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Every morning when I boot my compute, it plays the first
few bars of the Kingsmen's version of Louie,
Louie.
This is perfectly legal, since I own a legitimate rendition -- the 45 single on the Wand label that I bought at Woolworth's in the fall of 1965 -- and the copyright law allows us to make copies for our own use.
But that right to use things we paid for is under attack, under the guise of protecting intellectual property from theft.
The most recent phase of the assault comes from Sen. Fritz Hollings, a South Carolina Democrat, who has been promoting the Security System Standards and Certification Act. Among other things, he wants to make it illegal to sell computers that don't have some built-in mechanism to make it impossible to copy material whose owners don't want it to be copied.
That is, you buy a compact disk with some copyrighted musical performances. You'd like to have this music on the road, too, so you burn a copy of the CD to use in your car. That's legal, as long as you don't sell the copy, but Hollings wants to make it impossible by requiring all computers to have a chip that would read some message embedded in the original CD, and then refuse to make the copy.
And if you figured out a way around this infringement on your rights, you'd still be in trouble. Drafts of the Hollings bill call for criminal penalties -- up to five years in prison -- for anyone who disables this copy protection scheme.
This isn't just another stupid federal law that would never be enforced. We're already a long way down this particular slippery slope, thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that took effect in 1998.
A movie on DVD is protected against copying with something called the Content Scrambling System. DVD players know how to work with it, and so do Windows and Macintosh computers.
But Linux users also wanted to view DVDs with their computers, and the corporate world didn't consider us a market worth serving. So Jon Johansen, a Norwegian teenager, figured out how to descramble DVDs so they could be played on Linux systems.
Did the DVD producers send him a thank-you note for opening a new market for their wares, at absolutely no cost to them?
Of course not. The Motion Picture Association of America and the DVD Copy Control Association went to court, trying to shut down Internet sites which had Johansen's program, or even sites that pointed to Johansen's program. So much for free speech.
There was also the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov, the
Russian programmer who figured out a way around the copy
protection scheme that Adobe Systems uses for e-books.
Sklyarov was attending a high-tech convention in Los Vegas
when the FBI arrested him for creating any technology,
product, service, device, component or part
that
circumvents a copy-protection scheme.
Presumably these laws and proposed laws protect property rights by making it impossible to make copies. But it's not illegal to make copies.
Let's try an analogy. You can use a crowbar to break into a house, and you can use bolt-cutters to remove a padlock. But we don't outlaw these tools, since you can go into any hardware store and buy bolt-cutters and crowbars. They have legitimate uses, and it's a crime only if you use them in an illegal way.
In general, then, it's not a crime to possess a crowbar, or to tell people where they can find a crowbar if they want one. So why does some third-rate movie on DVD rate more protection -- and federal protection at that -- than your front door and mine?
Probably because you and I don't make campaign contributions, and the motion picture and software industries do. They whine about how many billions of dollars they lose every year on account of illegal copying.
But this argument seems specious. For one thing, most
of those billions of dollars in lost sales
never
would have been sales. Most people who use bootleg
versions aren't the people who would have purchased
legitimate versions.
For another, the publishing industry manages to survive even though there's a copyright-circumvention device -- a copying machine -- in almost every office.
The publishing industry figured out that most people find it easier to pay $25 for a book than to copy it page by page, then collate the copies, etc.
The music industry might see the light, too, and quit charging nearly $20 for something that costs less than a dollar to make -- but the trend is going the other way, alas.
And now they want to put people in jail for telling us how to do something we have a right to do -- make copies for our own use. President Bush keeps telling us that freedom is under attack. Trouble is, he points to Afghanistan instead of looking down the street in Washington.
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