gemmapeter.co.uk

The original bargain of copyright is a deal designed to benefit both the creators and the public. The creator would be granted a limited monopoly for so many years (originally 28 years) so that they could make money off their work, after that time the work would be released into public domain for everyone to use. The public in-turn would get more works because the creators would have more incentive to create new works.

Media companies in general have decided that copyright protection for their works is not enough and are taking more severe measures to lock down their content, by using DRM, so that consumers cannot use them even under conditions that copyright law allows.

DRM (Digital Rights Management) is used to stop people from doing certain things with a work. It might be the number of times you are allowed to access it or copy it or the amount of time you can access it for. These restrictions won’t just disappear when the copyright term expires leaving the work locked up forever. DRM doesn’t make the distinctions that copyright law makes which made copyright acceptable for the public (fair use) and it doesn’t release the work into the public domain.

So why should the law allow DRMed works to have copyright protection too? The DRM certainly isn’t keeping up the author’s side of the bargain so why should the public keep its side of the bargain and refrain from copying it?

Perhaps the conditions under which copyright is given should be changed, if a published work does not allow fair use it is not legall protected by copyright.

It would seem to make sense to force all DRMed works to allow the fair use rights granted by law or lose their copyrighted status.

Should DRM and copyright protection be mutually exclusive?