On Tue, 2005-11-08 at 16:17 -0800, PhilNYC wrote: > Pat...very interesting perspective. IMHO, in a broad sense, DRM is > important for anyone publishing digital content. It does not > necessarily have to do with getting paid, although that should be a > part of it.
But DRMs are all about getting paid. That is all they care about. Its what I care about. I write software for a living, I expect to get paid for it (unless I decide to give it away like my slimserver utilities). I'm a bad musician, but I can relate to musicians wanting to get paid for their talents. > I just thought it needed to be said that DRM is about > protecting the rights of the copyright owners, whether they be music > labels, musicians, or whoever else. But this is not what is happening. First of all, there is a lot of confusion about copyright. Most of it lays in the tradition that copying something was hard. For the first 10,000 years, it took a bunch of monks years to make one copy. After Guttenburg, it still took time and money. All of our copyright law and precedent is based on the expense of printing books or pressing records. (except for the awful DMCA law) What most people care about is called "useright" which is the legal ability to use something. This is separate from the right to copy something. I want to play music, watch movies, etc. I really don't care much about copying it and I sure don't want to share it worldwide. But I want to be able to play/watch goods that I paid for where I want. There has been a little discussion about use rights, see any discussion of "fair use" or the precedent about the Beta lawsuit of long ago, where the US Supreme Court said that "fair use" was acceptable. Except for a few "information wants to be free" radicals, most people expect to pay for fair use of all kinds of data. The problem is that the RIAA and similar folks are using crude techniques to enforce rules that a lot of reasonable folks find unacceptable, such as limiting the number of times you can copy a file between computers. They do this without using the technology that could make it transparent, or at least translucent. But it is hard. I worked doing cryptographic software for CyberCash, we moved money safely and reliably over the Internet nearly a decade ago. I worked at a company that tried to implement "use right" controls using strong encryption. I even worked at an Internet music company that tried to keep the RIAA happy. Until the RIAA get realistic, attempts to force DRM down people throats (like the recent Sony rootkit disguised as a music CD) will feed distrust and piracy. -- Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
