My pal and former EFF attorney Wendy Seltzer conducted a debate with MPPA exec Fritz Attaway in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. In it, Wendy makes mincemeat of Attaway's arguments, which keep coming around to accusing her of wanting to commit piracy and rip off artists, which, as she explains over and over again, isn't what she's trying to do at all:
Fritz, I have not been asking for media free of charge. I have been asking for it free of usage and interoperability restrictions that go beyond copyright. The difference is critical — I fully support a market in which creators are compensated for their works, but not one in which a creative industry can monopolize cultural reference and the technology around its works.
The copyright balance is that both creators and the public get the returns on investment, neither to the exclusion of the other. None of us creates from scratch, rather one creative work is input to the next.
I'd gladly pay more for fully usable media. The problem is that I don't just want to see my own creative output, but the works of the public around me. DRM hides the choices from us until we have a whole ecosystem of limited-use devices: iPods that need their songs re-purchased after one too many computer crashes; first-generation HDTVs that won't work with the next generation of HD-DVD players; and movies you don't realize you can't re-mix until you have a flash of inspiration after Jon Stewart's Oscar show.
I would ask you how you justify DRM that does not stop the commercial pirates — we all know they use even more sophisticated copying than the still-available DeCSS — but does interfere with noncommercial transformation.
(Thanks, Wendy!)
