My Music has Rights!

I'm writing this on a computer and you’re probably reading it on a computer and thus it’s fair from time to time to examine issues facing the 'net. Digital Rights Management has consequences for every Canadian. This week Minister of Industry Jim Prentice withdrew his legislation that would have seen some of the toughest copyright restrictions in the world for Canada. Included in the legislation were absurd restrictions like no device shifting (don't you dare think about putting that CD on your iPod), no back ups (just plain inconvenient) and a rollback on fair-use exemptions for education and political comment which would have resulted in a tightening of free speech. The reason the proposal was withdrawn is simple; it represented a dream list of laws as conceived by the world's biggest media content companies and their lobbyists. More disturbing for me than the legislation was the apparent attempt by the government to quietly pass it without public debate - debate being the key world here.

There’s no denying Canadian copyright law is in dire need of updating. Laws written in 1997 don’t any good in today's internet and technology dominant age. And I’m not really a radical in this regard—I believe in paying for music—but any changes must represent a balance between with all stakeholders—musicians, consumers and lobbyists. With the age of digital, a remix cultural has emerged and the behaviour of record companies is truly backward (Suing music fans anyone?). Despite the ease—one might even say naturalness—with which digital information is moved around the world and altered, the media companies have seen fit to move in an army of lawyers rather than change one thing about their business model. Which is all good and fine—the market will take care of it—this makes record companies poor investments since their structures are becoming top heavy with legal departments (you know, instead of finding great new bands that would sell records). Small artists generally like the internet because—take something like the CBC radio3 podcast—it allows them to have a global audience where once all they had to look forward to was a life of endless local gigs. Taking the view that music should be paid for, I lament that music fans are starting to view music as free, however, artists are quicker than multinational companies to shift business models and many artists have found success in cutting out the middle man, directly connecting to fans. I think this is one of the things that most upsets the large record companies.

Probably the most alarming fact for me is that media companies, through the heavy use of digital rights management that protects content, are giddy at the prospect of controlling content even after it has been purchased by the consumer. They are ready to pull western civilization back several decades. Say you bought a CD to play in your stereo, the record companies believe you should pay again to have the honour of playing it on your iPod and another fee if you want to play it in your car, and on and on. This flies directly in the face of widely used modern technology that already allows this to be done cheaply and easily. That's why I want claim media companies want are pulling backward. Crippleware is another great facet to this debate. Industry wide there is pressure to cripple data devices with DRM. Window’s Vista is by far the best example. Here is an OS that is designed bottom up to protect the rights of other’s over the user’s. All at the expense of stability, operability, and even logic as users flee to any other OS besides Vista, be it Mac, Linux or even WinXP. Vista’s implantation of DMR causes the OS to act paranoid to the point of uselessness. This is only the first in what is sure to be a long sad parade of crippled devices. And don’t think for a second any tech company wants to cripple their wares. That just gives sales to companies with more open and useful platforms. In a remix culture, the ability to buy a movie, rip it, put it on a one gig USB drive and to show it at a friends, just as we did with DVDs before and VHS before that is threatened by DMR. And consumers should say yes to a balanced review of copyright in Canada.