[Leaplist] Cory Doctorow, to Microsoft, on "Why DRM is bad"

[Damien McKenna]

On Nov 1, 2007, at 5:02 PM, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Thursday 01 November 2007 11:52, patrick wrote:
>> Copyright isn't an ethical proposition, it's a utilitarian one.  
>> There's
>> nothing *moral* about paying a composer tuppence for the piano-roll
>> rights, there's nothing *immoral* about not paying Hollywood for the
>> right to videotape a movie off your TV. They're just the best way of
>> balancing out so that people's physical property rights in their VCRs
>> and phonographs are respected and so that creators get enough of a
>> dangling carrot to go on making shows and music and books and  
>> paintings.
>
> That last quote alarms me.
[snip]

I think you misunderstand him.

The first statement he makes is in regards to the ability to buy  
something at a specific price.  Why is paying tuppence any less moral  
than twenty dollars?  For a sale to be binding there must be an  
agreement on both the item and the price, you don't just walk into a  
care dealership, give them $5 and drive home a car, likewise someone  
isn't going to pay $1000 for a newspaper (well, they shouldn't that'd  
be stupid).  The agreed upon price is based on both the buyer's and  
seller's perceived value of the item (and bartering, haggling, etc),  
so ultimately if you buy said piano roll for tuppence you've made a  
legal purchase.

The second statement is about the ability to record something off your  
TV, a signal that you're paying for in one way or another (almost  
always via cable or satellite service), a far cry from your examples.   
There are IIRC laws in place that grant you the right to record the  
video signal to tape for your own personal wishes.

In the before times, before Tivo and the other DVRs, people used to  
put this large lump of plastic, called a video cassette, into this  
box, called a video recorder, press a red button that said "record" on  
it and then magically have the ability to watch the video signal at a  
later time.  The MPAA have always had a problem with this, despite the  
fact that the video market accounts for an ever increasing portion of  
their income, and they're currently using digital TV, HDTV, the  
broadcast flag and the DMCA to stop people being able to do so with  
the current generation of home entertainment systems.

Also, what's your take on fair use?  Do you object to e.g. a professor  
photocopying a few pages from one of your books to hand out in class,  
or someone doing likewise for a friend of theirs?  How about someone  
offering to translate it into another language for you for free?  Or  
how about they make a copy of it to read in the car while their  
original is happily sitting on their bookshelf at home (seriously,  
I've done that, though a few pages at a time)?

-- 
Damien McKenna - Husband, father, geek.
damien at mc-kenna.com - http://www.mc-kenna.com/
http://twitter.com/DamienMcKenna
http://www.linkedin.com/in/damienmckenna