The RIAA should go into the fear-mongering business, or at the very least, release a comedy album of their histrionics.........rf
RIAA Says Future DRM Might ³Threaten Critical Infrastructure and Potentially Endanger Lives² Wednesday March 8, 2006 by Ed Felten http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=984 We¹re in the middle of the U.S. Copyright Office¹s triennial DMCA exemption rulemaking. As you might expect, most of the filings are dry as dust, but buried in the latest submission by a coalition of big copyright owners (publishers, Authors¹ Guild, BSA, MPAA, RIAA, etc.) is an utterly astonishing argument. Some background: In light of the Sony-BMG CD incident, Alex and I asked the Copyright Office for an exemption allowing users to remove from their computers certain DRM software that causes security and privacy harm. The CCIA and Open Source and Industry Association made an even simpler request for an exemption for DRM systems that ³employ access control measures which threaten critical infrastructure and potentially endanger lives.² Who could oppose that? The BSA, RIAA, MPAA, and friends that¹s who. Their objections to these two requests (and others) consist mostly of lawyerly parsing, but at the end of their argument about our request comes this (from pp. 22-23 of the document, if you¹re reading along at home): Furthermore, the claimed beneficial impact of recognition of the exemption that it would ³provide an incentive for the creation of protection measures that respect the security of consumers¹ computers while protecting the interests of the record labels² ([citation to our request]) would be fundamentally undermined if copyright owners and everyone else were left in such serious doubt about which measures were or were not subject to circumvention under the exemption. Hanging from the end of the above-quoted excerpt is a footnote: This uncertainty would be even more severe under the formulations proposed in submissions 2 (in which the terms ³privacy or security² are left completely undefined) or 8 [i.e., the CCIA request] (in which the boundaries of the proposed exemption would turn on whether access controls ³threaten critical infrastructure and potentially endanger lives²). You read that right. They¹re worried that there might be ³serious doubt² about whether their future DRM access control systems are covered by these exemptions, and they think the doubt ³would be even more severe² if the ³exemption would turn on whether access controls threaten critical infrastructure and potentially endanger lives¹.² Yikes. One would have thought they¹d make awfully sure that a DRM measure didn¹t threaten critical infrastructure or endanger lives, before they deployed that measure. But apparently they want to keep open the option of deploying DRM even when there are severe doubts about whether it threatens critical infrastructure and potentially endangers lives. And here¹s the really amazing part. In order to protect their ability to deploy this dangerous DRM, they want the Copyright Office to withhold from users permission to uninstall DRM software that actually does threaten critical infrastructure and endanger lives. If past rulemakings are a good predictor, it¹s more likely than not that the Copyright Office will rule in their favor. _______________________________________________ Infowarrior mailing list Infowarrior@attrition.org https://attrition.org/mailman/listinfo/infowarrior
