First, let me say that I am a *very* strong supporter of
intellectual property rights... I have always made my income by "selling" my
intellectual property and I consider the anti-IPR proponents and "Free
Software" evangelists to be no better than thieves or communists... Also, I
am listed as sole inventor on four patents dealing with DRM and I have a
number of pending applications in the works today... Having said that:
If writers and publishers are provided with mechanisms to attach
"rights" or DRM-like information to Atom entries or feeds, we are likely to
discover that they will mistakenly assume that software will actually take
some note of their statements and use those statements while processing
entries. I believe, however, that it is exceptionally unlikely that Atom
processors will, in fact, process such rights statements. There are many
reasons for this and I've outlined them in numerous posts in the past. The
most important are:
1) There are no useful, open and unencumbered standards for
expressing limitations to rights in a machine readable fashion. (Note: CC
does *not* support "limiting" rights.)
2) The DRM space is carpeted with patents and it is unlikely that
people will find an unencumbered DRM method for at least another 10 years or
so.
3) Authors and publishers are notoriously bad at understanding the
legal implications of what they are saying concerning IPR and will often
limit rights more than they expect.
4) The cost of upgrading every Atom processor to handle rights
"properly" and without legal risk will make it virtually impossible for
people to build the kind of quick-and-dirty processors that exist today.
(i.e. before you could release your latest PHP-hack, you'd have to get legal
review...)
5) We'll make it legally dangerous to build software that *reads*
Atom feeds. Thus, it will only safe to write software that creates Atom
feeds. The result will be reduced innovation in the space and potential
domination by a small number of "feed readers" who are able to demonstrate
legal compliance.
6) We're likely to "pollute the stream" by creating a babel of
rights languages and legal traps that will choke off the Blogosphere.
7) We risk a situation where some aggregator will obtain preferred
access to an encumbered DRM technology and then evangelize its use among
authors and publishers. The result might be that all feed readers who don't
use the method are forced to either go out of business to avoid the legal
attacks of irate users or they will be forced to pay license fees to the
patent holders. This would not be difficult to orchestrate...
We should studiously avoid encouraging people to believe that
software management of rights is possible in the open internet until some
time in the future when someone identifies a formal standard which is
demonstrated to be unencumbered by patents.
If people really insist on providing more encouragement to the
"rights management" folk in the Atom spec, then let us *please* include
something like the following in the specification in order to discourage
people from believing that processors will actually head the content of
their DRM statements:
"Publishers MUST NOT expect that processors of atom feeds or entries
will, in fact, modify their behavior based on any content provided in or
linked to by this element."
bob wyman
