Suggested Priority

Technology should follow the law, not establish it.

Whatever technological solutions are proposed or implemented as remedies for abuses of copyright should be consistent with the law.

Comment
The mandated use of technological means to implement the enforcement of law presents mechanical problems. If law and technology are to be consonant with one another, the law must take into account the limits of the technology and work within those limitations. Technological failures must be provided for, because it is inevitable that they will occur, and the relationship between the behavior of the technology and the implementation of the law must be both clearly relevant and clearly circumscribed. In addition, the combination of technology and law must be consonant with human behavior and the principles of ergonomics, or else the mechanico-legislative system will inevitably fail to work and will be subverted by the all-too-human users.

An example of a successful marriage of technology and law would be the traffic light. It is clearly related and limited to the law that governs it, common sense at all levels of the enforcement system cope with system failures, and the mechanism is ergonomically highly satisfactory.

Suggested Remedy

If abuses from home copying are found to be significant and it is sought to ease or eliminate those abuses, then copyright law should be modified so that adequate redress and enforceability, by whatever means, is provided for under the law.

Comment
The case of the proposed CBS Copycode¹ is instructive for a variety of reasons. In this particular context, the Copycode itself caused the vendors of copycoded recordings to have de facto rights in excess of those provided by copyright law (by preventing fair use, passage into public domain, etc.). Had the implementation of Copycode been mandated by law, this would have constituted a de facto revision of copyright law for a particular class of copyrighted works.