Peter from the DefectiveByDesign campaign sez,
Yesterday, Viviane Reding, European Union commissioner for information society and media, issued a report sanctioning a "transparent" DRM framework for the EU. This irresponsible and senseless report comes just as Sony BMG have announced that they would join Warner Music Group, EMI, and Vivendi's Universal Music Group in selling DRM-free music downloads in the United States. That Reding would take this moment to propose that the European Union seek to impose DRM on European citizens is both senseless and irresponsible.
Join us in demanding that Reding retract her statement and issue a new report stating that the EU will neither endorse nor sponsor the creation of any DRM technology scheme.
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Thanks, Peter!)
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you forgot to mention how senseless and irresponsible this is.
Music DRMs might be near extinction, however, I think that DRMs for movies, television shows, streaming services, videos games and so on still have life in them, at least in the foreseeable future. So don't expect lawmakers in Europe and elsewhere to give up on them altogether yet. Rather, they might, like the French, try to find ways to regulate them.
Interestingly, the campaign is to stop DRM in the EU, but only United States can be chosen in the "Country" field when you try to sign up for the campaign... heh
Although as an Italian I am used to be ashamed of government, sometime I am ashamed of government as an EU citizen too.
I hope you all will act now and sign the Open Letter, as I have just done.
@DMITRI: if you click on "Sign the Open Letter" link, you will find the page to sign. Only first name, last name and email are required. Yet I have to admit that "Join the Campaign today" on top of every page is a little misleading.
When you buy music/movie, you do not really buy something physical, but rather some rights for personal usage like: listening, viewing, mixing. Of course you pay for some quality, so if You pay for 128kbit mp3, You may not own 192bit (it would be like paying for Smart and demanding Ferrari), until you pay for it (though you may use lower quality).
Of course licenses are trying to limit your rights as much as possible (CD copy->forbidden, mixing music with movie from your grandmas birthday party->forbidden, etc), so that you would have to buy more items, that is why you may not make personal copy of CD to listen in your car, which is stupid, because you have payed for rights to listen and CD is only carrier for object of your rights.
When you pay for Book or CD/DVD, you get "official carrier" of bought media (paper, cd) which is also prof of your license. This is quite cool, because carrier and license are bound together and can be easily passed to another person (given, sold, exchanged). I love this old model because: my parents gave me a lot of old books, I got a lot of old vinyl records from may grandparents and I spend a lot of time with my father, searching for old books through the second hand market.
In new digital model DRM is prof of your license (rights?) and quality of media, that is bound to carrier: a file. In case of music this model seems to be nice, you do not need to buy entire album. There is problem with that media, file does not physically exist like CD or paper, so there is no original carrier of your license (personally copied CD and book does not look original, but files look the same bit-to-bit).
When you give book or CD to another person, you are also giving away your license. But when you are giving file (mp3 for example) you could keep copy and license for yourself and new owner would not know, DRM tries to prevent this.
I do not like this model because I know it would not be possible for me to sell or give away DRMed files (e-books, music) to other people when I no longer need/want them, what I can easily do with non-e media like paper.
Additional problem for me is that I use *nix systems mostly (Windows for some development and gaming only) and DRM (in my country music is mostly sold with MS DRM) would not allow me playing music while I work, etc.
I have written, that when music is bought, in reality right to listen is bought... DRM cripples even this right, because it limits it to: certain software; certain hardware; may require network connection; and may be canceled when license provider will stop to support current technology.
While media like CD or paper have some value and can be sold (I mean original of course), DRMed files have no value (except personal) because they can not be sold.
Thats why I do not support DRM, I will keep on buying CDs and DVDs (though the other one has some DRM anyway, but I have no choice here), I will buy paper books instead of e-books and wait for lawyers and corporations to get sane and stop believing that each of their clients is trying to rip them off.
I do hope that Europe, where I do live, would drop DRM or disallow it as anti-customer technology.
"When you give book or CD to another person, you are also giving away your license. But when you are giving file (mp3 for example) you could keep copy and license for yourself and new owner would not know, DRM tries to prevent this."
Here's what I do: When I let a friend borrow a CD, I delete the ripped files from my server. When the friend returns the CD, I rip it again and place the files back on my server. I assume my friend must be doing the same on his end. Right?
I did not mean lend, but give/sell. I only give away CDs I do not need/want anymore, so I do not have mp3 from them.
Nitcheplayer is right that lending CD is problematic. I have not written about lending CD :D, though.
OK you are right, it is hard to solve this problem (and is one of purposes for corporations' paranoia).
I never rip CDs borrowed from others and I hope others do not do this when I lend my CD to them. Probably when I lend CD I should not listen to music ripped from it :D.
Licenses should be here more elastic.
There ate a lot of problems to be solved in licenses, but it is just matter of good will and honesty of corporations and customers.
This article is strangely optimistic about the state of DRM in the US, claiming that all major labels now allow DRM free music. But in fact, the labels are only letting SOME stores sell DRM free music. Specifically they are wielding this as a cudgel against Apple as part of their retaliation for Apple suggesting that all music should be free of DRM. If Amazon becomes a significant part of the market, just watch how fast Sony stops letting them sell music without DRM. The only way out of this is for Apple, or a group that includes Apple, to win the fight against the labels.
Stephen @8: So the labels are bashing Apple by only letting some music go DRM? And this will hurt Apple how? DRM is customer-unfriendly, so the customers will tend towards buying DRM-free music. The labels will follow the money and eventually make all their music DRM-free. Apple doesn't have to do a thing; the labels will end up fighting each other, as per usual.
@7 Byte: In Norway, at least, the law allows you to make copies from CDs borrowed from friends. The law is a bit fuzzy about what "friend" means, but I would assume it is roughly the same group of people that you would feel comfortable lending a CD to in the first place, so you don't need to go through the hoops you describe. If I understand comments to previous articles here, that is the law in the US as well.
Svein: I'm afraid some commenters have confused their wishes with facts. Under US law, duplicating a CD for someone else, whether one friend or a hundred, is still duplicating it illegally, much like duplicating a movie or software disc and giving away the copy. Of course I can't imagine that anyone has ever actually bothered to prosecute piracy on such a tiny scale, or would.
The legal fair use is when you make a backup of media you own already for your own personal use. (Or when you transformatively quote some small fraction of the work into your own larger work for any of the many reasons Mr. Doctorow has explicated at length.)
EU has long tradition of imposing stuff on European citizens in both senseless and irresponsible way.
There're regulation to the size of some fruits.
@Byte
Information =/= property.
It was made "property" by copyrights, but in nature it simply isn't. It's why all the problems arise. We're trying to treat sqare like a circle - it needs a lot of pushing to start "rolling" and stops when you don't push anymore.
I do strongly support property rights to the lenghts most of Boing Boing readers don't, but information simply isn't property.
To be fair, Peterus, land wasn't property either until we passed laws making it so. Before then, land was simply part of the earth, and how could someone be said to own it for themselves? I can't "take away" land from someone by standing on it any more than I can take away the air or light that falls on it. Yet at some point a code of laws defined land as an individual's property and so it was.
What I'm getting at is that what is or is not property is more of a legal distinction than an intrinsic one. (I am not suggesting that real estate should not exist, I'm just using it as a clear analogy.)
NELSON.C, the issue is that the labels are letting only certain stores sell music without DRM (it's specific to the store not the song). They'll let Amazon sell without DRM to make Apple look bad, until Amazon gains significant market share, then they'll tell Amazon that DRM free music was just an experiment and now they need to use DRM.
What we need is a strategy that gets them to sell without DRM in the popular venues, and that needs to include Apple or it's not a big fraction of the market.