In his book
But in this case, Adobe decided to set the DRM “rights” for the e-book to say that you could not copy extracts from it, not print pages from it, and not even lend it or give it to a friend.
Blind and visually impaired people, who need to have e-books converted to accessible formats to be able to enjoy them, are often restricted by DRM. Although they have the legal right to convert the books they have bought, the DRM restrictions prevent them from doing so in practice.
Another example is the region coding on DVDs, which prevents you from watching movies that you have legally bought, if you bought it in a different region of the world from where you bought your DVD player.
These are things that you have all the legal rights in the world to do. But that will do you no good, if a company decides to put DRM restrictions on their product that restrict your technical ability to do so. And not only do the restrictions as such make it difficult to exercise your legal rights for a work that you have bought a copy of. The way the law is written today, it is illegal for you to even try.
This is clearly unreasonable. It should always be legal to circumvent DRM restrictions, and we should consider introducing a ban in the consumer rights legislation on DRM technologies that restrict legal uses of a work.
When doing this, we should define “DRM” as “any technical system that restricts consumers from anything that they have the legal right to do”. Since there are exceptions and limitations for certain uses (including the right to make private copies) in the copyright legislation of all countries, this definition covers all systems that one would normally think of as DRM.
There is no point in having our parliaments introduce a balanced and reasonable copyright legislation, if at the same time we allow the big multinational corporations to write their own laws, and enforce them through technical means.
Chapter 7
The Cultural Markets Of The Future
Nobody Asked For A Refrigerator Fee
A hundred years ago, one of the largest employers in the Stockholm, Sweden, was a company named Stockholm Ice. Their business was as straightforward as it was necessary: help keep perishable food edible for longer by distributing cold in a portable format.
They would cut up large blocks of ice from the frozen lakes in the winter, store them on sawdust in huge barns, cut the blocks into smaller chunks and sell it in the streets. People would buy the ice and keep it with food in special cupboards, so the food would be in cold storage.
(This is why some senior citizens still refer to refrigerators as “ice boxes”.)
When households in Stockholm were electrified during the first half of the last century, these distributors of cold were made obsolete. After all, what they distributed was the ability to keep food cold, and suddenly everybody could do that themselves.
This was a fairly rapid process in the cities. With the availability of the refrigerator from circa 1920, most households had their own refrigerator by the end of the 1930s. One of the city’s largest employers — distributors of cold — had been made totally obsolete by technical development.
There were many personal tragedies in this era as the icemen lost their bread-winning capacity and needed to retrain to get new jobs in a completely new field. The iceman profession had often been tough to begin with, and seeing your industry disintegrate in real- time didn’t make it any easier.
But here are a few things that did not happen as the ice distribution industry became obsolete:
No refrigerator owner was sued for making their own cold and ignoring the existing corporate cold distribution chains.
No laws were proposed that would make electricity companies liable in court if the electricity they provided was used in a way that destroyed icemen’s jobs.
Nobody demanded a monthly refrigerator fee from refrigerator owners that would go to the Icemen’s Union.
No lavishly expensive expert panels were held in total consensus about how necessary icemen were for the entire economy.
Rather, the distribution monopoly became obsolete, was ignored, and the economy as a whole benefited by the resulting decentralization.
We’re now seeing a repeat of this scenario, but where the distribution industry — the copyright industry — has the audacity to stand up and demand special laws and say that the economy will collapse without their unnecessary services. But we learn from history, every time, that it is good when an industry becomes obsolete. That means we have learned something important — to do things in a more efficient way. New skills and trades always appear in its wake.
The copyright industry tells us, again and again and again, that if they can’t have their obsolete distribution monopoly enshrined into law with ever-increasing penalties for ignoring it, that no culture will be produced at all. As we have seen, equally time and again, this is hogwash.
What might be true is that the copyright industry can’t produce music to the tune of one million US dollars per track. But you can’t motivate monopoly legislation based on your costs, when others are doing the same thing for much less — practically zero. There has never been as much music available as now, just because all of us love to create. It’s not something we do because of money, it’s because of who we are. We have always created.
What about movies, then? Hundred-million productions? There are examples of garage-produced movies (and one even has beat Casablanca to become the most-seen movie of all time in its native country: the film
So far, the film industry has been setting new box office records every year for the last decade. For all their doomsday scenarios, they have never done better financially than right now. But, fair enough, perhaps there will come a time when people will become less interested in paying for hundred-million dollar films.
But even if it would be true that movies can’t be made the same way with the Internet and our civil liberties both in existence, then maybe it’s just the natural progression of culture.
After all, we have previously had operettas, ballets, and classical concerts as the high points of culture in the past. They all still exist, but they are not at the center of mainstream public attention in the way they once were. Nobody is particularly concerned that those expressions have had their peak and that society has moved on to new expressions of culture. There is no inherent value in writing today’s forms of culture into law and preventing the changes we’ve always had.
Everywhere we look, we see that the copyright monopolies need to be cut down to allow society to move on from today’s stranglehold on culture and knowledge. Teenagers today typically don’t even see the problem — they take sharing in the connected world so totally for granted, that they discard any signals to the contrary as
