Do We Need A 'Circle Section' Registry To Prove Digital Ownership?
from the interesting-ideas dept
If you look at the history of copyright law, it's really a never-ending story of the law adjusting (often quite awkwardly) to deal with changes in technology that the law never predicted and wasn't prepared to handle. We see this manifest itself in many different ways today, including the whole question of "ownership" in a digital age. When you "buy" a digital video or song, did you really buy it? Or did you just license it? Because copyright law doesn't handle this well, we have a sort of Schrodinger's cat situation, in which companies claim it's either a license or a sale depending on who's suing whom. In other words, it's a complete mess.Entering the fray with a unique idea as an attempt to solve that, some folks (and a company who likely seeks to commercially benefit from this idea) are trying to convince the Copyright Office to create a new consumer ownership registration system, dubbed "circle section" after the character they'd like to use for it:
Unfortunately, they're marketing it like lawyers, rather than marketers, so there's a lot of verbiage surrounding the description everywhere they talk about it, but the basic idea is pretty straightforward (if I understand it correctly):
If you buy something digital, you can "register" your ownership right in that particular copy, which then would grant you basic ownership rights, including rights to format shift the content and to resell it under first sale rights.The folks behind this project have set up a Change.org petition in support of this, where they're seeking 200,000 signatures, though, currently they have very, very few (again, perhaps an issue of being lawyers, not marketers). Separately, they've chosen an odd strategy for pushing this effort: filing a petition with the Copyright Office as a part of the process by which the Copyright Office comes down from the mountain every three years and declares which products can ignore the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause. Except... this project has nothing to do with that. So, the backers have filed a separate motion, in which they basically admit that this is outside the rules... but they're doing it this way because if the Copyright Office accepts the proposal, than the whole question of ignoring anti-circumvention issues becomes moot, because a registry of consumer ownership would make it pointless. Or something like that. You can read the full motion below.
This seems like an incredibly long shot no matter how you look at it, and I'm not sure that trying to jump into the magical anti-circumvention clearance debate is such a smart move here. That said, I can see how a proposal along these lines could be interesting as a possible way to deal with the question of whether or not you "own" the digital products you thought you bought. At the very least, I'd be interested in hearing what other people think about it. Personally, I wonder if it's really necessary, or if it would just become seen as another burden for users, needing to register and track their registrations.
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Filed Under: copyright office, licensing, ownership, registration
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Here's an idea
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Re: Here's an idea
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Re: Re: Here's an idea
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Ugh!
Being a gamer, this is EXACTLY why my consoles (XBox360 & PS3) sit gathering dust because heaven forbid I pay hijacked prices for shitty games that end up being played on gaming consoles with short lifespans that I can't update because they have horrid graphics processors compared to what I can do in my homebuilt gaming PC in which I know EXACTLY what hardware went into it because I built it with TLC and lots of gaming geekery!
Greedy bastards. All of them. Oh yeah, it would be a GRAND waste of time because nobody would care unless it got hacked and your (not-so-) personal data got shared out by some anonymous group with an ax to grind against this all and then Congress creates a law for Fast and Furious recovery that gets the DoJ in trouble yet again because now that information has become weaponized!!!
Anyway, nope. Stupid has yet again been defined in the above text. Or is it futility??? I'm going back to my Sisyphean existence now. Toodles.
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Re: Ownership
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huh
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grant them once this power
The procedure for registering something can become complicated and expensive without limit, but it will be kept reasonable for the mainstream users that the gatekeepers don't want to rouse; Go outside the mainstream and you'll find it almost impossible to comply; stay in the mainstream and the process will be pretty easy-- but darned if you don't have to submit a lot of personal information to the registry.
If first sale rights are frowned upon, exercising them will start to involve lots of paperwork, sent to some overworked and underfunded branch of the Copyright Office that will get around to processing it someday. If format-shifting is frowned upon, it will be available for any format on this list -- which hasn't been updated in years -- the format shifting itself to be done on one of these approved black boxes-- which come with their own limitations, costs, and legal entanglements.
If you don't believe me, just ask gun owners what happens once a registry is in place. Or heck, look at what happened to [EXAMPLE DELETED IN ACCORDANCE WITH GODWIN'S LAW].
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Screw the ten percent
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Oh, we can't redefine things.
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Technology advances almost as fast as politics regress. Soon we'll have wonderful technology, but sadly by then, we'll be back in a feudalistic society.
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Never a good thing
1: creating a registry endangers the existing rights of those with unregistered media
2: gaining first sale rights for digital media results in an attack on first sale rights for all media
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Re: Never a good thing
According to some judges and a lot of copyright holders, you aren't legally allowed to resell copyright material produced in foreign countries.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120416/16434518517/supreme-court-to-review-if-its-l egal-to-resell-book-you-bought-abroad.shtml
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Brilliant!
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WoW
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Maybe there are some instances where this may be true, but to date I have not seen them in the case of an ordinary consumer good.
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Under this system we'd have to register every song, game, and ebook? And for what purpose? To avoid being sued for doing things which we should have the right to do anyway? I like the commenter's analogy of the jeans - we don't register a pair of jeans just in case someone says we may have stolen them.
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Re: Deeds and Titles
With vehicles, you can, in some areas, escape rent by ceasing to use them for their intended purposes and keeping them in storage somewhere.
As a practical matter, you do not own anything you have to report the existence of.
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fundamental flaw unsolved
What a company or registry's perspective, opinion or EULA is regarding this is meaningless.
Bits on my computer? I "own" them. Perhaps not in the legal sense but in the practical sense, absolutely. Good luck trying to restrict my usage/manipulation/reproduction of them.
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Too little, too late
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Re: Too little, too late
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Re: Re: Too little, too late
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Begin with ownership
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