Re: [Drm-elimination-crew] Welcome to the DRM Elimination Crew! Introductions and an important question

[Marcos Marado]

Hi there,

On Friday 24 May 2013 19:03:13 Kẏra wrote:
[...]
> The questions we must answer are these: 
> 
> * In each arena (audio, video, software, and ebooks), who are the
> biggest DRM proponents? 

Copyright owners. It is easy (easier?) to criticize content 
services/distributors, but they're (almost) always implementing DRM because 
that's the way they have to get rights to use that content on their services. 
I won't be against those who argue that those services shouldn't buck under 
the pressure (and I'm totally for services that say "we don't have company X's 
catalog because we don't want to use DRM"), but it might be a waste of effort 
to target companies who say, for instance "90% of the music market is from the 
three major labels. If we want to compete we need the content that provides 
those 90%, and for that to happen we need to use DRM". What we should target 
is those 90% (instead of each service that bucks under them): in music's case 
that's Sony, Universal and Warner.

From my experience, 
* Copyright owners want DRM - they'll say "if you want my content you need to 
  use DRM". That must change;
* Copyright owners don't want DRM - they'll use it anyway because that's the 
  "standard", many times they don't even know what they're doing. I've seen 
  this with, for instance, libraries: companies providing ebook store 
  solutions say to them "you need to buy this and that and whatever, total 
  cost X". They're adding DRM there, and they're getting more money, and 
  sometimes other "advantages" like vendor lock. In these cases, we also need 
  to educate copyright owners to know that they shouldn't want DRM.

> * How do we make it clear that DRM is not something we will allow to
> continue (target their bottom line)? 
> 
> Petitions and letter writing are both appeals to power. They assume that
> the DRM profiteers will be nice to their customers. We have seen this is
> not how they operate. 
> 
> Boycotting is only effective with mass support that we can't really
> expect. The real problem is that boycotting puts the responsibility on
> all individuals to abstain from supporting companies that use DRM rather
> than using the support we do have to stand up and resist those
> companies. 
> 
> So, with that in mind, what forms of direct action can we utilize? 

The only way I see is from the legal prespective. Breaking DRM shouldn't be 
illegal. If I'm in a country where private copying is legal (I am legally able 
to do a backup from a DVD I bought, for instance), there shouldn't be a law 
telling me that "oh, but if there's DRM involved you can't break it, so you 
just lost your private copying right".
From my (Portuguese) point of view, this needs to be done in two fronts:
* In Portugal, near Portuguese parties and legislators;
* In Europe, using the recent European plans to reform the private copying 
  directive (which also is the DRM directive) as the right place and time to 
  fix this.

In those two fronts, I can also say a couple of things:

= Portugal =

Getting completely under the radar internationally, and almost completely even 
nationally, two of our opposition parties are proposing two different laws to 
the parliament aiming to fix the DRM issue in Portugal. The project from one 
of the parties is already public (our analisys: http://s.clix.pt/bn , in 
Portuguese...) and while the other isn't yet, we know that its spirit is the 
same. Both will be debated in the Portuguese Parliament at the 12th of June, 
and probably to be voted on the 14th of June.

= Europe =

The private levies' issue next step should be in the Licenses For Europe 
initiative ( http://s.clix.pt/bp ), but somehow someone managed for it to be 
absent in any of the workgroups. In the meantime, there was a set of workshops 
from CEPS ( http://bit.ly/Tm97Kw ) that included discussion on the matter. 
Weirdly enough, there were no reports from each workshop, and while the latest 
was in January, the task force report is still "under preparation", and every 
query about it I've made goes unreplied.


Best regards,
-- 
Marcos Marado