This would amount to obliterating the “DRM Curtain” model of capitalism in the information field — a system of economic extraction and class rule comparable to the system of bureaucratic privilege in the old Soviet Union in its reliance on suppressing the free flow of information. It would put an end to the centerpieces of copyright culture today — DMCA takedowns, “three strikes” laws cutting off ISP services to illegal downloaders, and domain seizures of file-sharing sites.

But as Cory Doctorow points out (Courtney Nash, “Cory Doctorow on legally disabling DRM (for good),” O’Reilly Media, Aug. 17), this won’t just destroy the draconian legal regime in what’s conventionally regarded as information industries — music, movies, software, etc. — but increasingly prevalent use of copyrighted software to enforce proprietary designs and business models for physical goods. This includes limiting appliances to proprietary replacement parts and accessories (like printer cartridges), by DRMing the appliances to reject replacement parts that don’t pass an “integrity check” that verifies they come from the manufacturer.

“This is a live issue in a lot of domains. It’s in insulin pumps, it’s in voting machines, it’s in tractors…. Several security researchers filed a brief saying they had discovered grave defects in products as varied as voting machines, insulin pumps and cars, and they were told by their counsel that they couldn’t disclose because, in so doing, they would reveal information that might help someone bypass DRM, and thus would face felony prosecution and civil lawsuits.”

In short, eliminating the legal enforcement of DRM — by criminal, mind, not civil law — would effectively destroy all business models based on proprietary digital information, both in the “information industries” as such and in manufacturing. And these are, mind you, the primary source of profit in today’s global corporate economy.

Interestingly enough, thinkers like Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig say they’re not against copyright — they just want to reform it and make it more reasonable. But from what we’ve seen above, it’s absolutely dependent on police state measures like the DMCA and the “intellectual property” provisions in “Free Trade” Agreements like TPP for its survival in any remotely recognizable form.

That’s not to say copyright would cease to exist or be enforceable in any form. But what would be left of it, absent DMCA takedowns and criminal prosecution for file-sharing, would be the quaint world of copyright in the 1970s. The main material effect of copyright law would be to prevent the mass printing of unauthorized versions of copyrighted books, or of hard copies of recordings for sale in stores. And that would be far less significant for readers and listeners than it was back in the ’70s, when the inconvenient or poor quality output of photocopiers and casette recorders was the main threat to the publishing and record industries. Back in those days, the relative significance of copyright as a mechanism for rent extraction was relatively marginal, compared to capitalism’s other sources of profit.

The model of proprietary digital capitalism we’re familiar with — the central model of global corporate rent extraction — is absolutely dependent on police state measures like criminalizing the circumvention of DRM, the takedown (without due process of any kind) of allegedly infringing content online, and government seizure of Internet domains and web hosting servers without due process. Without them, it would simply collapse.

But fortunately, that model of capitalism is doomed regardless of the outcome of EFF’s lawsuit (and I wish it well!). Even as it is, circumvention technologies have advanced so rapidly that DRM-cracked versions of new movies and songs typically show up on torrent sites the same day they’re released, and Millennials accept it file-sharing as a simple fact of life. This culture of circumvention is now spreading into academic publishing with SciHub. How long before it spreads to proprietary spare parts and diagnostic software?

As always, as Center for a Stateless Society comrade Charles Johnson says (“Counter-Economic optimism,” Rad Geek People’s Daily, Feb. 7, 2009), an ounce of circumvention is worth a pound of lobbying.

Photo by Martin Krzywinski

The post Why “Reforming” Copyright Will Kill It appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The whole point of proprietary software and other forms of proprietary information, coupled with the DMCA’s restrictions on circumvention technology, is that you never actually own anything you buy. In fact directly accessing the source code is a crime. That’s bad enough — an injustice and an inconvenience — when it comes to your computer operating system or a song you paid for. But when it involves the software running a device inside your own body, that you depend on to keep your heart beating, it’s a lot more serious. As Doctorow says:

“However you feel about copyright law, everyone should be able to agree that copyright shouldn’t get in the way of testing the software in your hearing aid, pacemaker, insulin pump, or prosthetic limb to look for safety risks (or privacy risks, for that matter).”

Of course this is nothing new. So-called “intellectual property” has been a threat to human safety and survival ever since neoliberal “Free Trade Agreements” started imposing draconian increases in copyright and patent protections about 25 years ago. Big Pharma has been one of the most strident lobbyists — and biggest beneficiaries — for imposing U.S. patent law on a global scale. So countries that previously allowed the production of generic forms of patented life-saving drugs, or had compulsory licensing requirements, now fall afoul of the “intellectual property” provisions of those “Free Trade Agreements.” That translates into the deaths of potentially millions of real-life human beings.

In the United States, the chemical cocktail injected into the ground in the hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) process is also proprietary. That means the public, whose ground water is potentially threatened by these chemicals, has no legal right to know what’s being pumped into the ground by fossil fuels companies.

So the nature of “intellectual property” isn’t just a theoretical debate. “Property” claims on the right to use or duplicate information, or to copy techniques, are not only spurious in principle. They’re a threat to human life in the real world. It’s time to abolish them.

Photo by Horia Varlan

The post “Intellectual Property” Just Keeps Getting Deadlier appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“” anything from cell phones and computers to tractors, watches, refrigerators, and cars. It will also focus on passing state-level legislation that will require manufacturers to sell repair parts to independent repair shops and to consumers and will prevent them from artificially locking down their products to would-be repairers.

“It’s long overdue,” Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of the group, told me. “We have all these little businesses trying to repair stuff and running into what they thought were different problems in different industries. We realized it was all just the same problem.”

That problem—that manufacturers of everything are trying to control the secondary repair market—has two main sources, Gordon-Byrne said. First, manufacturers use federal copyright law to say that they control the software inside of gadgets and that only they or licensed repair shops should be allowed to work on it. Second, manufacturers won’t sell replacement parts or guides to the masses, and often use esoteric parts in order to specifically lock down the devices.

These problems have been well known in the smartphone, computer, and consumer electronics for years, and it’s why groups like iFixit and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been able to mount successful challenges to the DMCA in recent years. Increasingly, however, these problems are spilling over into just about every other industry.

…

The Repair Coalition—which is also calling itself repair.org—includes members from the EFF, iFixit, PC Rebuilders & Recyclers, The Fixers Collective, Public Knowledge, and a series of other smaller industry groups.

“All consumer appliances, from refrigerators to microwaves, very much have repair monopolies from manufacturers, even if you are able to buy parts,” Gordon-Byrne said. Customers who have dared to repair their refrigerator will get to a certain part of a repair and find that components for thermostats or valve controls are locked down via passwords that manufacturers only give to licensed repair shops that they themselves control. The problem is only going to get worse as the Internet of Things takes hold.

“We’ve had these kinds of issues for a long time, but now with the electronics-fication of everything, they’re affecting literally everything in the world that is complex enough to have digital components,” Kyle Wiens, the CEO of iFixit, told me.

And so The Repair Coalition will primarily work at a federal level to repeal Section 1201 of the DMCA, which states that it’s illegal to “circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under [the DMCA].” Thus far, activists have tried to gain “exemptions” to this section—it’s why you’re allowed to repair a John Deere tractor or a smartphone that has software in it. But the exemption process is grueling and has to be done every three years.

“I don’t like exempting equipment because it’s all conceptually the same problem,” Gordon-Byrne said.

On a state level, the group will push for laws such as one being proposed in New York that would require manufacturers to provide repair manuals and sell parts to anyone—not just licensed repair people—for their products. The thought is that, if enough states pass similar legislation, it will become burdensome for manufacturers to continue along with the status quo. At some point, it will become easier to simply allow people to fix the things they own.

“We want to become an umbrella organization for repair,” Gordon-Byrne said. “We want to help the small repair technicians that aren’t getting help from anywhere else.”

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