For context, the current government is composed of a center-left party supported by two "far-left" parties, which have the majority despite the center-right party having come out on top in number of votes. The bill comes from one of the far-left parties (Left Block).
That said, it's fairly mild: only says one can't use DRM to prevent users from enjoying their legal rights, and there's no penalty, except that the DRM breakers won't get fined by our (EU-mandated) anti-circumvention laws, if I'm reading it correctly. And they haven't revoked the bill passed by the previous right-wing government, which forced ISPs to block access to a bunch of "piracy" related sites (TPB, Kickass, etc).
Also, the private copying exception that they mention (and which already existed) doesn't come from free: we have an extra tax on storage devices that gets pooled into a fund to "compensate" authors for that exception.
> we have an extra tax on storage devices that gets pooled into a fund to "compensate" authors for that exception.
That's... a surprisingly (and refreshingly) pragmatic way to deal with that percieved problem, to be honest. It'd be nice to see more countries going with solutions like that, rather than the old "Do as I say or I'll beat you over the head"
It's not that common and it wouldn't make it any less of a travesty. It's like taxing all furniture on the off chance you'll use it to store your vinyl records. And like with furniture an increasing majority of your media is used to store your own content (e.g., the video of your kid from your brand new 4K camera) so this isn't even directionally correct.
It's a tax, not a payment. Sure, there's some attempt to target it at people who can actually enjoy that right (can't copy stuff if you have nowhere to copy it to), but it's not supposed to be an exchange for use.
We already have a tax for content authors, this is supposed to be much more targeted. Instead all it does is make local electronics retailers even less competitive when compared to the online players.
This is also a travesty because you're supposedly being taxed for the privilege of enjoying something you are already paying for. In reality it's even worse because this is only relevant to extract money from those who are not buying your content. The ones who are buying your content already have a pricing relationship with you where more or less money can be exchanged for more or less service.
At the end of the day this was just a way for entrenched interests to extract money from the population that wouldn't normally be given to them because they don't produce content that interests them.
Who cares about due process and the market, just presume everybody is liable and tax them to guarantee profit to an industry? What a complete perversion of basic capitalism and rule of law.
> It'd be nice to see more countries going with solutions like that
It's nice to pay an extra tax to prop up a poorly-run industry?
>>> There will also be an exception for private copying.
While it's not clear precisely what is meant by "private copying", time-shifting was ruled a fair use in the Betamax case, without the need for a levy.
I'm pretty sure that was the whole point. Capitalism is not a magical faery solution to everything, it obviously was not working in this industry so they are trying someone new.
> Capitalism is not a magical faery solution to everything,
I completely agree, but the solution to that is not granting guaranteed profits to an industry. They are already granted a monopoly market with copyright. Why should they also get to skip the entire legal system and having to actually produce a product people want and jump straight to profits?
If the fund is distributed according to sales, how does any of that apply?
They still have to compete for profits to get a share, their sales are just worth a little bit extra to offset the cultural benefit of more freely available music. (Eg, for each dollar they take in, they actually get $1.01.)
In the sense you're using "luxury goods", they're still essential to human cultural and psychological well-being, even if not base survival.
Because it's a societal level adjustment to an existing market distortion -- ie, adjusting the market incentives to work better with existing laws and regulations.
Society's interest in the market for arts isn't to just make money, and adjusting the pay structure as part of balancing competing interests (in this case, mandatory free use) is reasonable.
Even people who aren't directly interested in a particular work have an interest in the overarching production of arts.
You'd have to supplement it with a survey, to find out what how much of what should go where.
I think it's a valid alternative model that accommodates a lower transaction cost and higher overall welfare - more people can benefit from consuming art - provided that the income is sufficient to motivate its production. It's certainly not an open and closed case of anarchy; that's just as ridiculous to claim.
The Eurail / Interrail multi-day all-Europe train tickets have a similar mechanism. The basic requirement for travel is that you write your journey into the ticket's itinerary list (a multi-page lined space that you fill in manually); at the end, at your option, you send off the ticket to receive some kind of souvenir. Functionally this acts as a survey of which train trips were taken, so that the money from sales of the tickets can be distributed.
That's... a surprisingly (and refreshingly) pragmatic way to deal with that percieved problem
Unfortunately, it usually results in collecting money based on people buying recordable media, regardless of what material they're going to record on that media, and redirecting that money to large, high-profile content providers, also regardless of whose material was actually recorded. In short, smaller content providers and the citizens who are enjoying that content (or using the recordable media for other purposes entirely) are being systematically ripped off.
But it basically gives you carte blanche to pirate as much as you want. I mean, you already paid for every album and movie that exists, you might as well take advantage of it.
That's interesting. I'm not sure on Portuguese law, but at least in the US it's completely legal to copy stuff you already own. The RIAA and MPAA claim it's not, but it is as long as you don't break the DRM that was originally included on the disc. So unless the law in Portugal doesn't include this fair-use clause, you're paying a tax on media to pay companies for something that is already completely legal.
Again, I don't know Portuguese law, so it may be completely different.
The US fair use laws are probably the most liberal anywhere in the world when it comes to excluding some acts from copyright protection (at least within those places where copyright is a serious legal proposition in the first place). I don't know anywhere else that uses generic, test-based standards rather than identifying specific acts to be excluded. This has been a long-standing point of contention, because whether the US's fair use regime fully complies with its international obligations under the major treaties is questionable.
No it doesn't, because typically you still have to have some legal copy in the first place before private copying rules apply. The levy is about making extra copies.
The biggest problem with this is that if you have a blanket private copying exception to copyright and you also remove the rules about TPMs and anti-circumvention provisions, which is what seems to be proposed in Portugal, then you eliminate any business model more nuanced than selling a permanent copy of a work to each individual customer. No more pay-per-view, no more streaming libraries, no more volume sales or group plans, and no more much lower prices for customers who preferred some of these models to paying full price for a permanent purchase of everything.
Many people on both the production and consumption sides could lose out under such a scheme if it was compulsory, while if it could be overridden contractually then surely everyone's terms would just be updated to do exactly that, and then the new scheme probably wouldn't change much in practice.
You are assuming that, without DRM, everyone would use netflix to download all the content, then cancel their subscriptions.
I doubt this would actually happen. Netflix beat out piracy because it is convenient. People that want to pirate netflix content already do (by sharing accounts).
When the music industry abandoned DRM it wasn't a big disaster. I don't see why video would be different.
As someone with experience running somewhat similar services, I can promise you it does happen. Most customers seem to be honest, but the lengths that a significant minority will go to in order to take advantage of any access or exploit the system are almost unbelievable, and the excuses or arguments they make if you call them on it often read like parody.
When the music industry abandoned DRM it wasn't a big disaster. I don't see why video would be different.
One possibility you might like to consider is that music singles can typically be sold at sub-dollar prices, making an impulse purchase is highly likely, without undermining the commercial viability of the sector. Depending on the nature of the work, the same economics won't necessarily apply to other types of material.
>That's... a surprisingly (and refreshingly) pragmatic way to deal with that percieved problem, to be honest.
It's a solution to nothing and can easily turn into a bloated bureaucratic nightmare like in Germany. A private copying levy exists, regardless of that, there's a thriving business sector of lawyers sending out bulk cease&desist letters for the most absurd of copyright infringements.
Along with that come a number of "collecting societies" like GEMA (music), VG Wort (literature) or VG Bild-Kunst (video/art) which are responsible for collecting all kinds of levies and paying them out to the respective "artists", IF artists actually claim their share of the money.
In reality, these are bloated organizations where most of the collected money goes to the board of directors, of which most only sit in that position as some kind of political retirement plan/favor.
GEMA is the reason why many popular music videos on YouTube have been straight up blocked in Germany, they are also quite infamous for issuing admonishings to kindergartens and schools for singing/copying copyrighted christmas/birthday song texts.
> most of the collected money goes to the board of directors
Administrative costs of those societies are somewhere between 5% and 15%. The rest goes to the creators.
> board of directors, of which most only sit in that position as some kind of political retirement plan/favor
I just scanned a few biographies and it didn't look like anything out of the ordinary. They are elected by the members of those societies and not appointed by politicians.
>Administrative costs of those societies are somewhere between 5% and 15%. The rest goes to the creators.
That's the theory, in practice many members have to pay in more than they get out because they have to pay fees to GEMA even when playing their own works.
>I just scanned a few biographies and it didn't look like anything out of the ordinary.
For 17 years the CEO used to be Reinhold Kreile, a CSU politician, and lawyer for copyright. He wasn't the first and he ain't the last, it's part of the political culture in Germany.
I'm not claiming everything is perfect with those societies (that would be far from the truth). But both assertions that most of the collected money goes to the board of directors and most of those are there because of a political favor are simply not true even when taken as a hyperbole.
> many members have to pay in more than they get out
That their payment table needs some work is out of question. However, membership is entirely voluntary. If someone is a member and pays more in than they get out there has to be some other value they get of it or they would not be a member.
Voluntary being a pretty funny word in that regard considering that according to GEMA rules all works are to be under their trust by default, unless proven otherwise.
>If someone is a member and pays more in than they get out there has to be some other value they get of it or they would not be a member.
Once you are a member and can't publish any of your works, wich you registered with GEMA, under any other licenses, so what good is leaving gonna do anybody when they still lost the rights to publish their own works?
Ain't helping that the German patent office has been preventing the legitimization of alternative organizations, putting GEMA in a de facto monopoly position. It's a prime example of overbearing bureaucracy gone totally wrong and as such shouldn't surprise anybody that there've already been over 1800 petitions against GEMA.
It's an organization that's supposed to act in the best interest of the artists it's representing, but still tried to fight off the digitalization of the music market until 2007, it's an organization that sends out bills for singings songs to kindergartens and retirement homes. Seriously, take a step back and think about that and tell me this ain't totally absurd.
> That said, it's fairly mild: only says one can't use DRM to prevent users from enjoying their legal rights, and there's no penalty, except that the DRM breakers won't get fined by our (EU-mandated) anti-circumvention laws
This is sufficient for creating a market for DRM breakers. It's basically the same situation we have at Brazil, you can just take your stuff to a store and have someone remove DRM from stuff you own.
Seems like a perfect candidate for flexing out the nasty investor-state arbitration policies that large companies have been trying to pass through recent international trade agreement proposals.
It would be easy to argue that Portugal is forcing them to lose profit because they are not allowed to collect fines for "unauthorized" circumvention.
I feel like legislatures will eventually learn to propose and 'bring close to the floor' all kinds of stuff that aggressive businesses wouldn't like, just so that they increase lobbying efforts.
Nope. Rules differ from country to country and even within EU-the-organisation each institution sets their own rules and guidelines as to how much lobbying they allow.
That being said, nowhere in the EU is lobbying anywhere near the levels seen in the US.
I think the idea is that you pay a one time fee to lease your game console for life. If you mod it, then you have vandalized someone else's property.
The US has something called the "first sale doctrine" that essentially outlaws such schemes by simply treating such leasing schemes as sales.
The first sale doctrine has been constantly under attack (for a century, at least) by vendors that want to shut down markets for used goods, avoid allowing their own customers a license to use patented products as they see fit. Printer ink manufactures like lexmark are a good modern example.
Think of it as buying a movie ticket vs a DVD if they can legally (and this can be done) structure the terms of sale as a life time lease they can impose restrictions on it.
Arguably this is easier in Europe since first sale doctrine isn't enforced by law in most countries iirc.
48 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 98.2 ms ] threadThat said, it's fairly mild: only says one can't use DRM to prevent users from enjoying their legal rights, and there's no penalty, except that the DRM breakers won't get fined by our (EU-mandated) anti-circumvention laws, if I'm reading it correctly. And they haven't revoked the bill passed by the previous right-wing government, which forced ISPs to block access to a bunch of "piracy" related sites (TPB, Kickass, etc).
Also, the private copying exception that they mention (and which already existed) doesn't come from free: we have an extra tax on storage devices that gets pooled into a fund to "compensate" authors for that exception.
That's... a surprisingly (and refreshingly) pragmatic way to deal with that percieved problem, to be honest. It'd be nice to see more countries going with solutions like that, rather than the old "Do as I say or I'll beat you over the head"
This is also a travesty because you're supposedly being taxed for the privilege of enjoying something you are already paying for. In reality it's even worse because this is only relevant to extract money from those who are not buying your content. The ones who are buying your content already have a pricing relationship with you where more or less money can be exchanged for more or less service.
At the end of the day this was just a way for entrenched interests to extract money from the population that wouldn't normally be given to them because they don't produce content that interests them.
Who cares about due process and the market, just presume everybody is liable and tax them to guarantee profit to an industry? What a complete perversion of basic capitalism and rule of law.
> It'd be nice to see more countries going with solutions like that
It's nice to pay an extra tax to prop up a poorly-run industry?
>>> There will also be an exception for private copying.
While it's not clear precisely what is meant by "private copying", time-shifting was ruled a fair use in the Betamax case, without the need for a levy.
I'm pretty sure that was the whole point. Capitalism is not a magical faery solution to everything, it obviously was not working in this industry so they are trying someone new.
I completely agree, but the solution to that is not granting guaranteed profits to an industry. They are already granted a monopoly market with copyright. Why should they also get to skip the entire legal system and having to actually produce a product people want and jump straight to profits?
We're talking about luxury goods, not healthcare.
They still have to compete for profits to get a share, their sales are just worth a little bit extra to offset the cultural benefit of more freely available music. (Eg, for each dollar they take in, they actually get $1.01.)
In the sense you're using "luxury goods", they're still essential to human cultural and psychological well-being, even if not base survival.
Society's interest in the market for arts isn't to just make money, and adjusting the pay structure as part of balancing competing interests (in this case, mandatory free use) is reasonable.
Even people who aren't directly interested in a particular work have an interest in the overarching production of arts.
I think it's a valid alternative model that accommodates a lower transaction cost and higher overall welfare - more people can benefit from consuming art - provided that the income is sufficient to motivate its production. It's certainly not an open and closed case of anarchy; that's just as ridiculous to claim.
The Eurail / Interrail multi-day all-Europe train tickets have a similar mechanism. The basic requirement for travel is that you write your journey into the ticket's itinerary list (a multi-page lined space that you fill in manually); at the end, at your option, you send off the ticket to receive some kind of souvenir. Functionally this acts as a survey of which train trips were taken, so that the money from sales of the tickets can be distributed.
Unfortunately, it usually results in collecting money based on people buying recordable media, regardless of what material they're going to record on that media, and redirecting that money to large, high-profile content providers, also regardless of whose material was actually recorded. In short, smaller content providers and the citizens who are enjoying that content (or using the recordable media for other purposes entirely) are being systematically ripped off.
Again, I don't know Portuguese law, so it may be completely different.
The biggest problem with this is that if you have a blanket private copying exception to copyright and you also remove the rules about TPMs and anti-circumvention provisions, which is what seems to be proposed in Portugal, then you eliminate any business model more nuanced than selling a permanent copy of a work to each individual customer. No more pay-per-view, no more streaming libraries, no more volume sales or group plans, and no more much lower prices for customers who preferred some of these models to paying full price for a permanent purchase of everything.
Many people on both the production and consumption sides could lose out under such a scheme if it was compulsory, while if it could be overridden contractually then surely everyone's terms would just be updated to do exactly that, and then the new scheme probably wouldn't change much in practice.
I doubt this would actually happen. Netflix beat out piracy because it is convenient. People that want to pirate netflix content already do (by sharing accounts).
When the music industry abandoned DRM it wasn't a big disaster. I don't see why video would be different.
As someone with experience running somewhat similar services, I can promise you it does happen. Most customers seem to be honest, but the lengths that a significant minority will go to in order to take advantage of any access or exploit the system are almost unbelievable, and the excuses or arguments they make if you call them on it often read like parody.
When the music industry abandoned DRM it wasn't a big disaster. I don't see why video would be different.
One possibility you might like to consider is that music singles can typically be sold at sub-dollar prices, making an impulse purchase is highly likely, without undermining the commercial viability of the sector. Depending on the nature of the work, the same economics won't necessarily apply to other types of material.
Until you realise that it means the HDDs in your servers pay a piracy tax.
It's a solution to nothing and can easily turn into a bloated bureaucratic nightmare like in Germany. A private copying levy exists, regardless of that, there's a thriving business sector of lawyers sending out bulk cease&desist letters for the most absurd of copyright infringements.
Along with that come a number of "collecting societies" like GEMA (music), VG Wort (literature) or VG Bild-Kunst (video/art) which are responsible for collecting all kinds of levies and paying them out to the respective "artists", IF artists actually claim their share of the money.
In reality, these are bloated organizations where most of the collected money goes to the board of directors, of which most only sit in that position as some kind of political retirement plan/favor.
GEMA is the reason why many popular music videos on YouTube have been straight up blocked in Germany, they are also quite infamous for issuing admonishings to kindergartens and schools for singing/copying copyrighted christmas/birthday song texts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEMA_(German_organization)
Administrative costs of those societies are somewhere between 5% and 15%. The rest goes to the creators.
> board of directors, of which most only sit in that position as some kind of political retirement plan/favor
I just scanned a few biographies and it didn't look like anything out of the ordinary. They are elected by the members of those societies and not appointed by politicians.
That's the theory, in practice many members have to pay in more than they get out because they have to pay fees to GEMA even when playing their own works.
>I just scanned a few biographies and it didn't look like anything out of the ordinary.
For 17 years the CEO used to be Reinhold Kreile, a CSU politician, and lawyer for copyright. He wasn't the first and he ain't the last, it's part of the political culture in Germany.
> many members have to pay in more than they get out
That their payment table needs some work is out of question. However, membership is entirely voluntary. If someone is a member and pays more in than they get out there has to be some other value they get of it or they would not be a member.
Voluntary being a pretty funny word in that regard considering that according to GEMA rules all works are to be under their trust by default, unless proven otherwise.
>If someone is a member and pays more in than they get out there has to be some other value they get of it or they would not be a member.
Once you are a member and can't publish any of your works, wich you registered with GEMA, under any other licenses, so what good is leaving gonna do anybody when they still lost the rights to publish their own works?
Ain't helping that the German patent office has been preventing the legitimization of alternative organizations, putting GEMA in a de facto monopoly position. It's a prime example of overbearing bureaucracy gone totally wrong and as such shouldn't surprise anybody that there've already been over 1800 petitions against GEMA.
It's an organization that's supposed to act in the best interest of the artists it's representing, but still tried to fight off the digitalization of the music market until 2007, it's an organization that sends out bills for singings songs to kindergartens and retirement homes. Seriously, take a step back and think about that and tell me this ain't totally absurd.
This is sufficient for creating a market for DRM breakers. It's basically the same situation we have at Brazil, you can just take your stuff to a store and have someone remove DRM from stuff you own.
It would be easy to argue that Portugal is forcing them to lose profit because they are not allowed to collect fines for "unauthorized" circumvention.
Nope. Rules differ from country to country and even within EU-the-organisation each institution sets their own rules and guidelines as to how much lobbying they allow.
That being said, nowhere in the EU is lobbying anywhere near the levels seen in the US.
In others, you can rip DVDs for private use (private copies of copyright materials) by overcoming DRM technology is now protected by the law.
That reminds me of all the sites which sell PDFs of old equipment service manuals, many of which would've become public domain due to their age.
This isn't about banning DRM it's about not restricting your legal rights under ownership.
In both cases it can be "fixed" by changing the terms of sale to a lease.
How would the "lease fix" work? I don't think the law restricts itself to purchased products.
The US has something called the "first sale doctrine" that essentially outlaws such schemes by simply treating such leasing schemes as sales.
The first sale doctrine has been constantly under attack (for a century, at least) by vendors that want to shut down markets for used goods, avoid allowing their own customers a license to use patented products as they see fit. Printer ink manufactures like lexmark are a good modern example.
Arguably this is easier in Europe since first sale doctrine isn't enforced by law in most countries iirc.