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While I frequently complain about Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and the way it takes user's freedoms away, I have not really worked my way through the alternatives. It is clearly evil for someone to sell broken CDs (sometimes known as "copy protected"), let alone infect customer's computers with malicious software.

Yet there are many voices claiming that digital technology has made copying of data so easy that rightsholders must have some kind of instrument to persecute infringement of their rights. The best-known way of protecting music or video is to slap it with some kind of DRM, which foists all sorts of annoying restrictions on buyers. Often, you can't copy music files to your portable .ogg player, at least not unless it has some sort of weird crippling technology on it (which, by the way, significantly shortens battery life). Not to mention the many other ways to make the music you bought online a piece of junk in comparison to the one you bought at the CD store.

There's a thing called watermarking or, more accurately, fingerprinting. Information is embedded in music or video which can be linked to the person who bought the track. Thus, if it shows up on  a filesharing network, a buyer who uploaded it can be held to account - yet the buyer's fair use rights remain unharmed.

This type of protection is popular with indie online stores such as Beatport.  Beatport is a place where a lot of DJs and electronica musicians buy their tracks, and these people want to do the kind of things with their music that DRM-mongers get all worked up about: Remix it, sample it, take it apart, stir it up and put it back together. Any restrictions on this would totally devalue the music for the buyers.

After thinking a while, I still haven't quite made up my mind with regard to watermarking. Is this the holy grail of a compromise with which record labels and music buyers can live (as well as the army of lawyers now writing menacing letters to computer users, and who are at the root of much of the bally-hoe)? Is it a mean scheme by Big Brother, trying to put together a database of every song you listen to and every movie you see? Or a communist subversive plot to deprive well-meaning intellectual property rights holders of their right to to fight users with DRM?

I would like people on this site to voice their opinion on this, helping me to form my own. Some voicing has been done over at indicare.org, as well as on ZDNet, where there's comments aplenty. Also, Freedom to Tinker takes a look at the systemic weaknesses of different ways of watermarking.

In case I'm just warming up yesterday's news, please let me know. If not, your thoughts will be much appreciated. 

Just before heading off into their summer vacations, the European Commission has decided [press release] to extend the copyright term for sound recordings, from 50 to 95 years.

This significantly lengthens the period during which new creators will be taxed by rightsholders. The EC says this will benefit elderly session musicians who would otherwise now start losing royalties for recordings made in their 20s, and denies that the extension does anything to gold-plate Keith Richards' swimming pool.

The Register mentions a "use it or lose it" termination clause without going into specifics. I haven't seen this discussed anywhere else so far.

The EC's other decision today was to adopt a "Green Paper" [what's this?] on copyright in the knowledge economy. This is supposed to be the start of "a structured debate on the long-term future of copyright policy", and supposedly

The Green Paper is an attempt to organise this debate and point 
to future challenges in fields that have not been a focal point
 up to now, e.g. scientific and scholarly publishing, and the role
 of libraries, researchers and the persons with a disability.

While this doesn't sound so bad, right below the text is a link to a speech that Commissioner McCreevy gave at a BSA-sponsored conference on Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), which contains choice paragraphs like: 

So today we are here to talk about how we in the Commission can 
assist the ICT sector in putting the innovation that is at the 
heart of DRM technologies to use - so that other parts of the IP 
community can deliver protected content securely to consumers.

I hope he's just flogging a dead horse. But this doesn't bode well for the broadened focus of the Green Paper debate.