Digital Rights Molestation

That's right, molestation. We are seeing more and more of this technology, which pretends to protect media content from so-called piracy. For decades, the concept of fair-use (the notion that, laws aside, it is our prerogative to do honest things with content that we legitimately own licence to—like make copies of it for backup, or to put it on a different type of medium, better suited to some way that we want to use it, or even use a bit of it in our answering machine announcement) has been accepted as par for the course. Even in the face of DRM and 9 years of the DMCA's disallowence of bypassing it, fair-use has remained standing.

Now, the powers that be (mostly by virtue of wealth, attained in no small part by bleeding artists dry, then discarding them—often to wallow and die in abject poverty and pestolence—whilst raking in billions from their work) want it cast in stone, that circumventing DRM for any reason—even fair-use—shall be forbidden. (Boucher and Doolittle Introduce Fair Use Bill. Wired, 27 feb 2007)

At this point, we'd be far better off if the content megacorporations were dismantled. Sure we'd have fewer big ticket movies and musical acts. But then, how many manufactured bands and mindless action adventures do we really need? The easing of homogenous market saturation, would make room for more of the smaller-scale stuff that's actually interesting and creative.

The entities behind the MPAA and RIAA have been hollering "foul" and getting laws passed in the name of anti-piracy, that impose technological restrictions that do absolutely nothing to prevent real piracy. Anyone who has tried, in the past century, to get their own small slice of the industrial pie, knows that their real agenda is to keep the little guys out.

Now they see technology that allows anyone to publish their work to a worldwide audience, for a few hundred dollars, and they're racing to block the new road (just as they tried to stop R-DAT and high-speed cassette—two technologies which, in their respective times, raised the quality with which small operations could make field recordings), by—once again—yelling "pirates!" and attempting to require content restric— "protection" on all digital media, and to make it as close as possible to being explicitly illegal to copy any "protected" content, and spreading propaganda that has some people actually believing that it's illegal to "download music" even with the copyright holder's permission.

That's right. Some people actually think that it's illegal to download any music—not just the RIAA fill dirt. My sister—who makes some of her music freely available, with no restriction upon copying and passing around—has encountered people who won't download it, because they think that it is against the law to do so! She tells them, "But i'm the copyright-holder; i am giving you permission!" "But it's downloading music", they retort, "And downloading music is illegal!" And around it goes.

Our society is being raped.