Read this. Should that be compelling enough of a reason to lobby for not sticking DRM into everything?
Think about it this way. Forty years ago, if you bought something with cold hard cash, it is yours, for eternity. Heck, that was always the case for a very long time. Then the digital revolution came in and made the price of duplicating an item negligible (compare copying a file to replicating a vinyl record---you see what I mean here?). And then the companies shit themselves and want a piece of the market (Market? What market?) and start slapping on DRM onto everything because they think that this will give them the most profits.
Well, who suffers? The consumer. I love cryptography, I think it is fun and nifty and really awesome-cool that a bunch of simple steps can make something hard for prying eyes to read. But now, I am not specialising in a field that I love---because I do not believe in DRM. DRM is ``digital rights management'', an euphemism for ``you pay us so that we may allow you to use the product that you purchased... for the short while that we think you ought to''. That is essentially how it is now. Forget about all the copyright legal mumbo-jumbo for now; there is something fundamentally flawed with DRM---it takes away the consumer's rights and gives them to the manufacturer, who has no incentive whatsoever to ensure that the consumer's rights are not violated: ``as long as I get the money, all is well''.
Think of it this way: if you were a consumer in the 1970s, you could buy that vinyl record and listen to it for as much as you like, changing between players (when your usual one breaks down), make a copy of it to tape (because you did not want to lug your vinyl player around), resell it if you are hard of cash and have a willing buyer. But with DRM, here is what happens: if you have a sound file with DRM, you can only play it on that one machine that you bought the file from. What if the machine broke, you ask. Well, you buy another one for the new machine that you are running on. Does that sound logical to you? Suppose now you wanted to sell the sound file to another person: well you cannot do it, because the DRM ties it down to your machine. Also, it is a sound file; why do you want to sell it to someone?
Of course the scenario presented here is incomplete---in reality there is ``reasonable'' DRM and ``unreasonable'' DRM. ``Reasonable'' DRM is unobtrusive by not tying the product down to a single machine (many people own > 1 device that can read/use the file) but to a single person, capitalising on social shame as a penalty to ensure that people do not distribute stuff wantonly---if something has your name, identification number, telephone number, sexual preferences etc written on it, you probably do not want to distribute this to the rest of the world. This of course brings up a whole can of issues on privacy and all, but I will let that slide for the moment. ``Unreasonable'' DRM is obtrusive in almost every way---it ties you down to a single machine, to a single computer program distributed by a single manufacturer, and it forces you to trust that the company who sold you that product will not go under (because if it did, you can never use the file again).
But even ``reasonable'' DRM is not the holy grail of the distribution model; a new business model must be drawn up to deal with what are intrinsic properties of the media. In a domain that is both highly technical and of great reach to the general populace, there is a lot of FUD spread largely by the corporations in order to convince the layperson that DRM is great, file-sharing is wrong, and all their lives should be dictated by the corporations who supply them with ``stuff''. The truth is more gray---many DRM systems promulgated by the corporations now are intrusive and ``unreasonable''; sharing of products whose copyright you do not own is wrong, but sharing files/products that explicitly allow themselves to be shared in their licensing agreement (another can of worms!) is not wrong; and no one should really have their lives dictated by an entity whose main purpose is to extract maximal profits, and not for social betterment.
In short, I think that many people who are making the pivotal decisions that will change the landscape forever are either clueless about the effects and reach of technology and thus wanting to ``force'' the issue into something they know, or scheming enough to capitalise on the uncertain times for a mad power grab to secure their position for the next twenty years.
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