Re: OT: Movie editing... (Was RE: [dvd-discuss] Fair use in thewild ...)

["D. C. Sessions" <dcs(at)lumbercartel.com>]

On Saturday 27 October 2001 09:40, you wrote:
> Wendy Seltzer wrote:
> >   Unless courts recognize the
> > possibility of "significant non-circumvention use" of a circumvention
> > device, we won't be able to reach the unprotectable part of the mix.
> 
> Actually on should require a fair use defense for circumvention devices
> (and their distribution (trafficking).  If a circumvention device has a
> significant fair-use -- i.e. it enables the legitmate possesor of a copy
> (digital or physical) of a copyright work to make non-infringing uses
> precluded by the TPM or DRM, then the device should be defensible and
> exempt.  A further exemption for all academic, research, or scientific
> purpose would clear up the whole of the matter.  Yes it wouldn't
> legalize "cable descramblers" -- but I don't think that's what most of
> us are about here.

Frankly, the legal dance surrounding TPMs doesn't bother me all that
much.  I consider it a distraction from the liklihood that the content
cartel will quietly arrange in back rooms to make non-TPM hardware
disappear from the world.  No more general utility audio chips, no
more general-utility video chips, no more general-utility disks etc.

I think if we make these crippled devices uninteresting now, they
won't get a chance to evolve into something really ugly and hard
to deal with.  What would be RUAHTDW?  Imagine that the content
cartel actually got over their fixation on 19th-century manufacturing
models?  Imagine that every disk drive had a unique access key
built in.  In order to light up the drive, the drive generates a challenge,
to which the OS must respond.  The OS key comes from registering
the drive, and the drive key is only issued after querying the OS for
its registration key, which in turn is only provided at installation etc.

Not unbreakable, but it would have to be broken for each hardware
device, and doing so would be Just Too Much Trouble.  Instead, the
vast majority of people would go along.  After a few years, nobody
would remember that once upon a time, "computer" didn't mean
"entertainment console."

-- 
| I'm old enough that I don't have to pretend to be grown up.|
+----------- D. C. Sessions <dcs@lumbercartel.com> ----------+