DRM [Was: Torvolds on GPLv3]

[Mark Newton]

Adam Hawes wrote:

>> You think there are only two outcomes worth discussing:
> 
> That is because there ARE only two outcomes worth discussing.  Sure, your 
> intentions might be noble but at the end of the day not everyone is noble.

Why should that impact *my* ability to achieve *my* intentions?

> There exists corporations (*IAA, anyone) who would prefer to see the second 
> of your two scenarios as common place.  If everything is non-free they can
> force people to pay for even the most basic of things.

No they can't.  People who don't want to pay will use BitTorrent
instead, just like they always have.

You are coming at this with the misplaced belief that the *IA's are
monopolies on commercial content.  They aren't.  They share an ecosystem
with copyright infringers.  And they've spent most of the last five years
engaged in a big social experiment which has shown them that the more
restrictive they get, the more they drive people towards infringement.
The entertainment industry *knows* this, even if their public statements
make them look like they're in dumbfounded denial.

> Imagine paying $30 for a MP3 download of a CD and then having to pay every
> time you wanted to play it?

Why should I imagine something which simply will not happen?

If a label releases music under those terms, nobody will buy it.
They'll download the CD from somewhere illegal instead.  The label
will consequently lose money, and change their business practices
to increase their profitability next time.

Your horribly dystopian vision of the future is the modern version of
one of those 1950's picturebooks where all the year-2000 people are
flying around town in their nuclear-powered Jetsons air-cars to get
to a restaurant where they'll all sit down to eat food-pills.  It just
isn't going to happen.

> I accept that some of the examples you presented are perfectly valid, but at 
> the end of the day you have to accept that anything other than the first 
> scenario above brings with it the ability to easily move to the second.

So what?  The internal combustion engine is the enabling technology
which permits us to have a road death toll.  With or without DRM,
computers are the enabling technology which allows cruise missiles to
demolish hospitals in the middle east.  Every technology has uses
and misuses, but the technology itself is ethically neutral.  You can't
block a useful technology just because some dickhead somewhere might
misuse it.

   - mark

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I tried an internal modem,                    newton at atdot.dotat.org
      but it hurt when I walked.                          Mark Newton
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