8 ms·

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",

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 time greater than the duration of any human life means that for 99.99% of all works, the effective duration of copyright truly is forever, which reinforces the idea that copyright should be forever. And if it's forever and it's "property" why shouldn't strong, user-hostile DRM exist? It's the barbed-wire, severe-tire-damage, border-wall of electronic media.

ThrowawayR2 9y ago
> 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 for the correction. Yes, BSD-style open source would still survive.
- AlphaWeaver 9y ago
  If intellectual property rights ceased to exist, we wouldn't have a need for the GPL, wouldn't we?
  - mhluongo 9y ago
    Copyleft virality requires IP enforcement. Doing away with IP doesn't necessarily imply a world where everyone wants to share publicly
    - 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
      In practical terms, copyright-free software would be "viral": you would be free to redistribute under the same (lack of) terms that you received the software under. There would be no mechanism for things like tying source to binaries or the anti-Tivoization terms, but those aren't defining aspects of copyleft. I'm not sure what "share publicly" has to do with anything. GPL doesn't apply until you do share the software, and even then doesn't require you to do anything publicly.
  - klez 9y ago
    I've been giving some thought about this recently. I'd say that, at least for software, we'd still need the GPL and, therefore, copyright. Which clashes a bit with my anti-copyright sentiments, but whatever. Why is this? Because software is different from literature and visual arts. In a copyright-free world, once you copy a work of literature you have the whole work at your disposal to copy, modify and redistribute however you see fit. For music it's a bit different because you may need to reverse-engineer the music sheet, for example, but there's a lot you can do with just the recording of a piece of music. With software, the only thing you could do is copying it, or try and modify the binary, because you still don't have the source code. Sure, you can reverse-engineer it (which is already legal in some situations in certain jurisdictions), but the software wouldn't be free in today's understanding of what many consider free software (i.e., software that respects the four freedoms outlined by the fsf). This means, you get your copy of, e.g., AutoCAD, but it would still be hard for you to modify it, because, despite the absence of copyright, you'd still have no way of getting source code to work on (unless someone leaks it). So I'd say that, at least, absence of copyright wouldn't help with software. It will just create a situation where those who want to incorporate your source code into their products without publishing their source code will be able to do just that, and you'd have no recourse.
    - AlphaWeaver 9y ago
      Great response! I didn't think about that!
    - stale2002 9y ago
      Them make it illegal to sell software without publishing the source code.
      - zanny 9y ago
        Without copyright, this concept actually has traditional grounding in right to repair laws. Not distributing the source code of software is the exact same battle that has been fought for decades between machine manufacturers trying to deny access to documentation about how their machines work. You can have a right to repair legal system wholly independent of copyright.
  - emondi 9y ago
    This is an interesting analysis of software freedom without copyright http://culturalliberty.org/blog/index.php?id=278 http://culturalliberty.org/blog/index.php?id=278 Basically GPL would not be needed to restore a freedom which would no longer be restricted.
- ivanbakel 9y ago
  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.
  - RandomOpinion 9y ago
    Businesses could prevent that by requiring employees to agree to a separate, permanent contract not to release any code as part of the conditions for being hired.
    - jasonkostempski 9y ago
      And they could all refuse to sign, or demand a much higher salary, due the high risk of that contract easily being broken by accident. 1 stolen unencrypted laptop, or source control checkout over an unencrypted channel, is all it would take.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        And they could all refuse to sign, or demand a much higher salary Right. And you can already refuse to accept a job if all the code you produce isn't open sourced. Good luck with that on most companies, though.
      - thomastjeffery 9y ago
        That isn't any different from the current situation.
        jasonkostempski 9y ago
        It is different because it's currently a crime by default. If someone wants to add to my contract that saying "riboflavin" out loud can get me fired and sued for damages, I'm gonna want a ton of extra money to cover the ubsurd risk.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  Yeah, obviously, the whole open source ecosystem would collapse because BSD licensed software could now also incorporate GPL code into their code base ... WAT?
- samastur 9y ago
  Free software might collapse, but open source certainly would not especially since so much of it is under MIT and similar licenses which already allow anyone to do pretty much whatever with that code.
  - zanny 9y ago
    Free software would not go anywhere. The only difference is, without a right to repair law for software in a post-IP world, people writing software may or may not choose to withhold source code. But the trick is anyone who ever gets that source code can (unless under an NDA or contract not to) distribute it all they want. And the receivers of software will be able to distribute it however they want. The profit motive of artificial scarcity goes away, and if you try to use your holding of the source hostage as a way to keep users dependent on you all it takes is one leak to end your monopoly. That being said, right to repair goes hand in hand with the abolition of IP to resolve these edge cases. The problem of not providing the manual to your distributed invention goes far beyond just intellectual property, and is largely an independent issue, but good right to repair legislation is all encompassing, and is a consumer protection that naturally fits with IP-less software as well.
    - RandomOpinion 9y ago
      > ...all it takes is one leak to end your monopoly I don't know about that. Most significant software packages require ongoing maintenance (bug fixes, security patches, compatibility with other software) and add new features over time. A one-time leak certainly would be damaging but not necessarily fatal since most businesses want to have assured support and upgrades.
      - pille 9y ago
        > most businesses want to have assured support and upgrades. And not to get sued into the ground.
      - zanny 9y ago
        The difference is that before the leak only one entity could provide the support. After the leak, anyone can. Prices would adapt to the reality, and the original vendor would have a hard time demanding the rates they are used to when suddenly faced with competition. Especially competition that kept changes open, which instills more confidence in consumers of the software.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
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.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Indeed it would, for the parties that would argue this. In business, property rights seem to be seen primarily, if not only, as a money-making asset - if you own something then you can license it and thus make money from it. It works well for media companies, which is why I feel their primary business is moving property rights and licenses around, with any end-user benefit being a side effect.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    Yeah, sure ... but the weird part is that they use that in their propaganda, and successfully so, it seems. Totally would make sense in their internal communication on the matter of course.
- type0 9y ago
  The physical book comparison is interesting. Imagine there would be a way to publish physical books with DRM that all publishers would embrace. You open such a book without authorization and it's all gibberish. To read it you would need to have bought a special strip that you lay over the pages in order to read (don't matter the technical aspect, it's gedanken-experiment so let's consider such a strip magic for now). You buy this strip and enter a user agreement to only use it for yourself (you are not allowed to lend it - even to your children), it could easily be reverse-engineered but no-one would do it because that would be a felony. No sane person would agree to such state of affairs but somehow now because our books are digital it's all off a sudden okay with almost everyone?
  - 9y ago
zokier 9y ago
>That word, "property", gives the opposite connotations of "copyright"--permanent rightful ownership vs a temporary grant of monopoly on an idea. I'd point out that generally copyright protects only executions of an idea, not the idea itself. This is pretty much on what for example the existence of GNU and Linux hinge on; they implement the idea of UNIX despite AT&T claiming copyright on UNIX. Patents, on the other hand, do extend to ideas, and are completely different story.

ThrowawayR2 9y ago

> 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 for the correction. Yes, BSD-style open source would still survive.

AlphaWeaver 9y ago
If intellectual property rights ceased to exist, we wouldn't have a need for the GPL, wouldn't we?
- mhluongo 9y ago
  Copyleft virality requires IP enforcement. Doing away with IP doesn't necessarily imply a world where everyone wants to share publicly
  - 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
    In practical terms, copyright-free software would be "viral": you would be free to redistribute under the same (lack of) terms that you received the software under. There would be no mechanism for things like tying source to binaries or the anti-Tivoization terms, but those aren't defining aspects of copyleft. I'm not sure what "share publicly" has to do with anything. GPL doesn't apply until you do share the software, and even then doesn't require you to do anything publicly.
- klez 9y ago
  I've been giving some thought about this recently. I'd say that, at least for software, we'd still need the GPL and, therefore, copyright. Which clashes a bit with my anti-copyright sentiments, but whatever. Why is this? Because software is different from literature and visual arts. In a copyright-free world, once you copy a work of literature you have the whole work at your disposal to copy, modify and redistribute however you see fit. For music it's a bit different because you may need to reverse-engineer the music sheet, for example, but there's a lot you can do with just the recording of a piece of music. With software, the only thing you could do is copying it, or try and modify the binary, because you still don't have the source code. Sure, you can reverse-engineer it (which is already legal in some situations in certain jurisdictions), but the software wouldn't be free in today's understanding of what many consider free software (i.e., software that respects the four freedoms outlined by the fsf). This means, you get your copy of, e.g., AutoCAD, but it would still be hard for you to modify it, because, despite the absence of copyright, you'd still have no way of getting source code to work on (unless someone leaks it). So I'd say that, at least, absence of copyright wouldn't help with software. It will just create a situation where those who want to incorporate your source code into their products without publishing their source code will be able to do just that, and you'd have no recourse.
  - AlphaWeaver 9y ago
    Great response! I didn't think about that!
  - stale2002 9y ago
    Them make it illegal to sell software without publishing the source code.
    - zanny 9y ago
      Without copyright, this concept actually has traditional grounding in right to repair laws. Not distributing the source code of software is the exact same battle that has been fought for decades between machine manufacturers trying to deny access to documentation about how their machines work. You can have a right to repair legal system wholly independent of copyright.
- emondi 9y ago
  This is an interesting analysis of software freedom without copyright http://culturalliberty.org/blog/index.php?id=278 http://culturalliberty.org/blog/index.php?id=278 Basically GPL would not be needed to restore a freedom which would no longer be restricted.
ivanbakel 9y ago
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.
- RandomOpinion 9y ago
  Businesses could prevent that by requiring employees to agree to a separate, permanent contract not to release any code as part of the conditions for being hired.
  - jasonkostempski 9y ago
    And they could all refuse to sign, or demand a much higher salary, due the high risk of that contract easily being broken by accident. 1 stolen unencrypted laptop, or source control checkout over an unencrypted channel, is all it would take.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      And they could all refuse to sign, or demand a much higher salary Right. And you can already refuse to accept a job if all the code you produce isn't open sourced. Good luck with that on most companies, though.
    - thomastjeffery 9y ago
      That isn't any different from the current situation.
      - jasonkostempski 9y ago
        It is different because it's currently a crime by default. If someone wants to add to my contract that saying "riboflavin" out loud can get me fired and sued for damages, I'm gonna want a ton of extra money to cover the ubsurd risk.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
Yeah, obviously, the whole open source ecosystem would collapse because BSD licensed software could now also incorporate GPL code into their code base ... WAT?
samastur 9y ago
Free software might collapse, but open source certainly would not especially since so much of it is under MIT and similar licenses which already allow anyone to do pretty much whatever with that code.
- zanny 9y ago
  Free software would not go anywhere. The only difference is, without a right to repair law for software in a post-IP world, people writing software may or may not choose to withhold source code. But the trick is anyone who ever gets that source code can (unless under an NDA or contract not to) distribute it all they want. And the receivers of software will be able to distribute it however they want. The profit motive of artificial scarcity goes away, and if you try to use your holding of the source hostage as a way to keep users dependent on you all it takes is one leak to end your monopoly. That being said, right to repair goes hand in hand with the abolition of IP to resolve these edge cases. The problem of not providing the manual to your distributed invention goes far beyond just intellectual property, and is largely an independent issue, but good right to repair legislation is all encompassing, and is a consumer protection that naturally fits with IP-less software as well.
  - RandomOpinion 9y ago
    > ...all it takes is one leak to end your monopoly I don't know about that. Most significant software packages require ongoing maintenance (bug fixes, security patches, compatibility with other software) and add new features over time. A one-time leak certainly would be damaging but not necessarily fatal since most businesses want to have assured support and upgrades.
    - pille 9y ago
      > most businesses want to have assured support and upgrades. And not to get sued into the ground.
    - zanny 9y ago
      The difference is that before the leak only one entity could provide the support. After the leak, anyone can. Prices would adapt to the reality, and the original vendor would have a hard time demanding the rates they are used to when suddenly faced with competition. Especially competition that kept changes open, which instills more confidence in consumers of the software.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago

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.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
Indeed it would, for the parties that would argue this. In business, property rights seem to be seen primarily, if not only, as a money-making asset - if you own something then you can license it and thus make money from it. It works well for media companies, which is why I feel their primary business is moving property rights and licenses around, with any end-user benefit being a side effect.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  Yeah, sure ... but the weird part is that they use that in their propaganda, and successfully so, it seems. Totally would make sense in their internal communication on the matter of course.
type0 9y ago
The physical book comparison is interesting. Imagine there would be a way to publish physical books with DRM that all publishers would embrace. You open such a book without authorization and it's all gibberish. To read it you would need to have bought a special strip that you lay over the pages in order to read (don't matter the technical aspect, it's gedanken-experiment so let's consider such a strip magic for now). You buy this strip and enter a user agreement to only use it for yourself (you are not allowed to lend it - even to your children), it could easily be reverse-engineered but no-one would do it because that would be a felony. No sane person would agree to such state of affairs but somehow now because our books are digital it's all off a sudden okay with almost everyone?
- 9y ago

zokier 9y ago

>That word, "property", gives the opposite connotations of "copyright"--permanent rightful ownership vs a temporary grant of monopoly on an idea. I'd point out that generally copyright protects only executions of an idea, not the idea itself. This is pretty much on what for example the existence of GNU and Linux hinge on; they implement the idea of UNIX despite AT&T claiming copyright on UNIX. Patents, on the other hand, do extend to ideas, and are completely different story.