DRM Is Toxic to Culture

If you only used fingerprinting/watermarking instead of DRM, you could very well imagine an alternate model where creators are rewarded, and can find an audience a bit better, piracy is kept to a minimum, and culture is better off. There will still be sites like solarmovie, popcorntime, and perhaps some rental revenue will be lost because it will be easier to watch my neighbor or friends copy that he downloaded and walked over to my place with, but no one will be able to share it widely on youtube with anyone's fingerprint/watermark. The upside to culture? Anyone is free to edit/mix/use/peruse their fingerprinted/watermarked copy that they bought/rented. Unlike the consume-only model of the current Netflix/Amazon/Hulu/CBS/etc..

This is a long-term choice that I think both creators and consumers can make, but it probably won't happen as long as AT&T can make money off selling 4K copies of all Time Warner movies again, and as long as Disney never lets the copyright on Mickey Mouse expire. Copyright also has an important part to play in culture.

Maybe just send a tip to the authors directly?

If this were true in media, Mickey Mouse wouldn't still be copyrighted. DRM is recent, very recent, compared to analog media. It seems like the industry binged on copyright a little too much and by the time digital distribution came around, instead of using it to develop new talent and audiences, they decided to lock everything down with DRM. Must protect our copyrights! Prevent theft! Nevermind that DRM is mostly an added cost for the consumer, in exchange for no benefit, and the profits all seem to flow upwards regardless.

Social media is much better, and the cultural pay-off is much better in that what I create isn't being locked down and is available through APIs. Have you followed a twitter hashtag recently? People are as creative as ever. This does have it's own challenges as we saw in the last election. No substitutes for media literacy and good content...

> Also, you yourself haven't made an argument that DRM is anywhere near as bad a problem as slavery was.

This judgment was made with perfect hindsight in one case, and no hindsight in the other, so the conclusion is immediately suspect.

Like I said, consider the worst possible nightmare for DRM, and then judge whether the comparison is actually fair.

Finally, whether RMS is the best source on it is itself a red herring. If he makes a reasonable case for a nightmare outcome, his perspective is absolutely worth considering when weighing the pros and cons of DRM, regardless of how absolutist you think he is.

> No.

But?

> You sure know a lot about me. Oh wait, no you don't. I do my best to question things, which is all you can ask.

Which is besides the point. Whether it's all I can ask or not, it doesn't give you a useful answer. And yes, I am pretty sure I know about you that you are a human being, and therefore, general human psychology most likely applies, nothing more, nothing less.

Have you ever asked yourself whether it is a good compromise that your left thumb has not been removed when you were a child because of your hair color?

You haven't, right?

You haven't because it's just a completely crazy idea that there would never be any reason for you to consider it. One of presumably at the very least millions of equally crazy ideas that you could make up that you have never thought of, because, why would you? That is, except for the completely crazy idea that one should remove part of the genitals of children because of their gender. You probably have thought about that one, right?

And that is my point: The things that you have thought about are in no way a meaningfully representative sample of the set of all facts about how society operates, simply as a result of basic human psychology.

> Yes, lots of terrible things happen when you argue in bad faith. This isn't even the worst one.

Yeah, it's even worse when people reject arguments as "absolutist", you can't really get much more bad faith than that.

> Not much, which is another good reason not to bring up slavery. It's not relevant, which is basically all I was trying to say about it.

Well, except it is. That is, not slavery itself is relevant, but what is relevant is the way how people thought and argued about slavery before it became the consensus that slavery is bad. And if you agree that they were wrong about slavery being a good thing, then maybe it would be a good idea to understand how their thinking went wrong at the time. To understand how they convinced themselves that slavery was the right thing to do. Because if the method of reasoning that they used lead them to the conclusion that slavery was a good idea, then that probably means that their method of reasoning was unreliable, right?

So, if we can understand how they arrived at their conclusion, we can maybe use that understanding to see whether there are any conclusions that we arrive at today using the same kind of reasoning, and to then examine whether those conclusions maybe are also unreliable, and possibly wrong.

Whether slavery was in any way comparable to whatever conclusion we are examining now is completely irrelevant to this. The point is not to determine whether something is as bad as slavery. The point is to determine whether the method we use to conclude that something is right is the same that people used to conlude that slavery was right. And the reason why slavery is used as the reference for this is not because it was terrible, the reason is that it's something that is familiar. People nowadays generally have some understanding of how people back then justified slavery. Noone knows how the unfair distribution of bread in the year 1537 in some spanish village was justified, so it's a useless reference point, even if it might be a closer analogue to whatever we are discussing now.