Geeky Things

Last year me and some of my friends spent quite a lot of time to encourage people to comment on the Digital Copyright Consultation paper. Recently there were two LC papers (Here and here) describing the result of the consultation and the Government’s next step. The proposal this time is much more better than the suggestions in the consultation but are far from perfect. Here are some of my initial thought:

On the format shift (or media shift):

- At 8b) , government propose that the rights of format shift should not confer any rights to circumvent “technological measures to prevent copyright infringement”, namely DRM -_-. This is a important limitation which will makes the rights of format shift useless. As you can see many CD nowadays are DRM protected, with the given suggestion, is still a crime for users to copy legitimate copy of CD music into their iPod.

Moreover, most of the DRM used online today are not preventing copyright infringement actually -_- , they’re used to prevent format shifting as a anti-competitive behavior.

- I don’t have much to say about the scope and limitation on format shift at this point. But would like to add that the papers and the example given in other jurdisiction didn’t mention about obsoleted devices. I think the final law should include a special exemption for people to make copies from obsoleted devices under any circumstances. (Of course it might be difficult to define what’s obsoleted)

On criminalization of streaming

- Again, the first issue is how they define streaming in Law? Many program today offer some feature like “download while you play” (which means you can view a media when you’re actually still downloading), would that consider as streaming? What if a contributor provide a media as a HTTP or FTP download, but the downloader use for instance VLC to stream the FTP files?

- I’m more concerned with something like youtube. Technically speaking users are just uploading a complete file to a platform, is it streaming if the user upload a file to a platform provide streaming service?

On OSP’s caching exemption

- Glad to see government provide the exemption, but the limitations at 14. seems unrealistic for me:

* “The exemption only applies to communication that is not infringing” : That’s practically equals to having OSP to censor user’s data. OSP have the risk of infringing copyright if they don’t censor user’s data in this case

* “The content as contained in the original version should not be modified during the reproduction process.” : That could make many OSP’s temporary caching services useless. For example Google provide page caching services for mobile phone, and it will reduce the size of the images for better user experience in mobile phone. It certainly means that Google need to modify the original version of content.