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Well,
the deck chairs have started moving, but nobody’s quite sure
what it means. First, the U.S. Copyright Office issued a stunning
set of rulings two weeks ago. These had to do with a particularly
stinky part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that was
rammed through Congress in the ’90s—a law that made it illegal
to unlock “copyright protection” technologies. This absurd
little law virtually wipes out any notion of fair use of copyrighted
works, because it makes it illegal to simply get to copyright-protected
works in the first place! It’s also a dangerous law insofar
as it outlaws technologies in the name of copyright law. Predictably,
the law has been routinely abused by Big Media companies seeking
to stop folks from tinkering with their stuff, and utterly
ignored by the hacker community, which proves day-in and day-out
that “copyright protection technologies” are silly and doomed
to fail.
Congress did leave a little door open: Citizens could petition
the Copyright Office for exceptions to the law. If it could
be demonstrated that disabling a “copyright protection technology”
was in the “public interest,” the Copyright Office would grant
an exception to the law. (People forget that copyright law
was created to serve the public interest, and not the stockholders
of Viacom and Disney.) The Copyright Office is mandated to
issue these rulings every three years.
In the past, these exception rulings were so picayune or technically
dense that most of us paid them little mind. In this round,
the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a bunch of academics
got involved with the exemption requests, and two weeks ago
a couple of bombs dropped.
If you’ve heard about this at all from the media, you’ve probably
heard that there were Copyright Office rulings involving smartphones,
jailbreaking, and the use of “unauthorized” apps. The mainstream
media went nuts about this because both rulings were smackdowns
of Apple, and there’s been this childish fever for Apple-bashing
lately. I doubt either of these rulings will have much direct
impact on anybody. As for jailbreaking (hacking the phone
so it’s not tethered to a particular cellular company—in Apple’s
case, AT&T), folks have been jailbreaking iPhones for
a while now anyway; Apple’s reaction to the ruling was a shrug
and a statement that jailbreaking would void an iPhone’s warranty.
Now, one of the things we like about our Apple stuff is that,
on the off chance it goes south on us, we can just take our
broken stuff to the Apple store where nice people fix it all
up, often for free. So, jailbreak away, kids. I’m chicken
and I’m stayin’ put. As far as apps go, Apple hasn’t exactly
been limiting developers in the app store and has mainly blocked
only porn or apps that might destabilize your phone.
So, OK, jailbreak your iPhone and watch porn while talking
on the Sprint network. Hope it works out for ya.
The much more interesting and important ruling allowed the
copying of scrambled DVDs (and almost all commercial DVDs
are scrambled) for use by educators, documentary filmmakers,
and almost anybody who wants to remix a movie on a noncommercial
basis. This is just freakin’ huge. As scholar Peter Jaszi
points out on his ©ollectanea blog, the breadth of this exemption
is remarkable, with the Copyright Office taking a very broad
view of what fair use is for movies and who could take advantage
of it. You know those great YouTube videos involving the scene
from the German film Downfall? With Hitler reacting
to everything from the breakup of Oasis to Cristiano Ronaldo
going to play for Real Madrid? How they’ve been taken off
of YouTube for “copyright violations”? Well, they ain’t copyright
violations no more! You know the big scary warnings at the
beginning of DVDs about how any copying or unauthorized
use of the movie is punishable by torture, death and a fine
of $750,000? Buh-bye!
The other big news involves Net neutrality. The FCC is struggling
with whether it can and should impose rules ensuring equal
access and pricing on the Internet in the face of opposition
from the telecom industry and commercial interests. This week,
Google and Verizon released a “joint proposal” that caused
some excitable techies to scream about the “death of the Internet”
but left most of us scratching our heads. What is being proposed
is absolute Net neutrality for wired Internet, but not for
wireless Internet. This is not good, because wireless is soon
likely to be the dominant portal to the Internet. This is
kind of like saying, “OK, we’ll protect typewriters, but not
computers.”
What’s most stunning about this is the participation of Google,
which one would think would be staunchly in favor of Net neutrality
across all platforms. But then Google has been out in front
on the expansion of things like municipal WiFi, where boatloads
of money could be made with premium service tiers. But, like
I said, nobody’s really sure what it all means. It makes my
head hurt.
—Paul
Rapp
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