Library of Congress discredits DRM and DMCA law
The most important cultural institute of the USA returns to deal with two of the hot topics of archiving and preservation of contents in digital format, namely the anti-copy and anti-user technologies best known as Digital Rights Management (DRM) measures and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the States law on copyright that makes illegal the circumvention technologies of the above said DRM.
The Library of Congress is one of the main institutions for the knowledge preservation in the world with its 30 millions of books in 470 languages, its 58 millions of manuscripts, an original Gutenberg Bible, microfilms, comics, audio recording, movies and digital supports. And just in the attempt to preserve the said supports and digital contents for future memories, the library is obliged in the last years to deal with a double limitation of technological and legal nature, imposed by the regulations that Congress has adopted in defense of economic potentates and the lobbies of the entertainment industry penalizing the public good.
The preservation of the digital heritage of humanity is made extremely difficult by the insulting DRM protections, that producers implement in software and in digital multimedia in the attempt to prevent their unrestrained proliferation on file sharing and elsewhere. Attempt that anybody attending some contents sharing network knows to be vain, and nevertheless publishers don’t give up injecting purulent protections in videogames, in the audio tracks sold on-line in stores like Apple iTunes and basically anywhere they succeed to insert them.
The practical problem with DRM is then amplified by the DMCA dictates, that make illegal in the States any technology apt to eliminate or circumvent the software and contents protections. And even if in this case for whom is used to “cracks”, “no-cd” patches and so on the thing can be laughable, the Library can’t possibly evade the law and, despite the authorization for the government institution to act against the DMCA for archiving purposes, its draconian enforcement ensures that a legit market for anti-DRM solutions doesn’t exist.
The dog bites its tail, and what finds itself in the middle is the posterity at exclusive advantage of the artificial contingent needs of the industry to maintain its control on contents as much as possible. In a detailed 200 pages report the Library faces, together with the UK Joint Information Systems Committee, the Australian Open Access to Knowledge and the Dutch SURFfoundation the thorny topic of the consequences of DMCA and similar laws approved worldwide, united to the indiscriminate use of DRM, on the precious activity of archiving the cultural goods in the United States as in the other countries.
A problem that, today hot yet, is destined to echo its fatal effects much more in a future that appears to be even more digital. What’s more, the new Library anti-DRM and anti-DMCA report follows the recent increase of the institute activity into studying an adequate preservation frame for videogames, officially adopted as cultural goods of equal rank among movies, literature and music on the 23rd of October in 2007.