On Fri, 2004-01-23 at 10:33, Michael L Torrie wrote: > On Fri, 2004-01-23 at 11:27, Jason Holt wrote: > > Information, by its nature, can't be contained unless the people who know it > > do so willfully. Mozart, it's said, could transcribe a symphony at home after > > hearing it once in concert. > > > > So, while there are a few features that are kind of nifty that can come from > > DRM, the whole project feels contrary to nature. It's also a huge temptation > > to people who seek profit from scarcity and are willing to create it in order > > to make more profit. > > The problem furthermore is that people are tempted to create artificial > scarcity (where scarcity does not naturally exist) that will give them > unnatural profit on something that technically they can never own (like > air). I'm sure on some philosophical or religious level each of you > will agree that an idea simply cannot be owned. We are simpy > discovering things that have always existed. That said, copyright and > patent law should give a temporary, artifical stuardship over an idea to > allow the discoverer to recoup his costs.
So the real problem is that people want to treat what we geeks simply call "data" as a tangible thing, a piece of property, even if this idea is digitized. Up until this new "digital" age, people have have always been able to live like that. If you came up with a cool idea, you made some tangible product and sold it for money. People couldn't just push a button and duplicate it, but those with the proper means could maybe copy it, and copyright law kept them at bay. People associated ideas or data with tangible property. Now that this has all changed they are struggling to hold on to the old, well I guess I'll use the word, paradigm. Is that correct? OK, here's something I thought of. We can send encrypted emails today, right? Only those who have our public key can read the email, right? Isn't that basically DRM right there? At least what I think of as useful and reasonable DRM. Control freaks would like that email to also not allow itself to be copied once unencrypted for the intended recipient. Subsitute song for email and you've got the RIAA. Bryan ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
