15 ms·

“DRM is Used to Lock in, Control and Spy on Users”

246 points by cheiVia0 10y ago

eveningcoffee 10y ago
Interestingly copyright industry has grown to be one of the greatest enemies of the democracy and freedom of speech. I think that the shame is shared though as too many people started to disrespect the right of the authors to get a fair share for their work. It still does not follow that we should prefer rights of the authors over more general civil rights. If the choice is between authors not getting paid and freedom of expression, or any other more important right, we should choose the last.
- syshum 10y ago
  >>disrespect the right of the authors to get a fair share for their work. Because there is no right or "fair share". Creators have only the right to ask for money for their works, they have no right to compensation at all. Further from an American Legal perspective there is no "choice is between authors not getting paid and freedom of expression" the constitutional reason for copyright, patent and trademark is to promote free expression. That is the sole reason the government was empowered to create copyright law in the first place. to the extent that copyright becomes detrimental to free expression it becomes unconstitutional Copyright does not exist to protect the profitability of Disney no matter how much their lobbyist believe that it does
  - cheiVia0 10y ago
    Have there been any challenges to copyright on constitutional grounds? If not, at what point might that happen?
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - thoughtsimple 10y ago
      Copyright and patents are written into the US Constitution. The wording allows congress to pass laws granting for a limited time exclusive access to their creators. The Supreme Court of the US has held that congress can declare any duration as limited as long as it is not literally forever. There is nothing unconstitutional about copyright law.
    - syshum 10y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Supreme_Court_copyright_case_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Supreme_...
  - eveningcoffee 10y ago
    Because there is no right or "fair share". And there lies the problem, I think. Or perhaps maybe I did not express myself precisely enough. So this is another take. Everyone has right to ask and receive a compensation for their work. Nobody should be forced to work for unfair compensation. I do not know if this is written in your constitution, this is just something in what I believe. I believe that generally the justification for DRM arises from the second sentence. What I expressed was that if the measures used to safeguard this position interfere with other more important rights then we should value more important rights and accept that some work may not be created. We can not force somebody to work for free, but we can accept that some work will not be created. Creators have only the right to ask for money for their works, they have no right to compensation at all. Does this mean that if you do not accept what they ask for their work, you still will have the right to use their work?
    - syshum 10y ago
      >>Everyone has right to ask and receive a compensation for their work. Nobody should be forced to work for unfair compensation Last I check no one is being forced to create movies, music, books, software, or any other creative works. I work in software development. I have had commercial projects fail miserably, I have spent 100's of hours on projects that have earned me $0, why because while I valued them clearly no one else saw enough value in them to provide me with money for them. I have no right to compensation for that labor. I only have the right to ask people to compensate me, if they choose not to then I miscalculated the market.
      - falcolas 10y ago
        > Last I check no one is being forced to create movies, music, books, software, or any other creative works. No, most do it because they think they can make money off it. Movies are expensive to make, and without the expectation of making that money back (or more - its an investment), why would make the movie? Books can take years to write (cough, GRRM), and the authors are frequently paid up front for the book. Would GRRM still be writing ASOIF if he wasn't able to make a living off it? Perhaps, perhaps not. Paying him makes it a lot more likely.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - falcolas 10y ago
    > Creators have only the right to ask for money for their works, they have no right to compensation at all. Similarly, we as consumers have no inherit right to view or use their work without paying the creator's asking price. Nor do we have the right to force the creators to create work. IOW, the only way to really motivate creators to create is to compensate them somehow (money works great). Capitalism at work.
    - syshum 10y ago
      >>we as consumers have no inherit right to view So if I am walking past a home and they happen to be playing a movie I do not own I some how "owe" the created monetary compensation? > use their work without paying the creator's asking price. that depends on how you define use, I do not believe a content creator has the ethical authority to tell me how I can or can not arrange the bits on my computer system, or what order I am allowed to write words on paper I own. I dont believe a creator should be allowed to use government violence or the threat of government violence to prevent me from downloading instructions from a website that directs my computer to store a series of 1 of 0's in a manner that a translation program can then direct my display to light led's in a specific pattern that many brain will recognize and accept as entertainment They have the right to ask me to voluntary give them money in exchange for them recording how the computer should store these 1 and 0's but to make it illegal for me to copy this pattern is where I draw the line.
      - tedunangst 10y ago
        If you walk by my house and you're peeping in my window to watch my movie, I can pull the curtains and you don't have the right to demand I open them.
        syshum 10y ago
        And that has nothing to with if I owe the creator of the movie monetary compensation because of "viewed" the movie
      - falcolas 10y ago
  - imtringued 10y ago
    The problem with the copyright lobbyism is that it affects not just Disney but everyone else. Right now nothing will ever reach the public domain through copyright expiration. It would be okay if copyright law had a short duration like 10 years but a way to extend the copyright term by another 10 years for a flat fee that keeps up with inflation. It doesn't have to be an increasing fee. The point of this fee is to check whether a business can still extract money out of their IP. If they can't then release it to the public domain. If Mickey Mouse is a cash cow that lasts forever then so be it.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  > copyright industry has grown to be one of the greatest enemies of the democracy and freedom of speech And there I don't know if you are talking about the noble trying to stop Illuminism at the beginning of our times, facists (actual ones) trying to stop the press at the beginning of the last century, or about nowadays. Anyway, one could consider it interesting, but hardly surprising. About the modern version, the Trusted Computing Consortium, that is the ones that invented DRM and mostly the ones pushing for it until today (but with the consortium disintegrated) placed in the predicted use cases of their technology self destructing documents before even movies that couldn't be copied. That should be enough to understand what people want DRM for. (It should, but interesting that it was not. People mostly reacted to the idea of self destructing documents as "Of course that won't be used to organize crimes and destroy the evidence! What kind of paranoid are you?" Personally I'm the kind of paranoid person that 20 years later still couldn't discover any other use for self destructing documents - but that's me.)
  - eveningcoffee 10y ago
    One of my fears is that the technology we make would drastically reduce the entry level into a sophisticated organized crime.
- yuhong 10y ago
  I have been thinking of why this happened. I wonder what would have happened if DAT was invented before the record industry consolidated in the 1970s for example.
Fifer82 10y ago
Can't argue with my friend. "If DRM then Warez".
shmerl 10y ago
Indeed it is. But somehow the push to reform DMCA and repeal 1201 isn't strong enough. Why would anyone sensible (besides corrupted control freaks who designed that) not stand against this garbage?
- criddell 10y ago
  I think their argument would be stronger if DRM opponents were more specific when talking about harms. For example, DRM is used to spy on users. The article notes that DRM'd software can maintain a connection with a server and user actions are reported and recorded on the server. They need to go one step further and explain why this is bad and list some of the real damage that has caused. If they don't, it sounds more hypothetical and people just aren't going to get all that bothered by it.
cowardlydragon 10y ago
So many legal lawyers here. If the numerical representation of content can be arbitrarily shifted via encoding, encryption, or masking, how can anything be copyrightable? DRM itself encrypts and morphs the numerical representation, thus obscuring its precise identification.
- anonbanker 10y ago
  ...as opposed to nonlegal lawyers?
- marmshallow 10y ago
  The numerical representation of the content is not what's in question. It's the user-perceived content. Let's say you take the contents of a book, add an extra space between some words, then compress/hash the new contents. The numerical representation could be completely different, but the user-perceived content is the same. Sorry to get all legally lawful on over your ass, but the law of the land (and common sense) dictates that the new contents are still the works of the original author even though the numerical representation is completely different.

246 points by cheiVia0 10y ago

Interestingly copyright industry has grown to be one of the greatest enemies of the democracy and freedom of speech. I think that the shame is shared though as too many people started to disrespect the right of the authors to get a fair share for their work. It still does not follow that we should prefer rights of the authors over more general civil rights. If the choice is between authors not getting paid and freedom of expression, or any other more important right, we should choose the last.

syshum 10y ago
>>disrespect the right of the authors to get a fair share for their work. Because there is no right or "fair share". Creators have only the right to ask for money for their works, they have no right to compensation at all. Further from an American Legal perspective there is no "choice is between authors not getting paid and freedom of expression" the constitutional reason for copyright, patent and trademark is to promote free expression. That is the sole reason the government was empowered to create copyright law in the first place. to the extent that copyright becomes detrimental to free expression it becomes unconstitutional Copyright does not exist to protect the profitability of Disney no matter how much their lobbyist believe that it does
- cheiVia0 10y ago
  Have there been any challenges to copyright on constitutional grounds? If not, at what point might that happen?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - thoughtsimple 10y ago
    Copyright and patents are written into the US Constitution. The wording allows congress to pass laws granting for a limited time exclusive access to their creators. The Supreme Court of the US has held that congress can declare any duration as limited as long as it is not literally forever. There is nothing unconstitutional about copyright law.
  - syshum 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Supreme_Court_copyright_case_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Supreme_...
- eveningcoffee 10y ago
  Because there is no right or "fair share". And there lies the problem, I think. Or perhaps maybe I did not express myself precisely enough. So this is another take. Everyone has right to ask and receive a compensation for their work. Nobody should be forced to work for unfair compensation. I do not know if this is written in your constitution, this is just something in what I believe. I believe that generally the justification for DRM arises from the second sentence. What I expressed was that if the measures used to safeguard this position interfere with other more important rights then we should value more important rights and accept that some work may not be created. We can not force somebody to work for free, but we can accept that some work will not be created. Creators have only the right to ask for money for their works, they have no right to compensation at all. Does this mean that if you do not accept what they ask for their work, you still will have the right to use their work?
  - syshum 10y ago
    >>Everyone has right to ask and receive a compensation for their work. Nobody should be forced to work for unfair compensation Last I check no one is being forced to create movies, music, books, software, or any other creative works. I work in software development. I have had commercial projects fail miserably, I have spent 100's of hours on projects that have earned me $0, why because while I valued them clearly no one else saw enough value in them to provide me with money for them. I have no right to compensation for that labor. I only have the right to ask people to compensate me, if they choose not to then I miscalculated the market.
    - falcolas 10y ago
      > Last I check no one is being forced to create movies, music, books, software, or any other creative works. No, most do it because they think they can make money off it. Movies are expensive to make, and without the expectation of making that money back (or more - its an investment), why would make the movie? Books can take years to write (cough, GRRM), and the authors are frequently paid up front for the book. Would GRRM still be writing ASOIF if he wasn't able to make a living off it? Perhaps, perhaps not. Paying him makes it a lot more likely.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- falcolas 10y ago
  > Creators have only the right to ask for money for their works, they have no right to compensation at all. Similarly, we as consumers have no inherit right to view or use their work without paying the creator's asking price. Nor do we have the right to force the creators to create work. IOW, the only way to really motivate creators to create is to compensate them somehow (money works great). Capitalism at work.
  - syshum 10y ago
    >>we as consumers have no inherit right to view So if I am walking past a home and they happen to be playing a movie I do not own I some how "owe" the created monetary compensation? > use their work without paying the creator's asking price. that depends on how you define use, I do not believe a content creator has the ethical authority to tell me how I can or can not arrange the bits on my computer system, or what order I am allowed to write words on paper I own. I dont believe a creator should be allowed to use government violence or the threat of government violence to prevent me from downloading instructions from a website that directs my computer to store a series of 1 of 0's in a manner that a translation program can then direct my display to light led's in a specific pattern that many brain will recognize and accept as entertainment They have the right to ask me to voluntary give them money in exchange for them recording how the computer should store these 1 and 0's but to make it illegal for me to copy this pattern is where I draw the line.
    - tedunangst 10y ago
      If you walk by my house and you're peeping in my window to watch my movie, I can pull the curtains and you don't have the right to demand I open them.
      - syshum 10y ago
        And that has nothing to with if I owe the creator of the movie monetary compensation because of "viewed" the movie
    - falcolas 10y ago
- imtringued 10y ago
  The problem with the copyright lobbyism is that it affects not just Disney but everyone else. Right now nothing will ever reach the public domain through copyright expiration. It would be okay if copyright law had a short duration like 10 years but a way to extend the copyright term by another 10 years for a flat fee that keeps up with inflation. It doesn't have to be an increasing fee. The point of this fee is to check whether a business can still extract money out of their IP. If they can't then release it to the public domain. If Mickey Mouse is a cash cow that lasts forever then so be it.
marcosdumay 10y ago
> copyright industry has grown to be one of the greatest enemies of the democracy and freedom of speech And there I don't know if you are talking about the noble trying to stop Illuminism at the beginning of our times, facists (actual ones) trying to stop the press at the beginning of the last century, or about nowadays. Anyway, one could consider it interesting, but hardly surprising. About the modern version, the Trusted Computing Consortium, that is the ones that invented DRM and mostly the ones pushing for it until today (but with the consortium disintegrated) placed in the predicted use cases of their technology self destructing documents before even movies that couldn't be copied. That should be enough to understand what people want DRM for. (It should, but interesting that it was not. People mostly reacted to the idea of self destructing documents as "Of course that won't be used to organize crimes and destroy the evidence! What kind of paranoid are you?" Personally I'm the kind of paranoid person that 20 years later still couldn't discover any other use for self destructing documents - but that's me.)
- eveningcoffee 10y ago
  One of my fears is that the technology we make would drastically reduce the entry level into a sophisticated organized crime.
yuhong 10y ago
I have been thinking of why this happened. I wonder what would have happened if DAT was invented before the record industry consolidated in the 1970s for example.

Fifer82 10y ago

Can't argue with my friend. "If DRM then Warez".

shmerl 10y ago

Indeed it is. But somehow the push to reform DMCA and repeal 1201 isn't strong enough. Why would anyone sensible (besides corrupted control freaks who designed that) not stand against this garbage?

criddell 10y ago
I think their argument would be stronger if DRM opponents were more specific when talking about harms. For example, DRM is used to spy on users. The article notes that DRM'd software can maintain a connection with a server and user actions are reported and recorded on the server. They need to go one step further and explain why this is bad and list some of the real damage that has caused. If they don't, it sounds more hypothetical and people just aren't going to get all that bothered by it.

cowardlydragon 10y ago

So many legal lawyers here. If the numerical representation of content can be arbitrarily shifted via encoding, encryption, or masking, how can anything be copyrightable? DRM itself encrypts and morphs the numerical representation, thus obscuring its precise identification.

anonbanker 10y ago
...as opposed to nonlegal lawyers?
marmshallow 10y ago
The numerical representation of the content is not what's in question. It's the user-perceived content. Let's say you take the contents of a book, add an extra space between some words, then compress/hash the new contents. The numerical representation could be completely different, but the user-perceived content is the same. Sorry to get all legally lawful on over your ass, but the law of the land (and common sense) dictates that the new contents are still the works of the original author even though the numerical representation is completely different.