Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg has an excellent column in tomorrow’s edition taking the music and movie industries to task for using overly restrictive DRM. Like most reasonable people, Mossberg thinks copyright holders have the right to protect their products online, and doesn’t condone the mass theft of music or films.
On the other hand, some of the more stringent DRM technologies, such as those that don’t allow customers to copy their CDs to PCs or that automatically “expire” programs copied on Tivo without the user’s awareness, are just plain wrong, Mossberg says. “Treating all consumers as potential criminals by using DRM to overly limit their activities is just plain wrong.”
The beauty of digital media is the flexibility, and that flexibility shouldn’t be destroyed for honest consumers just because the companies that sell them have a theft problem caused by a minority of people.
Instead of using DRM to stop some individual from copying a song to give to her brother, the industry should be focusing on ways to use DRM to stop the serious pirates — people who upload massive quantities of music and videos to so-called file-sharing sites, or factories in China that churn out millions of pirate CDs and DVDs.
I believe Congress should rewrite the copyright laws to carve out a broad exemption for personal, noncommercial use by consumers, including sharing small numbers of copies among families.
Until then, I suggest that consumers avoid stealing music and videos, but also boycott products like copy-protected CDs that overly limit usage and treat everyone like a criminal. That would send the industry a message to use DRM more judiciously.
Cynthia Brumfield at 11:16 PM|Comments(0)
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