Sep 19

Civil Disobedience

Art, Christianity, Intellectual Property Add comments

Switchfoot, a Christian band currently experiencing crossover success, has “posted instructions for circumventing the copy protection on their new CD”:http://forums1.sonymusic.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/716102313/m/5201067064. Take note, because *this is illegal*.

The “Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA)”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA, a favorite in Congress, makes it illegal to circumvent encryption schemes, even if the end goal is perfectly legal. Switchfoot is helping their fans break United States law and circumvent measures their label has put into place to prevent piracy. And I applaud them for it.

The Wikipedia has a good article on the controversy around “Section 103′s anti-circumvention provisions”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA_anti-circumvention, but I’ll attempt to distill my complaints against the law down to a few sentences. The Supreme Court established fair use in the case Sony Corp v. Universal City Studios. I can already see your eyes glossing over, but stay with me here because if the Supreme Court hadn’t ruled in favor of fair use, you wouldn’t have a VCR. You see, the movie studios at the time were outraged that folks like you and I could use a VCR to make copies of their movies, so they tried to sue the VCR out of existence.

So what is fair use? It basically means that we can ignore copyrights as long as the copies we’re making aren’t:

# going to make us any money
# on a large scale
# isn’t going to deprive the copyright holder of signifigant chunks of money

Music fans everywhere enjoy fair use when they make (for my parents’ generation) mixed tapes or (my generation) rip mixed CDs. And that brings us back to Switchfoot and the DMCA.

You see, the DMCA makes it illegal for you to make those mixed tapes if the record label has some sort of encryption scheme on the albums. Even though the end goal is clearly legal under fair use, you’d have to break a law to get to the end goal. And that really sucks.

DMCA is badly in need of revision–Section 103 needs to be overhauled to account for fair use or dropped entirely. But until that happens, the only avenue left to protest is a time-honored tradition in American history: civil disobedience. I, for one, salute Switchfoot’s attempt to assist their customers in breaking the law. That’s a start.

But the Christian music industry needs to begin waking up to the new opportunities in the age of digital music. Bands with a strong fan base like Switchfoot no longer need a label to get their music out to the fans, between sites like “CDBaby”:http://www.cdbaby.com/ and the “iTunes Music Store”:http://www.itunes.com/ (with an 80% marketshare and a distribution deal with CDBaby). Furthermore, Christian artists need to begin looking at the “Creative Commons”:http://www.creativecommons.org/ for copyrights that would maintain their rights as artists while allowing freedom of use for their fans.

written by Kyle

  • Unfortunately that would be a losing case. Mostly because they aren't really reverse engineering any code to use against them. EThe protocols and specs for the networks are pretty much all open and most of the code is too. That isn't reverse engineering.
  • Does the DMCA target the reverse engineering of encryption systems, or simply getting around them in general. I thought it was the former (but perhaps its both). Anyway, if its the former, the fact that the band has told people how to get around their encryption system would make it legal for people to bypass it because they wouldn't have to do the work of reverse engineering. If it is both however, music listeners are just screwed because new tech law has trumped previous laws.



    Perhaps the P2P networks and other various things that are getting attacked by the media industry should counter-sue because the industry is unfairly reverse-engineering their code to use it against them.
  • Kyle
    I think that may be why artists find themselves in this position to begin with--intellectual property is such a boring topic. That is, until you find yourself in Switchfoot's position. One positive: there's at least one band that's going to be much more informed about IP in the future.
  • I couldn't agree more. The only thing I would appreciate more was if the band had worked to insure that the copy protection wasn't there in the first place. I realize that contracts and licensing through the album and recording companies limit in some respects their ability to do this. However a more vocal outcry from artists to get the music published without these hindrances would, I think, go a long way toward raising awareness.



    It really is hard to communicate well all the difficulties with current IP law. Until you get down to trying to define such things as fair use and IP ownership the whole picture doesn't really get clear.
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