[FYI] (Fwd) FC: European Commission considers mandatory digital rights management

["Axel H Horns" <horns@ipjur.com>]

------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date sent:      	Sat, 2 Mar 2002 12:23:13 -0500
From:           	Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
To:             	politech@politechbot.com
Subject:        	FC: European Commission considers mandatory digital rights management
Send reply to:  	declan@well.com

As the U.S. Congress weighs mandatory digital rights management, the
European Commission is also looking into the topic. A 43-page EC study
of digital rights management gives a nod to fair use and privacy --
and then says DRM schemes are not only inevitable but a fabulous idea.

A key excerpt from the study says the EC "should continue to encourage
all players to develop operational, open and interoperable DRM
solutions and to deploy them rapidly." (Apparently the EC has been
funding such schemes for the last decade.)

I've placed the EC study here in PDF form (thanks, Michael):
http://www.politechbot.com/docs/european.commission.drm.030202.pdf

-Declan

----- Forwarded message from Michael Kleinhenz
<kleinhenz@linuxtag.org> -----

From: Michael Kleinhenz <kleinhenz@linuxtag.org>
Subject: European Commission enforces DRM systems
To: declan@well.com
Date: Sat, 02 Mar 2002 10:33:59 -0500

Hi Declan,

maybe something for your list:

Yesterday I was at a workshop of the European Commision on Digital
Rights Management Systems. I held a talk about the weaknesses of DRMs
and the chances of Open Content like business models. Most of the
about 100 people attending the workshop were representatives of the
content industry or manufacturers of DRM systems. Therefore my talk
was not really liked by them (the usual "Open Source is like stealing"
stuff).

More interesting is, that my impression of this workshop is,
that

1. The EC will continue to support the use and implementation of DRM
    systems on a broad scale.

2. Their recent directive on that topic (2001/29/EC) that has to be
    implemented by the member states by the end of the year will
    result in a SSSCA like legislation.

3. From the proceedings and my personal conversation
    with some of the participants, I believe that most of the content
    providers have not realized the facts: many people at the workshop
    have talked about systems like Napster, but I think too few people
    had the actual technological advancement in mind when talking of
    such services. I was the only one to emphasize the implications
    from things like Freenet which I think is unstoppable, no matter
    what..

In result, I was scared by two things: how the workshop was compiled
by the EC (95% content industry, 5% consumer rights organizations) and
the fact that many people there were so naive in terms of DRMs, their
implications and their implementations. Example: everyone was talking
about a common standard for DRM systems to support many platforms, but
no one was talking about the implications of (software)patents on it.

Attached you can find a Commission staff working paper on Digital
Rights that may be interesting as well...

Thanks,
Michael

-- 
Michael Kleinhenz              LinuxTag 2002 - Europes largest Linux
Expo kleinhenz@linuxtag.org                          
http://www.linuxtag.org/



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