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THE LAW applies to technology in the following areas

Copyright vs.Copyleft and the Creative Commons

DRM Standard English Language vs Technical Language

DRM
Was coined by those who wish to claim as "rights" some things which are not actually their rights, or are at best contested. In other words, the "R" in the term "DRM" begs an important legal question. I wish people would instead use the term "TPM" (Technological Protection Measures) because at least it is neutral on whether or not those who deploy them have a "right" to do what they're doing in locking up information. And TPM happens to be the term used in the WIPO treaties, too. ~ Peggy Radin

The word "Right"

The word "Right" has a specific meaning.

"Constitutionally protected Rights"

"Constitutionally protected Rights"



THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION
Article 1. Section. 8. Clause 8:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; http://www.house.gov/Constitution/Constitution.html

A. Michael Froomkin Professor of Law:
The rights that copyright holders get are *statutory* rights, not constitutional ones; the Constitution merely empowers Congress to define what rights are appropriate, and it's done so in a way that creates a set of rights smaller than the set of powers that current technologies seek to claim for the sellers.
One of the problems with D-"R"-M is that the "rights" it seeks to
"protect" usually go well beyond what Congress has legislated -- to a point where they are not rights at all, but just grabby.
Two examples will make this clear.
(1) The Supreme Court has said that we have a right to "time shift" a broadcast -- record it now, play it later.
Some DRM systems try to make this impossible. Calling that "rights" protection is misleading, since what's being stopped isn't part of the right.
(2) The copyright statute gives us all a right of fair use. D-"R"-M that makes any copying impossible isn't illegal -- but it's "protecting" the content in a way that materially exceeds the scope of the right granted by copyright law.
If the average person "knows" something different -- for example
"knows" that Copyright comes straight from the Constitution without the mediating institution of Congress whether acting alone or implementing treaties -- then, once again, the average person "knows" something that ain't so.

DRM is _not_ a legal term; it's a technical term.
In IT security, when we talk about "rights" we do not mean whatever the local legal meaning for "rights" might  be. One would hope that the legal terminology war that has hijacked so much of the X.509/PKI technical work would stop there, where it has already shown to cause  more harm than help.
The technical term Digital Rights Management is about "digital rights" -- as in access rights to digital information. Whether those digital access rights correspond or not to legal rights is an open, local and variably-understood question. It may well be that DRM imposes access restrictions that are not legal in some jurisdictions, while they are legal in others. OTOH, technically, "protection" is not the same as "rights". Therefore, DRM and TPM, technically, should not be the same. ~Ed Gerck

CSS - or Content Scrambling System.
CSS is the DRM (Digital Rights Management) that’s designed to protect a DVD from its owner. DVD owners forced to do this to comply with DMCA act are often times looked upon with suspicion, as the owner might try to copy the product they own onto a portable device or their home computer. The answer to the demand to copy DVDs came from a product called DeCSS, which stripped away the copy protection, and with it, the dignity of DRM advocates. ~ ke

Seth Johnson:
It isn't the work, ultimately, that we want out of copyright; it's the shared (published) information, the knowledge and understanding and facts and ideas which promote the progress of science and the useful arts. The information within the work, when we make a distinction from original expression, is free to be used. That this is the case is not a mere legal artifice; it is in the intrinsic nature of publishing any information at all. It's nothing new; it's not a result of the digital revolution; it's a result of the nature of information, regardless of the medium or the form in which it is represented -- and this has always been the case, and will always be the case.
Distinguishing copyright and private interest uses of TPMs lets you start sorting things out and begin articulating a sensible policy that lives in the real world. You want to control a transaction, use access control. That's more of a private interest concept than copyright policy is designed to accomplish.
You want to set special terms for exactly what sort of transaction is taking place when someone obtains a work from you, then we need to confront those policy implications forthrightly. But what's going on there isn't really copyright: even though TPMs may be strengthened by enforcement under the misnamed Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the terms that are imposed in these transactions are not really in principle valid under copyright -- and on the other hand they're often not really good models of valid, consensual contractual arrangements.
Now, to look at it from that perspective, contractual arrangements that go beyond transfers of specific exclusive rights that authors hold, are about private interest and they also happen to be consensual; whereas authors may exercise their exclusive rights under copyright even without a consensual contract. There's a deep mismatch there. The rights that we choose to give to authors under a copyright policy appropriate for the digital age have to be considered in this light.
The confusion evaporates after you recognize these distinctions between copyright and attempts to impose prior restraints on how others can use the information contained within expressive works.
I might add, that clarifying the above is completely inconsistent with a basic purpose behind the various attempts to promulgate the notion of "DRM": the idea being to mix copyright policy with private interest perspectives until something very, very different from valid copyright can be established, and a new precedent can be set, that will hopefully trump traditional jurisprudence. If this cannot be accomplished through laws enacted by representatives directly accountable to their constituencies, then the intention is to do so through international treaties enacted by unelected representatives.

K-12 School

 

K12 Classroom copyright do's and don'ts.
A K-12 primer for teachers for the classroom.
Music, Video Copyright Law: How can K-12 legally use music for the video project, class project, multimedia presentation, school yearbook on the CD, class website or cable television program, produced at the school?

School's Rights vs. Students Rights Online.

Filtering in the Schools and Libraries restrict access to information

Standards for Electronic and Information Technology (NPRM) Implementation Section 508 Government Usability Requirements of the Rehabilitation Act.

Use the Law To Protect Yourself

 

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