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Lawsuit could be the beginning of the end for DRM

defectivebydesign.org

101–110 of 209 posts

Re: Lawsuit could be the beginning of the end for DRM

#101

The link is to a reasonably thought out and worded perspective from that of a technology industry participant. As noted within, there are some guiding principles which establish the basis for perspective and action. As in, the Free Software Foundation wouldn't be interested in participating in the for-profit software market. For a counter-point, when this case first broke and I was able to study the implications from…

By the way, something to think about regarding your suggested solution to the "John Deere problem":

John Deere will simply start selling smart tractors. You know, a large machine with a strong motor and everything. And with a computer controlling it. But without any software. Or with only very basic software. You cannot actually do anything useful with it unless you install some tractor apps. Which you can licence. From John Deere. So, what have you gained? Or do you have any workaround for this that does not entail abolishing DRM?

Re: Lawsuit could be the beginning of the end for DRM

#102
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The content corps make a ton of money by exploiting creative people. That shouldn't be part of this debate. It's despicable, there's no doubt but a company doing unethical things doesn't give license for anyone to steal from them. If you don't want to support them that's your choice, you can't choose to steal the product under the banner of moral outrage and claim to be in the right. Tons of companies exploit tons…

It shouldn't, but supporting artists is often brought up as an argument from the content industry to justify DRM or absurd lengths of copyright. So it's valid to debunk that argument in this context. Of course that doesn't change the fact that supporting artists is an actual problem and TheOtherHobbes' objections to the privacy cloud are very real. However, there are other projects (e.g. Patreon) that experiment with…

piracy crowd*. I don't even

Re: Lawsuit could be the beginning of the end for DRM

#103
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't rely on any 'official' solution to maintain your digital library as those are sure to stop working in one way (company goes bankrupt or gets bought) or another (planned obsolescence, forced upgrade, etc) in a few years time. Configure your own using one of the existing tools; if you use Owncloud or Nextcloud you could use my OPDS Catalog app ( https://apps.owncloud.com/content/show.php?content=168132 ), possibl…

You make me wonder what I should do to preserve my Steam account now... Maybe there's some way to get a VM image of the computer in offline mode?

Steam DRM is even more trivially defeated than Amazon DRM. Drop 4 files in the game folder and run it.

Re: Lawsuit could be the beginning of the end for DRM

#104

If it was not for DRM removal tools I would have recently been screwed by Amazon, here is my story: I was a longtime customer (easily 10 years or more I think) and have bought every version of Kindle to have come out over the years (unfortunately they break easily) and have build up a large collection Recently I replaced the debit card on my account as the old one expired, placed and order for a digital game code for…

Don't rely on any 'official' solution to maintain your digital library as those are sure to stop working in one way (company goes bankrupt or gets bought) or another (planned obsolescence, forced upgrade, etc) in a few years time. Configure your own using one of the existing tools; if you use Owncloud or Nextcloud you could use my OPDS Catalog app ( https://apps.owncloud.com/content/show.php?content=168132 ), possibl…

> Configure your own using one of the existing tools; if you use Owncloud or Nextcloud you could use my OPDS Catalog app…

Okay, so this is a whole new world for me. Thank you!

OPDS appears to be for electronic publications what RSS is to blogs and podcasts. There are feeds, there's content management software that generates them (like "OPDS catalog"), and there are reader-style apps to consume them and view the syndicated content. Yes?

But as someone with tons of Kindle purchases, I'm a little confused about where to go from here, and how to protect myself from what happened to throwaway1974. Is there an "OPDS for Dummies"?

Re: Lawsuit could be the beginning of the end for DRM

#105
post #88
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The only form of "DRM" I don't mind are the e-book stores that provide you with a personalised copy that includes my name/e-mail, but otherwise leaves the book unprotected. And that also implies that you give up right of resale. I can sell a physical book after I have it. I can choose to write my name in there... Or not. Having my name plastered as you indicate is OK, means giving up my own guaranteed rights of resa…

is it not the copyright owners right to allow others to resell or not!?

That certainly wasn't the original intent of copyright law, and in most places it wouldn't be the default position. Copyright is normally about controlling the making of new copies, not retaining control over an existing one after sale. The difficulty is that copyright law has been extended in various ways over the years.

Some of those extensions might seem reasonable and in the spirit of the original law. For example, in some places buying a single private copy of a movie on DVD doesn't give you a legal right to show that work, for money, to the general public, even if it's still your physical DVD in the player.

Other extensions in the scope of copyright protection have been much more dubious. For example, just about anything in the digital world tends to be vulnerable to arguments about making copies in a computer's RAM while you're running the software, playing the movie, listening to the song, or whatever it might be. Some horrible law has been made in some places using this kind of argument, even though it's totally distorting the spirit of the original copyright principle since you're only enjoying the copy you lawfully possess and not really making further copies to redistribute to anyone else. Trying to limit resale rights is another hot topic.

Some places have rather more sane laws in these respects, and even some reasonable discussions among the governing and lawyerly classes about how digital works should be handled in the modern age and how to balance the intended protection of creators with the legitimate right for customers to enjoy what they paid for. But there is still a long way to go even in the more enlightened legal environments today, and plenty of first world countries are far behind in their thinking so far.

Re: Lawsuit could be the beginning of the end for DRM

#106
Two blogs deep is the actual lawsuit: [1] Here's the legal theory: "To the extent that Section 1201 forbids circumvention even where such activity would be a noninfringing use (such as a fair use), or facilitates other lawful uses, it undermines the constitutionally required balance between copyright liability and the First Amendment and thereby disturbs the traditional contours of copyright."

As a constitutional claim, that's weak, not being an absolute First Amendment claim. The courts tend to defer to Congress where there's a balancing test. But let's see what happens.

[1] https://www.eff.org/document/1201-complaint

Re: Lawsuit could be the beginning of the end for DRM

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the merit of the DMCA is to curtail incentive to engage in infringement on an industrial scale. But that is not what the law says . It is written in much more broad, general, terms. If they get them to say that in court then it would be a huge step forward.

I'm all for it! I want the law clarified, not completely tossed out. The expression "throwing the baby out with the bath water" is what I somewhat believe to be at play here.

> I want the law clarified, not completely tossed out

I'm honestly fine with either, but yes, either way it's a win.

Re: Lawsuit could be the beginning of the end for DRM

#108
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you might have to do without some things. This is why some of us were making a lot of noise about this problem 20+ years ago, when sending the message that "leasing"/DRM isn't acceptable didn't require a significant sacrifice. Unfortunately everyone - including engineers that should have known better - was more interested in the media industry's shiny baubles than investing their future property rights. So now t…

Well, we had Stallman saying those things for decades, and everyone in tech mocked and ignored him instead.

Stallman does deserve credit for his farsightedness. At the same time, he never provided a realistic alternative (the FSF tithing hardware manufacturers to centrally plan us some Lisp machine bootstrapped on Unix software utopia is not).

Re: Lawsuit could be the beginning of the end for DRM

#109
post #88
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The only form of "DRM" I don't mind are the e-book stores that provide you with a personalised copy that includes my name/e-mail, but otherwise leaves the book unprotected. And that also implies that you give up right of resale. I can sell a physical book after I have it. I can choose to write my name in there... Or not. Having my name plastered as you indicate is OK, means giving up my own guaranteed rights of resa…

is it not the copyright owners right to allow others to resell or not!?

With physical items it most certainly is not on principal a digital item ought to be the same however I don't know how you enable that without drm.

Maybe the inherently absurd situation is best resolved by giving up the absurd notion of artificial scarcity.

Re: Lawsuit could be the beginning of the end for DRM

#110
post #13
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only scenario, in which DRM makes any sense at all, is B2B patronage. Other businesses probably SHOULD license hobbled, encrypted garbage from provider businesses. It's a use case where a collective group of people decide to use a pre-defined set of noises and pictures for some reason or another. But who cares why, and no one on the consumer side of that transaction really owns the media samples directly. The pro…

A lot of this comes down to terminology: the people who are the most upset about DRM are the people who thought they were “buying” something in the same manner as a physical item and are at some point rudely reminded that the company considers it more like a temporary license. Very few people mind services like Netflix or Spotify because it's extremely clear that you're paying for a month of access at a time. I doubt…

Probably nobody would be on board with paying 25-90 to rent a singular work for 5-20 years.
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