Effects of the EUCD
Alan Cox
(page 1)
The Business Agenda
Why is the industry scared ?
- Piracy became easier than buying
- Film business still needs huge upfront capital
- Film payback tends to be over long periods
- Dependency on market control
- Inefficient incumbents
Not everyone in the music business is an evil corporate plotter
nor a global monopolist.
(page 2)
The Flaws In The Model
Monopoly practices
- Product tying
- Shutting out interworking
- Blocking small competitors
- Import control, closed markets
Practicality
- One crack, a million copies
- Anyone can redigitize analogue data
To be effective internet piracy requires the user can find the
material they wish to copy. If the user can find it so can the
law enforcement people.
(page 3)
The Hidden Agenda
"He who owns the means of distribution"
Enforced Encryption
- Prevent musicians going elsewhere
- Prevent new businesses and new models
- Suppress innovation
- Censorship of their format
- Destroy second hand sales
- Corporation dictated copyright law
Our Format Alone
- Formats like WDM
- Any player so long as it runs Windows
(page 4)
Reverse Engineering
Monopoly Power
- Imagine Word 2002 [ab]uses DRM
- "For the good of the document author"
- Encryption in interfaces
- Cracking good encryption is hard
See You In Court
- If you want to make backups
- If they store your data in their protected format
- What is legitimate reverse engineering ?
- When is it circumvention ?
- DeCSS is disabled access ?
- DeCSS is compatibility ?
- DeCSS is circumvention ?
- Small business can't fight such cases
(page 5)
Free Porn For Schools
Recital 33
- Clarifies incidental reproduction
- Caching is explicitly allowed
"provided that the intermediary does not
modify the information"
- Porn filtering for others is explicitly prohibited
- Virus filtering for others is now a copyright violation
- There is no public/society interest exclusion permitted
(page 6)
Books
Increased Educational Cost
- Sharing E-Books can be a crime
- Yearly licences on text e-books
- Excerpting prevented by DRM
- Specific e-books may demand specific computers
- This e-book for windows XP only
Libraries
- Can't loan a protected book viably
- Can't archive protected material for a long time
At a time where literacy levels are decreasing in the UK
(page 7)
Law And Disorder
Witness Protection
- Watermarks identify whisteblowers
- Watermarks identify undercover agents
- Watermarks identify wiretap points
There is no provision for the removal of them from court
documents. The tools to do so would probably be illegal to
posess
Academic Research
- Forbids circumventing a measure (article 6)
- No real exclusion for legitimate research
- Prevents cryptographic weaknesses being found
- Only criminals will know
(page 8)
Disabilities
Disabled Rights Are Optional
- Only if a member state desires
- Not if the owner provides an alternative
- Even if it isn't usable
- Even if it doesn't work
- Imports
- No comeback on the owner
- No way to get DRM information
- Anyone can put themselves out of reach of the EU
Intellectual Lost Property
- What happens if the owner disappears ?
- What about when the copyright expires ?
- The new dark age ?
(page 9)