Felten: Diverse Users, Diverse Uses

Hey, where is everybody?  I guess I missed the party.   I would have been on time, see, but I put this new CD in my computer and it turned out to be copy-protected, and I had to spend the rest of the week in the lab.

Most of the brilliant things I was planning to say have already been said by others, so I'll be brief.. 

Julie is right to argue that users' interests deserve more attention.  A big part of the problem, I think, is that copyright arguments tend to underestimate the diversity of users, and the diversity of uses of copyrighted works.  The tendency instead is to postulate some notional average user, who makes some limited set of uses, and to attend only to that average user's interests.  We see this, for example, when broadcast flag advocates argue that the flag isn't harmful to consumers because it still allows some limited forms of time-shifting.  We see it, too, when a judge rules that the DMCA isn't a fair use problem because the first few fair uses he can think of are still possible with analog media.

The diversity of uses has grown vastly with the advent of digital technology, and it will continue to grow.  So continuing to ignore diversity will only lead us more badly astray.   Ignoring new digital uses is quite common in copyright discussions (present company excepted, of course), which helps to explain why copyright has such a bad name among technologists and early adopters.

Which brings me to Tim's suggestion that we should treat users' choices as presumptively good.  Who knows the most about the universe of uses?  Individual users, that's who.  As usual in a free society, we should start with the presumption that citizens can make choices for themselves.

Comments

[Randy Picker]

See, that will teach you not to buy CDs but instead to download your music from your peer-to-peer network of choice ... no, wait that must be the wrong lesson to take away from the Sony DRM fiasco, but it is hard to see what else one might conclude.

As I said to someone at a workshop yesterday, Xmas has come early for the anti-DRM folks.

[Ed Felten]

Actually, my students and I are probably the only people in the world who try to accumulate copy-protected CDs.

I'll write more on Freedom to Tinker about the reasons for the CD-DRM blowup. The short version is that once the music industry set off down the road of CD copy protection, something like this became inevitable. We didn't know exactly when or how the meltdown would happen, but we knew it was coming.