OneAndOneIs2

The lawyer who represents the RIAA and MPAA sent a letter to the copyright office in response to some questions they had.

One of the items he covered was the way that some DRMed media relies on servers being online to work: If you've installed proprietary software, you've probably run into authentication servers a time or two. Windows certainly wants to phone home after being installed..

This DRM is worse than most of the copy-protection stuff because if the servers go down, you lose your music. And since the servers cost money, the media guys have every incentive to kill them early. Especially since all you can (legally) do is to buy a NEW copy of all the music that you bought before and hope that this time it lasts longer.

I can't quite decide if he's a complete idiot who doesn't get it, or if he's very cleverly manipulating an otherwise-doomed argument to give it a chance of succeeding.

we reject the view, which is implicit in proposed Exemptions 10A and 10B and appears to underlie your questions, that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works. No other product or service providers are held to such lofty standards. No one expects computers or other electronic devices to work properly in perpetuity, and there is no reason that any particular mode of distributing copyrighted works should be required to do so.

I think most people would agree that just because they buy a CD, the company they bought if from shouldn't have to make sure that they always have access to that music: If I scratch a CD so badly that it's unplayable, they shouldn't have to send me a free CD. Fair enough.

But when I buy that CD, I buy the right to own a copy of the music on it. That's the fundamental point. I own that copy, in perpetuity, so long as I own the CD.

If the media company sent a representative around to snap my CD in half so I could no longer play it, they couldn't get away with saying "Well, you still have the physical property you bought, it's not our problem that you can't play the music that was on it. Nothing lasts forever!" - they sabotaged what I bought so that it was no longer playable. I have a right to the content that was on that CD, if they take away my ability to access it, I don't think you'd find anybody who would say that they shouldn't have to replace that content, either by giving me a new CD or by giving me an equivalent, such as the MP3.

And buying a digital copy of music is no different. I don't just buy a batch of ones and zeros to reside on my hard drive: I buy the right to possess and play the music that it encodes. If you take away my ability to play that music, you can't say that I still have the file I bought so I have no complaint.

From a purely legal point of view, what he says is true but completely irrelevant. I have the legal right to be able to play the music I buy, if the company I buy it from sabotages my ability to do so, they are indefensibly in the wrong.

From a purely practical point of view, why the hell are they even bothering to pay him to make this kind of argument? There's not a form of DRM in use today that can't be defeated; even if you can't get around it yourself, it's simple to source a P2P copy with no DRM for free; and the media companies themselves are phasing out DRM because more people buy it, and they pay more for it too.

Seriously.. can they really be this blind to the very technology they rely on to make their money? They must have SOME clever strategy in place.. mustn't they?