On Fri, 23 Jan 2004, Bryan Murdock wrote: > 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?
Yup. And the old paradigm had "some 'splainin' to do", so to speak ... in the early eighties, people weren't sure whether computer software was (or should be) copyrightable at all (since binaries aren't "human-readable"). I've got an mp3 of an interview with Bill Gates from 1980 where he's arguing that software _should_ be copyrightable. But this idea wasn't immediately obvious in the digital world. > 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? Nope. That's simple security. > Control freaks would like that email to also not allow itself to be > copied once unencrypted for the intended recipient. _That's_ DRM, trying to keep the person from copying it once they've unencrypted it. And that, IMNSHO, is what is completely impossible. ~ross -- This sentence would be seven words long if it were six words shorter. ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
