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April 1, 2003

ABA Climbs Heights of Ignorance

By Glenn Fleishman

ABA’s committee produces cut and paste digital rights management report about Wi-Fi: Cory Doctorow, an educator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, eviscerates a report from the American Bar Assocation’s committee studying new information technologies that recommends a variety of asinine protocol-level changes to support digital rights management (DRM). The changes are ridiculous because they would require massive infrastructure reworkings with no increased benefit to the users of the technology, only to a tiny number of rights holders.

DRM itself is not evil, but there has so far been no example of it which offers equal and fair-use rights to the individuals who are the victims of DRM while protecting the copyright and usage rights of intellectual property owners.

As a creator of intellectual property—a writer—I would like to see my IP used only in ways that I allow, which include unlimited use or release into the public domain. But only at my discretion. DRM as a concept is worthwhile if all the implementations didn’t go hand in hand with criminalization and mass-media control—DRM doesn’t help an individual like me yet.

(Disclosure: The EFF is suing 29 meda companies that have sued SonicBlue over ReplayTV on behalf of myself and four other plaintiffs. SonicBlue just went into bankruptcy and the sale of ReplayTV is pending to a Japanese firm.)

Posted by Glennf at April 1, 2003 10:16 AM

Categories: Cluelessness

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