I never would have thought the comics would be a good source for this blog, but a friend of mine showed me this Foxtrot comic strip from Sunday, December 30.
In my opinion, this comic strip is more effective than 100 hysterical blog posts, and in any case reaches thousands more people that don't read blogs.
I've been hearing a lot about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) ever since I started reading a blog called Boing Boing. (A quick Google search tells me that "Digital Millennium Copyright Act" has been mentioned at least 228 times on BB.) One of the ways the DCMA enforces copyright is through Digital Rights Management, or DRM. This is how iTunes limits the number of times you can burn downloaded music, or limits the number of computers you have a downloaded movie on. I’m not quite as militantly against the DCMA as a lot of people are, but I do see the point that in a lot of cases it hampers a person’s ability to freely use the media that they purchased. The DVD issue mentioned in the comic strip is pretty ludicrous, though. Why shouldn’t I be able to “rip” my DVDs to my computer the way I rip CDs? Without doing much research, I would guess the answer is money, or more particularly, the movie studios are afraid of losing profits from people sharing their downloaded movies with other people.
(Oh by the way...I wasn't able to right-click and save this from the site, so I used a screen capture program. Hmm...did I violate copyright law by posting this?)
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1 comment:
Yes, you'll probably be hearing from Universal Press Syndicate soon asking you to remove the cartoon. This is a topic that I deal with more in my information policy seminar but it's clearly part of intellectual freedom, too.
The Chicago Tribune had a story last week that the Canadian Songwriters Association is proposing a $5 fee charged to each wireless and Internet account in exchange for unlimited downloading. For an industry that's losing money, it may be worth considering.
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