Consumer Bill of Rights - DRAFT

Communities
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So what would a bill of rights look like for copyright enjoyers? Well, we want your input. We’ve started a thread on the forum and here’s what we’ve got so far:

1. The Right to Backup, Format-Shift, and Time-Shift

It shall always be lawful for an individual to make personal copies of lawfully acquired media, for the purpose of backup, migration to different formats, or consumption at a later time. This includes—but is not limited to—video, audio, books, software, and immersive or neural recordings.

2. The Right to Repair and Modify

Any device, once lawfully acquired, becomes the full property of its owner. Owners shall have the inalienable right to open, modify, repair, and improve the hardware and software, including firmware, without interference or legal risk.

3. The Right to Share Tools with Lawful Uses

Distribution of tools or instructions that enable others to exercise their rights under this Bill—such as for backup, repair, or education—shall not be presumed unlawful if the tool has significant non-infringing uses.

4. The Right to Reverse Engineer

Reverse engineering, for purposes such as documentation, interoperability, research, and accessibility, shall be protected speech. Artificial limitations based on software licensing or DRM shall not override this right.

5. Graduated Copyright Enforcement

Copyright enforcement must consider the economic and cultural relevance of the media. Obsolete, orphaned, or unsupported works—where no reasonable means exist to purchase or license—shall be treated with leniency.

In cases where a user purchases or “licenses” a work and that work experiences degraded functionality due to action or inaction by the copyright owner, it is an automatic defense against civil or criminal proceedings the end-user can leverage if they are reverse engineering, using tools or technically violating some aspect of copyright in order to restore functionality to the work. By way of example, an online game no longer has online servers? Folks working to reverse engineer and “patch” that functionality back into the work are automatically protected.

6. The Right to Local AI and Private Computation

Users have the right to run local AI models on their devices without surveillance or restriction. Any AI agent operating on behalf of third parties (e.g., to detect piracy) shall be opt-in only, and its function must be disclosed in full.

7. The Right to Disable or Reject Remote Kill-Switches

Devices with remote firmware updates or feature toggles must include transparent controls to allow users to opt out. No manufacturer shall be allowed to revoke features from a purchased device without express and informed consent.

This is also important in cases like Doctorow’s enshittification. The only real defense consumers have against enshittification is an affirmative legal defense in both tort and criminal law when they modify products to suit their needs.

8. The Right to Use Alternative Parts and Supplies

Consumers shall not be restricted from using third-party parts, supplies, or consumables—whether ink, batteries, or components. Attempts to lock out or degrade functionality due to use of third-party items shall be considered anti-competitive and void.

9. The Right to Anonymity in Personal Use

No device or software shall require internet connectivity or third-party account registration for basic functionality unless the feature requires such access by nature (e.g., cloud storage). Offline functionality shall be preserved as a baseline right.

10. The Right to Documentation and Transparency

Any user-facing system or device must provide complete documentation of its capabilities, limitations, and any telemetry or tracking systems. Obfuscation of how a device operates, especially to prevent modification or repair, is a violation of this principle. Some leeway can be given to companies in the case of trade secrets and novel designs, but it would be a violation of consumer protection laws if, for example, HP issued a firmware update that contained undocumented changes to make it harder to use third party ink with their products.

11. The Right to Escape End-of-Life Traps

Manufacturers shall be required to either provide open tools or release technical specifications when a product reaches End-of-Life (EOL), to allow the community to continue use and maintenance without legal encumbrance.

12. The Right to Migrate and Archive

Users shall be free to extract, archive, and migrate their data and digital purchases, including from proprietary platforms. Lock-in through encrypted formats or online-only access shall not override this right.

13. The Right to Silence from Advertisements in Owned Media

It is a violation of consumer rights to insert, force, or re-enable advertising in previously purchased or ad-free content via software update or network manipulation. Content paid for as ad-free shall remain ad-free.

14. The Right to Resale and Transfer

Digital goods must carry the same resale rights as physical ones. Users may sell, lend, or gift digital media or software, provided they no longer retain a usable copy themselves.

15. The Right to Protest Surveillance and Tattling Agents

Devices or software that report on user behavior—whether to manufacturers, copyright holders, or third parties—must do so only with explicit, informed, and revocable consent. Covert tattling agents are a violation of user autonomy.

16. The Right to Capture Lawfully Accessed Media

Users shall have the right to locally record or capture any media they have lawful access to—whether streamed, displayed, or transmitted—so long as it is for personal use such as time-shifting, annotation, commentary, or archival. This includes video, audio, interactive media, neural feeds, or immersive content. Circumvention of technical measures solely to enable such capture shall be lawful under this right.

Annotation: This principle continues the legal precedent established in Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, recognizing personal time-shifting and private copying as fair use. It rejects the notion that streaming platforms may artificially revoke the practical equivalents of traditional media rights.

This is a draft and several of these items can be consolidated. At the same time there is an aspect here similar to the holy hand-grenade of antiacho. Thou shall count to three. Five is right out. etc.

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If you haven’t, study the EU directive on this:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj/eng
Select language and format of choice from the table.

HTH!

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  1. Shorter copyright terms

Copyright protection should only be granted by registration, but registration should not be required to circulate the work. Copyright term should be 7 years initially, with 3.5 year extensions at a time, not exceeding 21 years from creation or 20 years from publication, whichever is earlier. For works published after the author’s death, the term should be 7.5 years from author’s death, but not exceeding 21 years from creation in any case. For works with multiple authors, the term should be 3.5 years from the author that died first, with a 3.5 year extension, not exceeding 7 years from death of said author.

For work-for-hire, the commissioner of the work should get a protection for 7 years from creation if the work is published, none if it is not published, with the commissioner reserving the right to initial publication.

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this is the best book against IP https://www.stephankinsella.com/wp-content/uploads/publications/kinsella-against-ip-mises-2008.pdf

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The first point could perhaps instead reflect the old ways we had/have in Sweden - the right to private copies. It also entails the right to grant copies to friends and family, and was connected to a tax ( because Sweden…) that was placed on the “media”. However, I still feel that for legal readers, the right to copy needs a clarification - a backup is thus a mere copy.

I really feel we want a certain old New York resident in this thread in terms of the rights to repair ie, point 2 (yay Rossmann!) :D.

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I don’t know how much these could be captured by the existing list but some rights I have in mind involving abandoned copyrighted works:

  • ability to reverse engineer and re-implement protocols and interfaces for interacting with copyrighted works in certain cases. This is the “game developer went bankrupt, existing rights holder blocks 3rd parties maintaining community servers while also refusing to provide these things itself” case. I’m not quite sure of the details of how to implement this.
  • copyrighted works where the rights holder refuses to issue reprints should enter the public domain sooner. Want to maintain your copyright? Make sure it’s available for people to access. This is the “The Internet Archive is prevented to hosting old works despite them being unavailable any other way, effectively preventing access” case.

I recently read Chokepoint Capitalism by Giblin&Doctorow Chokepoint Capitalism - Wikipedia and the first half documents problems and the second offers solutions and copyright is key in many of the things they discuss. That would provide more ideas for this list but also everything on the list should be evaluated through that lens, namely how are existing powers exploiting loopholes in the copyright system to profit at the expense of creators and consumers.

Great video and idea, I look forward to what develops! Also somebody get Louis Rossman in there!

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  1. The right to purchase

No streaming or subscription exclusivity, unless it’s a service, like cloud services or online multiplayer games.

If you can’t purchase a work, then it should lose copyright altogether.

Corporations can’t complain about lost sales if they refuse to sell.

I would like to have this right, but the only way to enforce that you don’t retain a copy is with DRM, and I don’t want DRM.

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Had a 15yr old started this thread, i’d have simply abstained… but as the OP’s smart, a hell of a lot older and i’m in front of a keyboard anyway…

I know you probably don’t need this -let alone having someone be that guy- but;

You need a lawyer. Not forum randos.

There is wishing and then there’s real life in a socio-economic environment as complex as we’ve made ours to be.
You need to protect a company’s intellectual property, so you can’t go around telling anyone they’re fully gonna own this or that product. Lest of course you get a kick from having everyone and their mother potentially take everything you own. So you separate. Owning physically, versus owning intellectually. Leading us to:
Same goes for re-distributing.
And you cannot force someone into a complex, non-complex, cheap, expensive, big or small in volume device; they should have a right to sell whatever they’re pleased to be selling. Except of course cost being cost, small, cheap and fast does come with consequences, leading us to:
Same goes for repairing.

So careful what you ask for.

Before you go ballistic here, i hate your [plural, last two gens’] new age SMD-ridden crappola devices. Plastic, made to break, not last, with zero personal/software support and a hotline in Gagabishu Moaha, India. Hate them. So imagine how much i hate my additionally being unable to salvage them. But that’s my problem. Don’t have to buy them if i don’t want to, now do i.
So where’s all the whine coming from exactly? Have we considered this? Beyond the superficial “i have rights” declaration?
(also, kindly differentiate at this point American “right to repair” ““bills”” from the universal reality. It’s exactly like woke-supporting laws. Trends, the voters they swing, until they do not, then “laws” change again. You can’t chase this bad boy without literally stagnating market after market. You can only pretend you do so; as they are right now)

Or maybe, be very specific about what kind of product/service’s copyright rules you’re fishing for? :slight_smile:

That might attract maturer and actually useful responses.
Says the old fart mind, ignore freely.

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I like that there are items that could be consolidated, but not sure I would say you should remove them. It’s not too verbose as it is, and adds specificity to limit the interpretations of it.

I hate the language of having the holder of the media be called “consumer.” Could it use person or people instead?

Not sure if the verbiage of “for personal use” is what I would ideally want either. Specifically “Noncommercial use” would catch just about every use case I would want for media in general.

.[quote=“Aenra, post:10, topic:229124”]
Or maybe, be very specific about what kind of product/service’s copyright rules you’re fishing for?
[/quote]

But it’s for like, everything?

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Blockquote The only real defense consumers have against enshittification is an affirmative legal defense in both tort and criminal law when they modify products to suit their needs.

I’d go with a rebuttable presumption to shift the burden of prove to the copyright enforcer. With an affirmative defense you still have to prove it. With a rebuttable presumption, you can sit there with your arms crossed (in theory) and it’s up to the other side to prove the presumption should not hold.

Something like: There shall exist, for any product bought by an individual person and used for a “non-commercial use” by such individual person, a rebuttable presumption that any modification done in connection with such non-commerical use is a “permissible modification”.

One would have to get into the weeds a bit on what a “permissible modification” would be though I think much of what you have in the list are “permissible modifications” or “permissible uses”, so you could almost just go for a one liner like I have above and then the real meat is in the defined term “permissible use” or “permissible modification”.

So something like: There shall exist, for any product bought by an individual person and used for a “non-commercial use” by such individual person, a rebuttable presumption in favor of such individual with respect to such product for any Permissible Modification or Use. For the purposes of this act, Permissible Modification or Use means: [then list your numbered items]"

I’m not an IP lawyer and I don’t write legislation for a living so I don’t have much in the way of good insights on this stuff (and as a user of tech, I think you caught a lot of what I care about already) but hopefully you can find a lawyer out there that does this stuff that could contribute some thoughts after the community has created its list of what it wants and get it into the form of a model law/bill that either a state could pass (or that folks could lobby for the state to pass) or the feds could pass (I’m sure there will be some state vs federal law presumption stuff to work through - again where volunteer lawyers that do this type of work could help navigate the icebergs).

Interested to see where this goes!

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I think this could be expanded as a separate point or under 3 or 12. In the direction for libraries(perhaps everyone) to have the right to share through a good faith attempt at controlled digital lending, without limitation of format. Also for the purpose of lost or abandonware, waiving the controlled digital lending would be good. As it doesn’t make sense to have 1-1 lending if the “supply” is that limited, miniscule, non-existent and has an insignificant sales impact for the right holder, but idk how well that would float.

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Regarding item #5, graduated copyright enforcement: I would prefer that any work of media which has been “abandoned” (to mean it was on sale at one point in time, but there has been no available method of legally purchasing it from any rights holder for at least five years) shall have its copyright forfeit and be granted Public Domain status. Saying that infringements in such cases “shall be treated with leniency” leaves too much grey area for my taste.

Regarding #14, the right to resale and transfer, is questionable to me, mainly because the last bit is unenforceable without means excluded by other parts of this BoR. The right to Migrate and Archive in #12, paired with the restrictions on tattling agents in #15, would seem to effectively grant the ability to transfer any electronic good to your own devices or anyone else’s without the creator’s knowledge. Whether you delete your own copy of it after sending it to someone else would be up to your own conscience and nothing else—the honor system.

What purpose does it serve that one can legally sell their digital copy of a good? Reselling a physical object is one thing: It’s hard to make a physical object, it’s very hard to perfectly replicate one, and transferring possession of an object is inherently zero-sum (for one person to gain it, another must lose it), so supply and demand are at play to determine the resale price of a physical good.

These don’t really apply to digital goods, absent some kind of restrictive DRM. The supply of a digital good, once created, is effectively infinite, so the value of any particular copy is effectively zero. The reason people pay lots of money for digital goods is because they understand the work it takes to create them, find that work valuable, have the ability to pay, and feel a desire or obligation to do so. Those for whom any of those points don’t apply either don’t want the digital good or will find a free copy through other means, if one is available.

So I don’t think reselling digital goods is a use case that actually serves any party. Allowing transfer of ownership is one thing for purposes of support, etc., but mandating that sale be allowed of any digital good feels like a can of worms.

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I am a dummy when it come to all this legal jargon but I can fix just about anything and I have $ to donate to this cause. If we own media such as DVD/BR its ours same for games, what has the world come too :frowning:

Edit: sorry for not really helping but fuck, this is what is has come too?

Edit#2: Im gonna share this with my local and reps, I live in NM so won’t do much but it’s a start.

Thank you @wendell and Ryan putting this together. Lets do this!

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While i cant help but say your argument is valid, i dont think it justifies not being able to sell a digital good to someone else. Just as you used to be able to sell games you finished to a friend back in the days of game cartigdes, you should be able to resell a digital game.

But i think the real problem is with most of this is most goods today are not sold at all, and some never were. We buy a licenses to “access” items under the terms of a license agreement. We need a fundamental shift in how the “sale” of digital goods works in the first place before, anyone can say they actually “own” a digital good.

A lot of this falls apart the moment you consider the fact that the good is never yours in the first place, and you do not have the right to transfer the license, or view the good in a way not laid out in the license agreement.

I think this leads to a first step which is that sellers should not have the right to revoke acess. This is not saying they can’t sue you and win for making copies and giving out thier digital good, but they should not have the ability to take back or revoke acess.

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I don’t know how to word it, but I’d expect a consumer bill of rights to include protections from overreaching terms of service. Maybe using the word “rights” implies “inalienable rights”, but perhaps something a bit more explicit that protects from anti-consumer practices, like burying a forefit clause on the 37th page of a TOS link.

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Probably needs to move back the time limits too.

As much as lifetime of the author might benefit the author, there is something profoundly sad about the ability for children to grow up enjoying a piece of media but be unable to make things based on it in adulthood.

Also there should probably be explicit protections for fanfiction/fan works in general.

It’d be nice if there was a way to make works more open but also more durable. For example, it’d be nice for something like Star Wars to have not been co-opted by Disney and systematically torn apart. It’d be nice for fans to have more say on the direction of large enough properties but there could be some benefits to some level of ability to lock things down so you don’t have everything going off into a mess.

I wonder if there would be a benefit to have explicit sets of per media type rules, like the Right to Reverse Engineer would be one for software. Just to allow for more tweaking in an organized way.

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Depending on the field of study the author gets exclusive rights to distribute and modify the copyrighted material for five to ten years depending on the field. You want to preserve the initial act of innovation, and prevent someone from controlling the evolution of a project through administrative rules. Five years seems about right for works of fiction. While, ten might be right for technological innovations depending on the field. Drug discovery and re-purposing is more complicated. The laws around drug IPs are probably about right.

After a set time, you have to compete on distribution. NetFlix vs Popcorn Time. If you have the most popular means of distribution you still retain control of the IP through the market choosing you over others.

For stuff like Star Wars, you just need to keep producing and / or managing the wider ecosystem in a manner that makes your curation cannon. Every, individual work within an ecosystem does not extend the overall IP, though.

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Modifying copyright is a bit of a tangent from a “consumer bill of rights”, but my thoughts that i’ve written down before are,

Copyright is non-transferrable, and may ONLY ever be held by the INDIVIDUAL who created the work. Copyright owners may of course grant/contract/sell usage rights as they see fit, but control over the work may never be sold. I.e. no one but the writer may set restrictions on use or seek damages for misuse.

Obviously this is not fully fleshed out, for example no mention of multi-author works. But I think it should be the guiding principle. Copyright is for the protection of the artist, not a money-making scheme for corporations.

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