Automated DRM keeps spoiling the show, from the DNC to Mars. obots aren't smart enough to decide if video or song is used lawfully; instead of trying to improve content monitoring software, we should look to ditch it.

The Hugo Awards debacle wasn't just an isolated instance, either. After last night's Democratic National Convention, anyone who sought to watch the video of the evening's presentations on BarackObama.com or YouTube found the video flagged by copyright claims shortly after it finished, according to Wired. Ironically, YouTube is the official streaming partner of the Democratic National Convention, yet according to Wired, the site put a copyright blocking message on the video. Anyone trying to access the video was presented with a message claiming the stream had been caught infringing on the copyright of one of many possible content companies, including, "WMG, SME, Associated Press (AP), UMG, Dow Jones, New York Times Digital, The Harry Fox Agency, Inc. (HFA), Warner Chappell, UMPG Publishing, and EMI Music Publishing." [...]

"Quantization of discretion" is a nice turn of phrase:

It's not just Web robots: The AirPlay feature in Apple's OS X Mountain Lion similarly blocks the streaming of DVDs to TVs on the network, even though it is perfectly legal to play a commercial DVD on your TV, even if the DVD player happens to reside on your computer.

People talk of "fair use," but what they actually mean is that we all depend on the exercise of judgment in every decision. Near the bulls-eye of copyright where it was meant to apply -- the origination of works by specialist producers -- most people are clear what it means. But as legal scholar Lawrence Lessig eloquently explained in his excellent book "Free Culture," in the outer circles we have to make case-by-case judgments about what usage is fair and what usage is abuse. When a technologist embodies their or their employer's view of what's fair into a technology-enforced restriction, any potential for the exercise of discretion is turned from a scale to a step, and freedom is quantized. That quantization of discretion is always in the interest of the person forcing the issue.

These technology-imposed restrictions aren't just a problem for now. The natural consequence of having the outlook and business model of one person replace the spectrum of discretion is that scope for new interpretations of what's fair usage in the future is removed. Future uses of the content involved are reduced to just historic uses the content had at the time it was locked up in the technology wrapper (if that -- for example, digital books are generally not able to be loaned to friends, and even when they are, it's treated as a limited privilege).

The law may change, the outlook of society may mature, but the freedom to use that content according to the new view will never emerge from the quantized state the wrapper imposes. The code becomes the law, as Lessig again explains in his book "Code." Although the concept of "fair use" is potentially flexible and forward-looking, "historic use" is ossifying.

Thus the calls for better robots that understand fair use are misguided and pointless, a plot device that would fail the sniff test at the Hugo Awards, or in the wake of the Mars Rover landing or the DNC. Any technology that applies restrictions to text, music, video, or any other creative medium quantizes discretion and inherently dehumanizes culture. We don't need better robots; we need the reform of copyright so that it only applies to producers and not to consumers.

Another article that says the same thing with more examples.

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