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Destroying the DMCA will go quite a way in improving the whole DRM situation, but frankly we're at the point where we need to fight back hard. We're heading in a direction where nobody can truly own their own devices, because some people want to be absolutely sure no unauthorized (e.g. free, open source) software runs on it, because god forbid anyone should have any agency.

We should make clear that copyright is about publishing not using and that any usability infringements are infringements on ownership i.e. stealing.

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I’d be in favour of excluding certain types of work from copyright protection entirely. Copyright isn’t there to create a barrier to interoperability or a way to artificially prevent competition in markets, so IMHO things like data formats and APIs should not be copyrightable. This isn’t to say that no real creative work is involved in producing those things, only that the damage to society from allowing them to be protected in this way is too great.

Curiously, the US does recognise this concept to an extent in its legal treatment of fonts, but unfortunately that remains the exception rather than the rule, and even that exception is not recognised in the global copyright treaties. There is still a long list of software and hardware that is protected from otherwise normal competition by repurposing copyright to prevent things like easily exporting a user’s own data to use with different software or swapping out a failed hardware product for an after-market alternative that wasn’t made by the original manufacturer. In this respect, copyright now acts like bad patents, subverting the original intent and corrupting any reasonable moral/economic arguments behind it, and instead merely providing a legal weapon for powerful incumbents to inhibit creative work it was supposed to encourage.

I don't think API copyright is recognized, even in the U.S. Logically speaking it shouldn't constitute a copyrightable work, but you never know sometimes. The documentation could be considered copyrightable, though you could just reverse engineer it.

It's kind of the same category as fonts and recipes, which you can figure out by inspection mostly. If you want to protect something like that then a patent might be in order, though let's not get into that mess...

> I don't think API copyright is recognized, even in the U.S.

That was what every single person thought right until Oracle won a suit against Google for use of the Java's API.

As I recall that was a claim of a byte for byte copy. Google claimed there was no other meaningful way to use the API but the court said that copying the file itself was a step too far.

I'm confused, all that I can find is that the final decision by the supreme court was that it fell under fair use.

> it fell under fair use

What means it's protected by copyrights. Fair use on the US is a murky thing that only large corporations have the legal power to bet on.

But the sibling saying it's about the organization of the files may be on point. I remember it being about the organization into packages, but I can easily be wrong here.

API might go down the road travelled by music in the last 25 years or so.

Music used to be a copyright on a melody. Arrangers/producers had nothing. Recorded music now has expanded to have "production rights". This a copyright on the way the released recording "sounds". The recent Ed Sheeran court case is a good example how weird that can get.

So APIs could be get there with the right crop of lawyers and court cases. ?

Get rid of copyright and the industry response will just be to move everything to the cloud. You don’t even get a device, just a thin client. Things will be more locked down, not less.

People want information to be free and have largely price anchored on free, but information of any quality is extremely labor intensive and expensive. That radical mismatch between desire and reality has and will continue to twist the market into weird and increasingly hostile shapes.

You can't see or hear media in "the cloud". It has to be downloaded to your device to do that. "Streaming" is just downloading + (usually) DRM enforced deleting, which is exactly what the person you're replying to is saying will improve when we repeal DMCA.

DRM can get much more restrictive, such as being locked down to only special purpose devices produced by the publisher or distributor / streaming service. So imagine requiring a Netflix dongle to watch Netflix, etc. Without the DMCA these things would just get built like Yubikeys with internal HSMs that require clean room practices to unlock. That'll be combined with watermarking so if you do pirate it and leak it they sue you by tracing it back to you.

My real point is the second part: quality media of any kind is very expensive and labor intensive to produce. Piracy can result in only two possible things: (1) even more restrictive and arcane DRM, or (2) the media you like just stops getting produced at all.

If people flatly refuse to pay and insist on pirating, option (2) is the final endpoint. You just won't get the product because nobody will make it.

Free is a lie. When you insist that things must be free, you're lying to yourself. When companies tell you it's free, they are lying to you (usually to get you hooked for surveillance or later monetization).

> Without the DMCA these things would just get built like Yubikeys with internal HSMs that require clean room practices to unlock.

There is always the Analog hole¹, and I don't think that can ever be resolved. You only need one A/D conversion where quality is paramount and after that you have DRM free copies.

> the media you like just stops getting produced at all.

This is a sacrifice I'd be willing to make if it means eliminating DRM and other schemes that do NOT promote the progress of science and the useful arts.

¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

> This is a sacrifice I'd be willing to make

I feel like I must not understand your point, because this seems odd to me. You’re saying it’s better to have no high quality media at all than to have any form of DRM?

If it makes you feel any better, I think this is where we are headed because as you correctly point out DRM doesn’t really work. The future is cheap trash produced almost for free by AI, crowdsourced filler like TikTok, or ads and propaganda funded by someone other than the consumer to push a message.

The period from the birth of recorded media to the birth of easy digital reproduction will be remembered as this weird golden age when massive amounts of incredible recorded art, film, and music were produced because there was an economic model for it.

I used to have the “information wants to be free” view until I saw how much effort goes into producing any form of media of any quality. It’s not easy or cheap at all and if it’s not funded it won’t happen.

> You’re saying it’s better to have no high quality media at all than to have any form of DRM?

I get your point, but there’s plenty of high quality media produced without financial incentive or with alternate funding schemes (donations, gov grants, patronage). I think hyperbole weakens the argument here.

No need to look far, the pathology is blatantly obvious visible in some despots - who think normal everyday people should never have agency and can ever be only puppets for the powerful. Secret services, governments and cooperations are filled to the brim with these types at the top. So the first step to remove that sort of policy, is a screening for the pathology among the powerful.

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