Death Of DRM Means Rise Of Anti-Counterfeiting WarsDeath Of DRM Means Rise Of Anti-Counterfeiting Wars

You think the drug wars are bad? Then just wait until we've got SWAT teams, empowered by the upcoming ACTA anti-counterfeiting trade agreement, taking down the local DVD duplicating operation. It'll make anti-DRM advocates long for the grandma-suing ways of the RIAA.I got onto the ACTA, about which little has been written recently, in the wake the to-do the other day about RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy. He was misquoted as having said "DRM is dead, isn't it?"

That nugget reverberated across the Web until our own Antone Gonsalves found out he didn't use the word "dead." What he actually said was: "There is virtually no DRM on music anymore, at least on download services, including iTunes." OK, so maybe this is a distinction without a difference, but it's a big deal to the Recording Industry Association of America, which has served as an enforcer via its aforementioned lawsuits. Of course, those suits don't actually stop music piracy; it's more like the RIAA has been running a long-standing legal terror campaign.

Which is not to say that they're wrong on the facts. They're not: ripping off music is theft. (So is underreporting artist royalties, but I digress, and in any case one wrong does not mitigate the other.)

But as Lamy's actual quote -- the "virtually no. . . anymore" -- makes clear, the days of DRM'd music are waning. Indeed, the music industry has pretty much given up the idea that anything approaching the old business model is ever coming back. Artists have accepted the fact that they've got to make their money touring.

However, Hollywood is another story entirely. DRM is still firmly in place on DVDs and downloadable videos. (Anyone who's ever ordered a TV show off of iTunes is aware of the inflexibility enforced by Apple's anti-copying encoding.)

Which is where the ACTA comes in. The stuff I've seen has mostly focused on the Internet provisions getting folded into the treaty. Most notable among these is the infamous "three strikes" rule, which would force ISPs to permanently ban users who repeatedly share pirated files.

However, if you parse what's been written further (OK, if you look at Wikipedia), you see that what's whetting the industry's appetite for ACTA is that it'll function like a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) on steroids.

This'll enable the movie industry to sic the full fury of the law on the big-time pirate dealers, even multitudes of small-time users gets caught in the legal crossfire. Which is where the drug-war analogy comes from.

One guesses that their efforts will be similarly efficacious.

For a related take on this stuff, see my column, AP Vs. Google Proves Web No Longer Wants To Be So Free.

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