[free-sklyarov] What is Copyright?

[David Haworth]

On Thu, Sep 13, 2001 at 06:43:09AM -0400, John Dempsey wrote:

> Strenuously agreed.  But it is plasuable that removing features from media
> eventually removes the copyright protection of the media.  The rules of its
> ownership--quite possibly including the right to speech-to-text it--are for
> courts and governments to define, not content owners.  I understand the
> motivation somewhat of putting the owners in charge of the new and dynamic
> digital media forms.  But courts will eventually defend some rights of media
> owners for digital media, as they did for all other forms, because at some
> point of "feature reduction", ownership isn't ownership anymore.

The DMCA is quite simplistic (despite all its legal verbosity):

1. Certain activities are defined as infringement of copyright.

2. Publishers can try to prevent these activites using technological
   methods.

3. If you distribute mechanisms to overcome these protections, you're
   a criminal.

And that's the problem. It's a simplistic solution to a very
complex problem. Too simplistic. Because what we now have is

4. Publishers can use the technological methods in (2) to prevent
   activities that don't infringe copyright.

Without (3), there wouldn't be a problem. If I find an eBook that
doesn't work with the text-to-speech features of my eboook reader
program, I can work around it using a little programming expertise.
I can still do this even with the DMCA - as far as I can tell the
act of circumvention is only illegal if you do it to infringe
copyrights. But if I give you the program I wrote, I'm a criminal.
Or at least, I face the prospect of spending a long time in court
testing an ill-conceived law, against all the financial muscle of
the publishing industry. That's what's wrong, and it's why the
"read aloud" permission.

Here's an interesting thought, though. Warning: I'm going to make
a pretty heavy assumption that the "read aloud" permission
is hidden behind the encryption that is supposed to prevent
copying. If this turns out not to be the case, then this whole
discussion falls down - because you could modify the permission
bit without circumventing anything.

Under the DMCA as it stands, if I wrote a program that merely
modified the "read aloud" bit, it wouldn't be illegal to
distribute a binary version of that program - at least not
under any sane interpretation of the DMCA - because it
doesn't circumvent the copy protection in any way. But that
program must decrypt, modify and re-encrypt the ebook. So
if I distributed the source you could easily modify it to
dump the plaintext of the book. Does that make the source
code illegal when the binary is legal? What, then, about the
source code to the "official" ebook reader?

-- 
David Haworth
Baiersdorf, Germany
david.haworth at altavista.net