Bongboys

The Pit

Copywrites are some of the best ways for persons to to protect their ideas, information, and work. Yet, although we recognize the creators of the works with the copywrite, most persons take for granted the 'fair use' of copywrited materials. People often time shift programs with VHS machines, and many people have recorded CDs to tape. All that is protected under 'fair use'. Yet, now, giant corporations have devised a way to take these rights from you: the Digital Millenium Copywrite Act.

The Digital Millentium Copywrite Act (DMCA) was passed in order to update copywrite laws to the current times. To a casual lookover, it appears to protect consumers, but in reality it takes away rights. The DMCA was created by coporations to help them, and to take the rights of fair use away from the consumer in order to profit from them. Any added protections for consumers was purely by accident. The protections for reverse engineering are an example of this.

Many people say the DMCA is protecting consumers, and state as an example the specific protections for reverse engineering that it contains. What they don't realize is that those protections are soley in the interest of corporations. The computer industry is built heavily on the back of reverse engineering, and that is where the money to fund things is. Just like the rest of the DMCA, money talks and the common consumer is given little interest.

The real problem with the DMCA is that it takes away fair use with restrictions on encryption. The United States has had notoriously bad laws concerning encryption, this being the latest addition. The DMCA makes it illegal to decrypt any encrcrypted materials, even if you own them, without the permission of the copywrite holder. This has been used in numerous ways to restict the rights of the consumer to fair use. The most notable use of the DMCA to stop fair use is that of DVDs. DVDs are encrypted on the disk, in order to do 2 things: stop the purchaser from copying a digitally perfect copy of the dvd to his hard drive, and to keep users in other countries from importing dvds. Movies are traditionally released later in Europe and Australia, to increase profits for movie corporations. The difference in the PAL and NTSC formats kept VHS imports from becoming too popular, but with DVDs, nothing stops any DVD drive from reading and displaying the information besides the loose encryption on the DVD.

Because of the promise of getting back fair use from the DVD was good, a group of programers wrote a program, DeCSS, that was able to decrypt audio/video files on the DVD. This allowed consumers to regain 'fair use' of their DVDs, which coporate America did not like. They promtly sued the makers of DeCSS, stating that it allowed pirates to copy perfect images of DVDs. What they did not say is that true pirates didn't need to decrypt the information anyway—they need only to make a 1 to 1 copy of the DVD itself.

Even if the DVDs are repacked with the highest recompression, they can typically take up to 650 megabytes of space. On the fastest internet connection, it would take hours to download a movie pirated this way. Making minimum wage for the time of the download, a person could easily buy 2 DVDs with their gross earnings.