be used primarily for piracy. But changing technology soon gave CopyIIpc another legitimate purpose beyond making a backup - it made it possible to run a program faster by copying it to one of those new-fangled things called a hard drive that were just then becoming common on PCs. Because the software publishers were slow to adopt their copy protection schemes to hard drives, the market soon forced them to abandon copy protection altogether.
There are a number of parallels between Lotus copy protection of old and the movie industry's DVD encryption, but the one I believe most important is how copy protection inevitably clashes with the progress of technology. The most obvious example is the fact that to play a legally purchased DVD on a Linux system, you need to get DeCSS - software the movie industry also brands illegal under the DMCA.
And let's not ignore some of the other ways the movie industry uses its DMCA-blessed copy protection to deprive customers of the right to use DVDs fairly. DVDs are coded by region of the world, so, for example, a DVD purchased in the U.S. can't be used on a player purchased in Europe.
Some DVDs that you pay for now come with commercials that you aren't able to skip, unless you take matters and your fair use rights in your own hands with DVD-ripper technology like that the courts are saying 321 Studios can't sell.
That's why this case deserves some discussion. You bought the DVD, and you should have the right to make a back-up in case it's damaged and to play it in the device of your choice, including future devices that Hollywood don't get to veto. Those are the real fair use rights that the movie industry and its stooges in Congress and the courts are actually taking away from us.
And speaking of Congress, this is an election year. I doubt very much we can get digital fair use on the radar screen in the Presidential election, but local elections are another story. Even a relatively small group of voters, if they work hard enough at making their voices heard, can have a big impact at the grassroots level with an issue like this.
That's why I'm going to be at my local Meetup site on the evening of March 18 to talk about digital fair use. Hope to see you there.
========================================
Read this column on-line and post your own comments at
http://www.gripe2ed.com/scoop/section/Columns, or write me directly at
Foster@gripe2ed.com.
