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DRM Is Toxic to Culture

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Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#41

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

skywhopper wrote: post #26

I would say that DRM is merely an inevitable outgrowth of our society's enshrinement and worship of the idea of "intellectual property". That word, "property", gives the opposite connotations of "copyright"--permanent rightful ownership vs a temporary grant of monopoly on an idea. But yes, it's definitely the case that the cultural idea that humans and corporations have the right to own a copyright for a length of ti…

And the really weird part is that while the propaganda puts it as "protecting property", it really has exactly the opposite effect. When you buy a physical book, that book is indeed your property, and you can do with it whatever you want. Now, with DRM-infested ebooks, you are actually just licensing it for very restricted use.

You might as well be claiming that making private home ownership illegal would strengthen property rights.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#42

Post by ivanbakel »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #36
skywhopper wrote: post #26

I would say that DRM is merely an inevitable outgrowth of our society's enshrinement and worship of the idea of "intellectual property". That word, "property", gives the opposite connotations of "copyright"--permanent rightful ownership vs a temporary grant of monopoly on an idea. But yes, it's definitely the case that the cultural idea that humans and corporations have the right to own a copyright for a length of ti…

> I would say that DRM is merely an inevitable outgrowth of our society's enshrinement and worship of the idea of "intellectual property". If intellectual property rights cease to exist, then there's no longer any legal basis to enforce the GPL and similar licenses and the Free Software ecosystem would collapse. Are you sure you want that? EDIT: Replaced "open source" with "Free Software". My thanks to other posters…

Would there even still be a need for it? Releasing code without the approval of your managers would stop being a crime, and it's not like most people are only releasing free software because of licenses in the first place.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#43

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #36
skywhopper wrote: post #26

I would say that DRM is merely an inevitable outgrowth of our society's enshrinement and worship of the idea of "intellectual property". That word, "property", gives the opposite connotations of "copyright"--permanent rightful ownership vs a temporary grant of monopoly on an idea. But yes, it's definitely the case that the cultural idea that humans and corporations have the right to own a copyright for a length of ti…

> I would say that DRM is merely an inevitable outgrowth of our society's enshrinement and worship of the idea of "intellectual property". If intellectual property rights cease to exist, then there's no longer any legal basis to enforce the GPL and similar licenses and the Free Software ecosystem would collapse. Are you sure you want that? EDIT: Replaced "open source" with "Free Software". My thanks to other posters…

Yeah, obviously, the whole open source ecosystem would collapse because BSD licensed software could now also incorporate GPL code into their code base ... WAT?

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#44

Post by panic »

izacus wrote: post #11
makecheck wrote: post #7

DRM and advertising tech have a similar problem of bad execution. Sure, there exists a way to do each of these that many may consider "reasonable" but in practice industries have shown that they would rather be obnoxious and make everything annoying or just much more difficult than necessary. This means they can't be trusted to do it well, and the solution must be to avoid it completely (DRM-free content and ad block…

I don't get this - why is DRM is friggning' NECESSARY? What makes it this forced law of nature? The current multi-billion media conglomerates grew at times when being able to copy a piece of content from TV was encoded in the LAW. Content providers earned billions of dollars at times when you could press REC on your VCR and ("THE HORROR" now every content provider shill screams) rewatch the show many times and ( GASP…

Music downloads are largely DRM-free these days, but piracy is still as low as ever. It really is just powerful media companies abusing their power to make a little more money.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#45

Post by _jal »

coldtea wrote: post #29
_jal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to be fair, the VCR didn't have a distribution system attached that allows sharing worldwide. I still agree with you, though; times change, and nobody "deserves" business-model protection. The legacy copyright industries already get massive state subsidies through the legal enforcement of artificial monopolies - degrading everyone's computing to prop them up further is insane.

> I still agree with you, though; times change, and nobody "deserves" business-model protection. Is that true though? Because laws against theft (physical theft of actual products I mean, let's not get into whether "copying" is theft here) are a business-model protection too. As are most business laws (e.g. contract law). Why pay at a restaurant when you can just walk out and run for it? Isn't making it illegal a "bu…

Laws against theft, contract enforcement, etc. are general laws for the benefit of everyone. (They also derive from common law, which dates back over a thousand years, as opposed to statutory laws that are routinely bought by lobbying, but let's put that aside.) They are a sort of 'legal primitive' - don't cheat, don't steal - that attempt to provide a baseline of trust in society.

Mandates that computers must respect special rules based on legal definitions are laws that tell me how my machines must operate and how you must build machines. They are arbitrary restrictions the degrade capabilities (make the machines less valuable) solely for the purpose of enabling a few industries to be lazy and not figure out how to be relevant in a changing world.

If you want to go down that path, you're going to be "picking winners and losers" - something I hear we are supposed to dislike. Which business models "deserve" protections?

- Do long-haul truckers "deserve" to keep working in the face of self-driving trucks?

- Do corner groceries "deserve" protection from Whole Foods/Amazon or Walmart's logistics innovations?

> So what makes some business models [...] more protectable?

As a descriptive matter, it appears that that's closely related to one's investment in lobbying.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#46

Post by izacus »

coldtea wrote: post #29
_jal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to be fair, the VCR didn't have a distribution system attached that allows sharing worldwide. I still agree with you, though; times change, and nobody "deserves" business-model protection. The legacy copyright industries already get massive state subsidies through the legal enforcement of artificial monopolies - degrading everyone's computing to prop them up further is insane.

> I still agree with you, though; times change, and nobody "deserves" business-model protection. Is that true though? Because laws against theft (physical theft of actual products I mean, let's not get into whether "copying" is theft here) are a business-model protection too. As are most business laws (e.g. contract law). Why pay at a restaurant when you can just walk out and run for it? Isn't making it illegal a "bu…

You're making false comparison here. DRM is extremely invasive - it's akin to being forced to wear handcuffs inside a store to prevent theft, or perhaps being strip searched every time you walk past a store. Both of those actions can also be sold as "business protection against theft", but our legal framework currently says that we're ready to tolerate some amount of shoplifting and we're not going to allow stores to strip people naked at the exit to check for stolen goods. The profit fallout of shoplifting is just too small to allow for such egregious attacks on legitimate customers.

Same story with DRM - yes, piracy IS illegal. But DRM as a response is hugely disproportionate to damage done, causes huge issues to LEGITIMATE buyers. What DRM proponents defend is attacking paying customers with restrictions, lockdowns and costs to hunt a rather small profit loss (the relative smallness of lost sales due to piracy have been repeatedly demonstrated in these last years).

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#47

Post by Retric »

jws wrote: post #23
izacus wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get this - why is DRM is friggning' NECESSARY? What makes it this forced law of nature? The current multi-billion media conglomerates grew at times when being able to copy a piece of content from TV was encoded in the LAW. Content providers earned billions of dollars at times when you could press REC on your VCR and ("THE HORROR" now every content provider shill screams) rewatch the show many times and ( GASP…

press REC on your VCR and … make a worse copy of the already pretty bad copy you received over the air. Subsequent generation copies would be really bad. Sharing your copy with a friend involved physically transferring it and possibly not getting it back. It really isn't comparable to a directly copyable digital form. If you like the 1970s way, prop your phone up on a table and use the camera to record a movie off of…

VCR's where generally better recordings than the 'cam' footage of the latest blockbuster leaked on the internet. People sometimes are watching films before the special effects are done.

The core issue is if a company can make 501 million instead of 500 million they have zero incentives to make less money. Which is why cable companies scrimp on backhaul even when it's a rounding error on their costs. And why companies are so focused on DRM etc.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#48

Post by izacus »

eastWestMath wrote: post #37
izacus wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get this - why is DRM is friggning' NECESSARY? What makes it this forced law of nature? The current multi-billion media conglomerates grew at times when being able to copy a piece of content from TV was encoded in the LAW. Content providers earned billions of dollars at times when you could press REC on your VCR and ("THE HORROR" now every content provider shill screams) rewatch the show many times and ( GASP…

There's a huge difference between lending your friend a VHS and uploading a torrent. And the idea of owning a license to a piece of intellectual property shouldn't be a hard thing to wrap one's head around if you work in software.

I can wrap my mind around idea of licensing just fine. That in no way means I agree with current one-sided state of affairs in copyright law.

I also don't see why did you bring torrenting into the debate - do you consider me sharing am movie to my friend from my iPad to his a crime? Is that the same as torrenting? Or why am I prevented from doing that due to DRM?

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#49

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #34
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What exactly was so horrible at being able to rewatch, store and borrow a movie to a friend that now seems to completely incomprehensible to people here on HN and outside? You're forgetting that VCRs and other analog tape-based media had generational losses; every copy made degraded the quality noticeably and put wear on the tape which, from the studios' perspective, kept copying under control. That isn't so for di…

> Beyond that, one can't be against DRM and for GPL enforcement at the same time and remain logically consistent. One can absolutely do that. Technical restraints and legal remedies are not the same thing, and it's completely consistent to say that DRM should be unavailable to both proprietary and free works while legal remedies should be available to both.

> Technical restraints and legal remedies are not the same thing, and it's completely consistent to say that DRM should be unavailable to both proprietary and free works while legal remedies should be available to both.

"legal remedies should be available to both" was tried for media; that was the era where the studios were suing individuals for copyright violations. Needless to say, that proved to be impractical for a variety of reasons.

Unless your intent is to draft laws that specifically don't work for causes you don't like and works only for causes you do, i.e. negotiating in bad faith, you're going to have to admit that the existence of IP rights implies that that other IP rightsholders are permitted to build some mechanism that works to enforce their rights.

And, again, note I'm not defending DRM. I find it just as annoying and inconvenient as everyone else.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#50

Post by mhluongo »

AlphaWeaver wrote: post #40
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would say that DRM is merely an inevitable outgrowth of our society's enshrinement and worship of the idea of "intellectual property". If intellectual property rights cease to exist, then there's no longer any legal basis to enforce the GPL and similar licenses and the Free Software ecosystem would collapse. Are you sure you want that? EDIT: Replaced "open source" with "Free Software". My thanks to other posters…

If intellectual property rights ceased to exist, we wouldn't have a need for the GPL, wouldn't we?

Copyleft virality requires IP enforcement. Doing away with IP doesn't necessarily imply a world where everyone wants to share publicly
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