“The DMCA is federal law, and no mere purveyor of protected works has the authority to cast off responsibility for circumvention of technological measures that effectively control access to works such seller may be involved in distributing.”
I totally agree.
This DRM stuff has become a mess. On one hand, originating artists deserve copyright protections, and, on the other, purchasers of their art deserve to get what they pay for. So far, no one has found a practical solution to copyright infringement.
My basic solution is as Amazon and others are doing and that is to make music and other works of art easy enough and cheap enough to purchase and make the whole process hassle free as possible. All the other problems like peer-to-peer are something for law enforcement to enforce and in the infomration age that is nearly impossible to do.
I suggest DRM was always a mess waiting to happen to most any who would "step in it." Those who recognized that sought to gain sufficient advantage by lubricating Congress to foist the DMCA and other copyright changes onto us poor, unsuspecting chumps. Previous law more reasonably and fairly manifested the methods whereby copyright infringement grievances could be adjudicated, compensated, punished and/or rectified, IMHO.
Microsoft was apprised of DRM's folly early on in this process, e.g., by Cory Doctorow and others, but Microsoft, in their desire to rise above their competition, disregarded such input, as have many others.
The legal responsibilities for DRM have--through the lubricant of campaign funds--have been foisted on the law enforcement community versus its domain prior to the DMCA, the civil courts. In other words, rightsholders groups, viz. RIAA, MPAA, etc. have paid our politicians filthy lucre to pass into law that which would subjugate and criminalize the previously non-criminal activities (freely enjoying their purchased multimedia on a variety of household players) of a huge proportion of Americans. Such rights groups gave protection money to politicians who would relieve rightsholders' legal bills and pass on the expense of collecting civil judgments from example-grannies onto the backs of all taxpayers.
That all reeks of raw corruption.
Without laws like DMCA, DRM could never succeed in the marketplace. The whole Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD debacle deserved never to have pointlessly soaked up all the money it did. Certain groups were simply interested in using the artificially-designated moment in time of the feasibility of bumping up the video resolution for movies (in no way owing technologically to those rights groups, by the way) to turn the Hollywood-and-consumer purchase transactions of the past into a monopolistic licensing tollbooth to skew the business advantage toward the Hollywood types.
In similar fashion, without government subsidies, ethanol could not succeed in the marketplace, and we probably wouldn't be facing, as we are presently, the prospect of a global food shortage. Politicians have been bribed to lay their hands--ignorantly and corruptly--to the wheels of capitalism. But, I digress.
HF