DRM, copyright and the DMCA
A Parliamentary Group (which I assume is similar to a committee in the US Congress) recently met to hear oral evidence to help it prepare a report on Digital Rights Management.
I'm a supporter of DRM, a status that is about as rare in technology forums as bodybuilding, healthy eating and sunlight. I also, however, value the information commons, something I explained in a previous post on the subject of intellectual property. Copyright is designed to have limits in order to ensure that the intellectual property it covers will, eventually, fall into the "public domain" where anyone can use, reuse and edit it without the need to pay fees. This is important in the realm of ideas and culture as new inspiration builds on what went before it.
The fear that many expressed in response to a later defense of DRM was that it would enable big business to evade copyright limits by ensuring that only DRMed copies existed. Defended by laws such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act which outlaws hacking of digital protection mechanisms, companies could theoretically evade copyright rules indefinitely. That issue occurred to British legislators, and this was how they proposed to deal with it:
Next up, representatives from the British Library explained their concerns that DRM technology could stop future generations accessing material the library is obliged to store forever. They suggested either a trusted third party to hold information in an unencrypted form or for DRM to be removed once copyright has expired.
Copyright has limits for a reason, and the rules of the DMCA don't trump the limits designed into copyright law. If a company tries to make an end-run around copyright limits, the solution lies in the courts, and on mandates to release the media in unencrypted form once the copyright period has expired. This will happen, in my opinion.
Granted, this is untested in the United States, and the UK, for that matter. I feel fairly confident, however, that super-humans living 500 years hence and flitting around the galaxy through exotic quirks in spacetime won't be paying licensing fees for Sheb Wooley's "Flying Purple Eater" because copyright owners pulled a fast one on copyright law by making sure only DRM copies existed.