Hi Al,
I do not want to appear to be in favour of DRM as I am not. But I am
aware that the argument against DRM often forgets that real people make
their living from the material that is distributed with or without DRM
technology. And in the frenzy to preserve our freedoms as consumers,
those real people can be dehumanised as some kind of corporate behemoth.
I am delighted that you are not losing sight of the wider considerations.
I am fortunate enough to live in a community where I do not need to lock
my house at night and I often do not lock it when I go out, sadly the
fact is that most of us are unable to feel so secure because of bitter
experience, paranoia or in some cases, common sense. It is like that
in the creative industries who are in a dilemma between offering
freedoms or listening to rabid attorneys and predatory special interests.
best,
Danny
Alan Pope wrote:
On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 09:20:48AM +0000, Daniel Owens wrote:
So DRM is about making your computer refuse to obey you - its owner.
Why would you want to ask your computer to break the agreement under
which you obtained somebody's copyright material?
"Because it's my computer" might be one answer.
"Why would you want your car to do more than 70MPH when the speed limit is 70?".
We already have a means to enforce copyright and that is the legal system. It is also used for
everything else from speeding, theft and fraud to rape, murder and manslaughter. It's not foolproof
but it is a framework that society has put in place to discourage people from breaking the law, and
punish those that do. Note: I am not drawing a comparision between rape and copyright infringement,
merely that the law is used to impose penalties on those that break those laws.
DRM is a technical means to attempt to further enforce the copyright laws in the copyright holders
favour. As a consumer of digital content I would like to be able to move the data around on my
computers to suit my viewing habits. DRM prevents me doing this. What I (and others) wish to do with
the media we consume is play it where we want, on the device we want when we want. I don't
particularly want to reduce the copyright holders potential revenue stream by giving copies of their
content to others, I just want to consume the content in the way I have done for analog content for
years.
The GPL and other open source licencing systems exist to protect and
enshrine the copyright of the work of developers like us. Why should
we not respect a system that is intended to protect creative people's
copyright within a different commercial model?
The GPL doesn't *force* you to make your code available, it sets out in legal terms that you should.
If you modify a GPL licensed program and distribute the binary version to your customers, the source
code doesn't magically ftp itself to gnu.org/foo and announce itself on freshmeat. It is up to you
to make the source available, and up to the community and legal system to police and enforce that
license.
I do think that DRM technology is often abused, I do think that aspects
of the media industry are paranoid, I also think that creative people
like us deserve to make a living doing what we love.
I fail to see how me copying a legitimately purchased piece of digital content to a different device
for my own consumption prevents you from making money. Please elaborate.
Cheers,
Al.
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