DRM: What's your view?

[DoctorMO]

I couldn't agree more. I may use this in the paper, if you don't mind.

I don't mind; DRM is also a way for the producer to enforce their own brand of justice which last time I checked was the preserve of the courts, maffia and corrupt governments. There are no checks, no balances, no judge or jury. instead every judgement is pre-decided by the corporation and then every action taken after that is taken without the ability of appeal.

This is poison to the very nature of the way we as a peoples conduct business. all this bother because it's information services and because once information is out it's can't really be controlled so you have to make people and long standing social structures suffer in order to extort more money.

I have to wonder what they did thousands of years ago when someone figured out a new way to bind axe heads. I wonder if he patented the idea that lead to mankind's extinction in the next winter.

[ssam]

if an artist wants to make up silly rules about under what conditions i can listen to their music then they are every welcome to.

if i write some source code (as i occasionally do) then i can choose some conditions for what people can do with it.

now if you dont agree with the conditions then don't buy the music, download the software.

i find there is a lot of good music with good terms at magnatune.

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there is also the other issue of DRM making it technically impossible to exercise you fair usage rights. thats quite a bad thing.

[Mateo]

I think it is a wildly overblown topic. DRM exists where? iTunes... er I can't even think of any other place where it exists. So why is it talked about so much? Vastly overrated issue, sprung on, in my opinion, by the alarmist tendancy in people.

[DoctorMO]

now if you dont agree with the conditions then don't buy the music, download the software.

That wouldn't be a problem if the artist relied on the law to enforce their stupid rules, because the police don't like enforcing stupid rules.

Look at the GPL, some very odd rules about what you can and can not do with the software, but do we use the software to enforce copyright law? no, we use the courts to enforce copyright law as we should.

[rai4shu2]

DRM is too immature to be feasible. The latest crack to HDDVD was possible because modders could remove a surface-mounted chip from their xbox without too much trouble to the equipment. Now, if Microsoft had rigged the chip with serious anti-tamper devices and self-destruct mechanisms that wouldn't have been hacked so easily.

[JNowka]

Oh one more thing,

4)When looking at Vista, I like to have a fast, stable, reliable system. Not an OS that is going to shut itself down when it gets to paranoid, eat up my memory and cpu cycles, and force me to get the best hardware possible in order to get any performance what so ever.

[reacocard]

I think it is a wildly overblown topic. DRM exists where? iTunes... er I can't even think of any other place where it exists.

It's on most DVDs, in the form of CSS. This is why dvdcss is needed for playing most DVDs under Ubuntu. So, because of DRM, we, normally law-abiding users, must install illegal software to watch our legally purchased DVDs on our legally purchased computers.

[Adamant1988]

DRM is a lot of money being poured into the most fruitless research ever, seriously. Look at it this way:

If I were allowed to share my music with my friends, family, peers on the net, etc. more people might develop the same love for bands like Linkin Park and such that I have. I'm willing to bet that if I spend $30 on a Linkin Park t-shirt both the record label and the band are seeing more money from me than they would have otherwise, if I had only bought the CD. Options exist, and these companies need to be exploring them.


Just IMAGINE what could be done on a freely shareable platform operating system! If you GAVE AWAY the operating system an entire ecosystem can be built on top of that, goods and services can be sold for it, etc. Look at Red Hat, Canonical, and any other Linux distributor. , they GIVE away the operating system. The real question, though, is how money can be made in a DRM free world, or even a Free software world.

I think once a proven model for success in a DRM free world exists, we'll see the need for it, and it's use steadily decline. The companies creating it will either disappear or go elsewhere, hopefully.

[Celegorm]

I am personally against DRM. All it does is inconvenience innocent customers without actually preventing any of the people who really want to pirate from doing so.

Here's one of the more interesting articles I found while looking into DRM: http://preview.baens-universe.com/articles/salvos6

[deepwave]

I share my computer security prof's opinion on DRM: DRM makers are fighting a pointless battle.

It makes no sense from a technical implementation stand point. It makes no sense from a theoretical cryptographic view. And it makes absolutely no sense from an economic stand point.

I would wager, that DRM is the music/film distribution industry of trying to live the physical media and non-sharing days, in an Internet era.