DRM Is Toxic to Culture

There is a vast qualitative difference between the output of ten thousand amateurs and one highly trained and exceptionally talented artist (working in whatever medium.)

This an immensely unfashionable idea. But the real problem with DRM isn't that it does or does not enable copying, but that it presupposes that artistic output is a commodity that can be copied.

In fact artistic output - considered as the cultural influence of an entire career, and not as a series of copyable files or performances - is not fungible.

Not all content creators are equal. If you want quality as opposed to quantity, you need to set up a feedback function that makes some effort to reward and support quality, based on a more sophisticated metric than a lowest-common-denominator unit sales count in a mass market.

This is even more true of science. Ten thousand PhDs do not add up to one Newton or Einstein.

And politics. Ten thousand mediocre politicians do not add up to one Nelson Mandela or Gandhi.

By the time everyone is having the DRM or no-DRM argument they've already missed the point - which is that commodifying cultural output as "content" for industrial distribution mechanisms (including live tours) is to misunderstand how culture propagates and evolves.

And if you can't invent a system that finds and rewards talent - without reducing every transaction to the vapid foolishness of markets - then your culture, science, politics, art, and general joy in invention will stagnate and eventually disappear.

DRM is barely a footnote here. It's nowhere close to being the main problem.

A neighborhood library lending books out to people, under this DRM-mentality scheme, would be illegal, because everyone should have to buy their own copy of the books, not borrow from others.

How did the libraries get by this? Do they agree with the publisher to pay a premium price for the book, seeing as they'll lend it out? Or were the publishers OK with this model because it meant more exposure of their content to users, who may in turn want to own their own copy?

Those DMCA takedowns, for example, need to be processed by hosting platforms and ISPs, so they have to pay people for doing so, and that's then necessarily part of the price that you pay for ISP service, or that, I dunno, youtube video makers get less revenue from their videos.

Just because the state doesn't spend tax money on it, doesn't mean it doesn't consume public resources.

And much more insidious are the opportunity costs, because they are more or less invisible: For example, the DMCA makes it a criminal offense to circumvent any technology that was intended to "protect copyright" or something to that effect. Now, there might be the opportunity for who knows what kind of technical innovation if that wasn't illegal. People could possibly build all kinds of nifty devices that allow you to use media in new ways or circumstances that would be perfectly legal as far as copyright is concerned--but people don't because that would be criminal. How much value for society is thus not created as a side effect of this ban? That value is also part of what we spend on enforcing copyright.

Or how about security holes in DRM software? As it's illegal to reverse-engineer DRM software, security researchers don't touch DRM software. But essentially all software that security researchers have ever looked at does have vulnerabilities. So, who knows how many people have been hacked via vulnerabilities in DRM software? How many people's data was stolen that way? Maybe people were the victim of identity theft due to vulnerabilities in DRM software? All of that also would be part of the resources that we spend on this.

Or what about when John Deere holds the data hostage that the tractors that they supposedly sold to farmers collects? And people aren't even allowed to swap out the tractor's software for their own due to DRM and the above criminalization of circumventing it?

You have to consider all the negative consequences that the existence of those rules has, because that all comes out of our collective wealth in order to prop up their business model.