• Tag Archives DCMA

  • Analog: The Last Defense Against DRM

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    With the recent iPhone 7 announcement, Apple confirmed what had already been widely speculated: that the new smartphone won’t have a traditional, analog headphone jack. Instead, the only ways to connect the phone to an external headset or speaker will be via Bluetooth, through the phone’s AirPlay feature, or through Apple’s proprietary Lightning port.

    Apple’s motivations for abandoning the analog jack are opaque, but likely benign. Apple is obsessed with simple, clean design, and this move lets the company remove one more piece of clutter from the phone’s body. The decision may also have been a part of the move to a water-resistant iPhone. And certainly, many people choose a wireless listening experience.

    But removing the port will change how a substantial portion of iPhone owners listen to audio content—namely, by simply plugging in a set of headphones. By switching from an analog signal to a digital one, Apple has potentially given itself more control than ever over what people can do with music or other audio content on an iPhone. We hope that Apple isn’t unwittingly opening the door to new pressures to take advantage of that power.

    When you plug an audio cable into a smartphone, it just works. It doesn’t matter whether the headphones were made by the same manufacturer as the phone. It doesn’t even matter what you’re trying to do with the audio signal—it works whether the cable is going into a speaker, a mixing board, or a recording device.

    The Lightning port works differently. Manufacturers must apply and pay a licensing fee to create a Lightning-compatible device. When rumors were circulating about an iPhone 7 with no headphone jack, our colleague Cory Doctorow predicted that big content companies would try to take advantage of that control: “Right now, an insistence on DRM would simply invite the people who wanted to bypass it for legal reasons to use that 3.5mm headphone jack to get at it. Once that jack is gone, there’s no legal way to get around the DRM.”

    In other words, if it’s impossible to connect a speaker or other audio device to an iPhone without Apple software governing it, then major media companies might pressure Apple to place limits on how Apple’s customers can use their content. Because U.S. law protects digital rights management (DRM) technologies, it may be illegal to circumvent any potential restrictions, even if you’re doing it for completely lawful purposes. There would certainly be a precedent: big content companies infamously pressured Apple to incorporate DRM in its iTunes service.

    iTunes DRM is a thing of the past now—and fortunately, most DRM for audio downloads has gone with it. But some major media companies are still eager to find ways to control how we use their content. In the current debate over the FCC’s proposal to unlock TV set-top boxes, TV and film producers have insisted that they should be able to decide which devices can receive video. Can we believe the content industry will leave audio alone if outputs become entirely digital?

    The good news is that the new iPhone will come with a Lightning dongle that will provide a standard 3.5 mm analog port. What’s not clear is whether iOS or specific apps will be able to disable the dongle—if so, history suggests that Hollywood and other major media industries will be eager to take advantage of that capability. It’s also unclear whether the iPhone’s software will be able to disable access to the 3.5 mm port for other third-party devices that use it, such as credit card terminals or blood pressure readers.

    To its credit, Apple has been adamant it won’t use the new design to restrict your listening experience. But therein lies the problem: you shouldn’t have to depend on a manufacturer’s permission to use its hardware however you like (or, for that matter, to build your own peripherals and accessories for it). What you can do with your hardware should be determined by the limits of the technology itself, not its manufacturers’ policy decisions.

    Ultimately, this story isn’t about Apple, or any other company’s design decisions. It’s about theDigital Millennium Copyright Act’s protection for DRM. Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it illegal to bypass DRM or give others the means of doing so. 1201 gives technology manufacturers the power to cast clouds of legal uncertainty over common uses of their products. It gives content owners and other powerful entities an unfair weapon against innovation by others. It’s a law that needs fixing.

    Source: Analog: The Last Defense Against DRM | Electronic Frontier Foundation


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  • YouTube’s Copyright Robots Help Sony Shake Down Bluegrass Educators

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    A series of bluegrass history lectures has become the latest victim of the bullying that is enabled by content filtering systems like YouTube’s Content ID.

    The Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe harbors protect websites like YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, and many others against runaway copyright lawsuits. They also protect people’s fair use rights when they post their own creations online, by ensuring that online platforms don’t have to assume the risk of a user’s fair use case going the wrong way. But automated filtering and takedown systems on platforms like YouTube—systems that the DMCA doesn’t require—flag obvious fair uses as potential infringement, including educational work around the history of music itself. That’s why it’s alarming that major entertainment companies want Congress to scrap the DMCA’s safe harbor and make automatic filtering the law.

    The Hudson Valley Bluegrass Association was founded “to knit together the bluegrass community of musicians and fans.” Besides hosting jam sessions and concerts, the non-profit association gives lectures on the history of this American art form. These “Evolution of Bluegrass” lectures, which take place in a classroom in Poughkeepsie, New York, are also posted to YouTube for others to learn from. As you might expect from lectures on music history, these hour-long sessions include many short music clips, typically of about 30 seconds, played over still images of bluegrass musicians and surrounded by commentary.

    HVBA’s use of clips from old bluegrass recordings is a clear fair use under copyright law. The clips are short, the purpose of the videos is educational, and the group does not earn money from its videos. Plus, no one is likely to forego buying the complete recordings simply because they heard a clip in the middle of an hour-long lecture.

    Still, HVBA’s videos have repeatedly been caught up by YouTube’s automatic filters, which are known as Content ID. Most of the matches came from Sony Music and its subsidiaries. This had several consequences for HVBA: ominous warnings from YouTube, the lecture videos being blocked in various countries, and HVBA making numerous entreaties to the record labels to withdraw the Content ID matches. Mostly, they did.

    But the situation changed this year. When HVBA’s webmaster emailed Sony Music to explain that the use of music clips in the lecture videos was fair use, Sony’s representative responded that the label had “a new company policy that uses such as yours be subject to a minimum $500 license fee,” and that “if you are going to upload more videos we are going to have to follow our protocol.” Sony’s representative didn’t say that she believed the video was not a fair use. Instead, she implied that even a fair use would require payment, and that Sony would keep using YouTube’s Content ID system against HVBA until they paid up.

    This is absurd. When using copyrighted material qualifies as a fair use, the user doesn’t need to get a license, permission, or to pay a fee. This exchange suggests that Sony’s representative didn’t know the law, or else knew it full well but tried to coerce HVBA into paying anyway. The Content ID system simply funneled a fair user like HVBA into this misleading exchange with Sony.

    Content ID is not the law—yet. It’s a private system set up between YouTube and major entertainment companies like Sony Music, and it exists outside of the regular notice-and-takedown process created by the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions. But the titans of entertainment, and some of their friends in government, want that to change. At Congressional hearings and in formal comments, they have asked Congress to throw out the DMCA’s safe harbor and replace it with something like Content ID on steroids: a law that would require every website and service to match user-posted material against every takedown request ever sent, and then block anything that matches, or even prevent them being uploaded at all.

    Changing notice-and-takedown into notice-and-censor would be a disaster for Internet users because, as HVBA’s experience shows, computers are terrible at identifying fair use. If automatic copyright filters become a legal requirement for every user-content website, more people like HVBA will be forced to run a gauntlet of permissions, appeals, and mistakes, just to communicate their own creative works and educational materials. Many, like HVBA, could be pressured to pay licensing fees for uses that require none. Congress needs to preserve and strengthen the safe harbors, not scrap them for a speech-chilling, notice-and-censor approach.

    Source: YouTube’s Copyright Robots Help Sony Shake Down Bluegrass Educators | Electronic Frontier Foundation


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