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Leafing through the comments filed in the Copyright Office's Triennial Review of the DMCA, I found a comment filed by lawyer Steve Metalitz on behalf of 14 associations of content providers.
The most eye-catching part is a section entitled: The Digital Cornucopia – How Widespread Use of Access Controls Has Led to Increased Access to Copyrighted Works, which reviews the richness of the material that is now being made available "through legitimate services that generally employ access controls."
These include, in 2005, 1.664 DVDs representing 12,000 titles; 300 million single-song digital downloads in the U.S. alone, plus at least 9 subscription services offering more than a million songs each; a growing number of movies and videos available for download over the Internet; since 2003, over 1800 console games, 700 handheld games, and 2200 PC games; 45,000 available eBooks; and uncounted distributions of software upgrades.
The excerpt is reproduced here.
Comparing this reality to Stallman's anti-DRM vitriol called to mind a blog I saw yesterday:
[I]t's the tyranny of the abstract. . . . Abstract ideas are designed to understand and describe reality. But intellectuals turn this around and begin using their abstractions to judge reality. And if reality falls short, they don't abandon their ideals but jettison reality. Intellectuals just can't stand the thought that a free market with no one in charge has much more embodied wisdom and rationality than their sacred abstractions and economic prescriptions. As the old joke goes, "Well, that may work fine in practice, but it'll never work in theory!"
So, since DRM is actually working to produce the Digital Cornucopia, one can be certain that the attacks on it will redouble in rabidity.
posted by James DeLong @ 1:01 PM | DMCA
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