7 ms·

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

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?
- pdkl95 9y ago
  RMS has been warning[1] about that specific problem for decades. Unfortunately, very few people listened. Now we have the additional problem of people already giving up property rights for shiny digital baubles. -sigh- [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    I'm getting a little exhausted in every thread about DRM and the likes to read about how "people don't listen to RMS". People don't listen to RMS because he makes no effort to be listened to and constantly takes absolutist stances which only harm what he defends. In the case of DRM, many people have been talking about this problem for a long time. It's not a matter of consumers not listening, it's a matter of alternatives not developing in the market. DRM in video games is a lesser problem as alternatives did develop. Steam, the #1 platform, doesn't enforce DRM. GOG and Humble Bundle have been running their platforms on mostly DRM-free games. Who do you fault for alternatives not developing/not catching on in the ebooks/video world? Consumers for making the wrong choices? Companies for not trying hard enough? Governments for not regulating consumer rights?
    - pharrington 9y ago
      Stallman's a philosopher, so his precision and consistency in how he interprets the digital world is actually mandatory. Do you know the time limits for how long your games can run in Steam's offline mode?
      - jdormit 9y ago
        I'm pretty sure you can just go to the steamapps directory and run the .exes directly
        pharrington 9y ago
        The DRM happens in the game's steam_api.dll, which the game executable is linked to.
zanny 9y ago
You say you can do whatever you want with a physical book, but you cannot - you are still restricted by the state from making copies of that book. You cannot take passages from that book and reuse them as your own, unless given permission by the author. It is still not wholly your own property. It depends on the mires of the draconian copyright system, but there are things I can buy and then duplicate - if I buy a generic pill of a drug, I am fully within my right to use that pill to produce more pills like it, and nobody can sue me for infringing their IP. Probably the scariest thing is that probably none of us can even reasonably conceive of how the world would be without this spectre hanging over everything. It influences our brain development extraordinarily fundamentally to contextualize that nothing we interact with is truly our own to learn from, because someone else almost always owns the idea behind it.
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  "you are still restricted by the state from making copies of that book" Is that true or can you just not sell the copies? "You cannot take passages from that book and reuse them as your own, unless given permission by the author." Again, pretty sure that's only when selling things.
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    It depends on where you are. In the US, some activities like this might fall under fair use, and therefore be legal. In much of the rest of the first world, the ways in which you can copy or share a work under copyright are specifically listed in the laws, and the mere act of making the copy might itself be an infringement. However, also in those places outside the US, non-commercial infringement is typically a civil matter and you'd only be on the hook for actual damages, which might be zero or close to it in the cases you described anyway.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
jdormit 9y ago
A better analogy would be to landlords rights vs. renters rights. DRM sets conceptually equivalent restrictions on protected media as leases set on rented property. The difference, of course, is that it is very hard/impossible to break the restrictions set by DRM, whereas the restrictions set by leases are hard to enforce. The problem that I see is that the language around DRM needs to change - you aren't buying that Kindle book, you are renting it from Amazon under a digitally-enforced lease. So DRM is protecting property - it's just not protecting consumers' property, since they effectively don't actually own the media in the first place.
- bo1024 9y ago
  I disagree with your premise, which makes the error pointed out in above posts -- accepting the idea of "intellectual property" as though it were analogous to physical property. But the reality is that there is no such thing as "owning" a copyrightable work of expression like Bob Dylan's lyrics. Instead, some people have temporary legal control over who may copy those lyrics and for what purpose. There is no moral or legal sense in which someone else "owns" those words on the page in front of me and I am not in any way "leasing" or "borrowing" the words. However, they may still try to restrict what I can do with those words. So DRM is about technologically limiting others' rights, usually in some way above and beyond legal limitations. For example, if you buy a DVD, you legally have the right to make copies for personal use, or e.g. use 30 seconds of footage in your own work of art. But DRM may prevent you from exercising those rights. However, I completely agree that it is misleading of companies to use the word "buy" when what you're acquiring remains under their control, not yours.
  - jdormit 9y ago
    Yeah, "ownership" isn't really what's at stake here. I guess, "consumption" would be a better term? DRM limits the ways in which consumers' can consume media - specifically, it enforces copyright. I think we are on the same page about the questionable moral standing of copyright for digital artifacts.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
anigbrowl 9y ago
That's all true, but these analyses always seem to skate over the fact that the copyright system exists because without it it's hard for authors to get paid. Don't talk to me about a world free of intellectual property rights unless you can also offer practical suggestions for what creative people are supposed to live on while they're working. Regrettably, the cult of celebrity has blinded people to the fact that cultural work requires as much time and effort as any other variety. A good place to start the analysis would be an assumption that all software is freely copyable, so suddenly nobody wants to pay for any of it other than for bespoke purposes. Consider how projects like NumPy and so on are only now getting funding after becoming so widely used that people are dependent on them and it takes a threat to retire from further work on it to make people put their hands in their pockets. If you're against copyright, then you need to be for something like a basic income and universal service availability, to create the conditions in which creativity has an opportunity to flourish free of market pressures. Otherwise you're just saying you want media to be free as in beer. The biggest barrier to creativity is not the inability to iterate on existing work. People already do that, it's fun and some of the results are great, but innovation is more complex than that.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  > That's all true, but these analyses always seem to skate over the fact that the copyright system exists because without it it's hard for authors to get paid. What made you think that I objected to copyright?
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Sorry, that statement wasn't directed at you specifically but the recurring arguments that crop up around this topic on HN.
- cyphar 9y ago
  I was going to write a comment and walk through the full history of copyright, but I realised that it would be a very good blog post (which I'll get around to writing this week). RMS has talked about this in the past, but I believe there's a lot more interesting stuff in the history of copyright that does change how you think about modern copyright law.
xg15 9y ago
>And the really weird part is that while the propaganda puts it as "protecting property", it really has exactly the opposite effect. I think the comparison is entirely fitting if you remember that in this model you (the consumer) don't own the property and therefore DRM is not about protecting your rights either. Viewed from the perspective of a non-owner, the effects of DRM look quite similar to the effects of physical property protection. People are working on fields, in factories and in offices they don't own, with equivalent they don't own and produce things they don't own. They live in space they don't own and increasingly use transportation they don't own. I don't find it hard to imagine at all they'll also consume entertainment and knowledge they don't own. Continuing the private home ownership example, the landlords would certainly see it as a bold defense of (their) property.

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?

pdkl95 9y ago
RMS has been warning[1] about that specific problem for decades. Unfortunately, very few people listened. Now we have the additional problem of people already giving up property rights for shiny digital baubles. -sigh- [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
- scrollaway 9y ago
  I'm getting a little exhausted in every thread about DRM and the likes to read about how "people don't listen to RMS". People don't listen to RMS because he makes no effort to be listened to and constantly takes absolutist stances which only harm what he defends. In the case of DRM, many people have been talking about this problem for a long time. It's not a matter of consumers not listening, it's a matter of alternatives not developing in the market. DRM in video games is a lesser problem as alternatives did develop. Steam, the #1 platform, doesn't enforce DRM. GOG and Humble Bundle have been running their platforms on mostly DRM-free games. Who do you fault for alternatives not developing/not catching on in the ebooks/video world? Consumers for making the wrong choices? Companies for not trying hard enough? Governments for not regulating consumer rights?
  - pharrington 9y ago
    Stallman's a philosopher, so his precision and consistency in how he interprets the digital world is actually mandatory. Do you know the time limits for how long your games can run in Steam's offline mode?
    - jdormit 9y ago
      I'm pretty sure you can just go to the steamapps directory and run the .exes directly
      - pharrington 9y ago
        The DRM happens in the game's steam_api.dll, which the game executable is linked to.

zanny 9y ago

You say you can do whatever you want with a physical book, but you cannot - you are still restricted by the state from making copies of that book. You cannot take passages from that book and reuse them as your own, unless given permission by the author. It is still not wholly your own property. It depends on the mires of the draconian copyright system, but there are things I can buy and then duplicate - if I buy a generic pill of a drug, I am fully within my right to use that pill to produce more pills like it, and nobody can sue me for infringing their IP. Probably the scariest thing is that probably none of us can even reasonably conceive of how the world would be without this spectre hanging over everything. It influences our brain development extraordinarily fundamentally to contextualize that nothing we interact with is truly our own to learn from, because someone else almost always owns the idea behind it.

jasonkostempski 9y ago
"you are still restricted by the state from making copies of that book" Is that true or can you just not sell the copies? "You cannot take passages from that book and reuse them as your own, unless given permission by the author." Again, pretty sure that's only when selling things.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  It depends on where you are. In the US, some activities like this might fall under fair use, and therefore be legal. In much of the rest of the first world, the ways in which you can copy or share a work under copyright are specifically listed in the laws, and the mere act of making the copy might itself be an infringement. However, also in those places outside the US, non-commercial infringement is typically a civil matter and you'd only be on the hook for actual damages, which might be zero or close to it in the cases you described anyway.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

jdormit 9y ago

A better analogy would be to landlords rights vs. renters rights. DRM sets conceptually equivalent restrictions on protected media as leases set on rented property. The difference, of course, is that it is very hard/impossible to break the restrictions set by DRM, whereas the restrictions set by leases are hard to enforce. The problem that I see is that the language around DRM needs to change - you aren't buying that Kindle book, you are renting it from Amazon under a digitally-enforced lease. So DRM is protecting property - it's just not protecting consumers' property, since they effectively don't actually own the media in the first place.

bo1024 9y ago
I disagree with your premise, which makes the error pointed out in above posts -- accepting the idea of "intellectual property" as though it were analogous to physical property. But the reality is that there is no such thing as "owning" a copyrightable work of expression like Bob Dylan's lyrics. Instead, some people have temporary legal control over who may copy those lyrics and for what purpose. There is no moral or legal sense in which someone else "owns" those words on the page in front of me and I am not in any way "leasing" or "borrowing" the words. However, they may still try to restrict what I can do with those words. So DRM is about technologically limiting others' rights, usually in some way above and beyond legal limitations. For example, if you buy a DVD, you legally have the right to make copies for personal use, or e.g. use 30 seconds of footage in your own work of art. But DRM may prevent you from exercising those rights. However, I completely agree that it is misleading of companies to use the word "buy" when what you're acquiring remains under their control, not yours.
- jdormit 9y ago
  Yeah, "ownership" isn't really what's at stake here. I guess, "consumption" would be a better term? DRM limits the ways in which consumers' can consume media - specifically, it enforces copyright. I think we are on the same page about the questionable moral standing of copyright for digital artifacts.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago

anigbrowl 9y ago

That's all true, but these analyses always seem to skate over the fact that the copyright system exists because without it it's hard for authors to get paid. Don't talk to me about a world free of intellectual property rights unless you can also offer practical suggestions for what creative people are supposed to live on while they're working. Regrettably, the cult of celebrity has blinded people to the fact that cultural work requires as much time and effort as any other variety. A good place to start the analysis would be an assumption that all software is freely copyable, so suddenly nobody wants to pay for any of it other than for bespoke purposes. Consider how projects like NumPy and so on are only now getting funding after becoming so widely used that people are dependent on them and it takes a threat to retire from further work on it to make people put their hands in their pockets. If you're against copyright, then you need to be for something like a basic income and universal service availability, to create the conditions in which creativity has an opportunity to flourish free of market pressures. Otherwise you're just saying you want media to be free as in beer. The biggest barrier to creativity is not the inability to iterate on existing work. People already do that, it's fun and some of the results are great, but innovation is more complex than that.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
> That's all true, but these analyses always seem to skate over the fact that the copyright system exists because without it it's hard for authors to get paid. What made you think that I objected to copyright?
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Sorry, that statement wasn't directed at you specifically but the recurring arguments that crop up around this topic on HN.
cyphar 9y ago
I was going to write a comment and walk through the full history of copyright, but I realised that it would be a very good blog post (which I'll get around to writing this week). RMS has talked about this in the past, but I believe there's a lot more interesting stuff in the history of copyright that does change how you think about modern copyright law.

xg15 9y ago

>And the really weird part is that while the propaganda puts it as "protecting property", it really has exactly the opposite effect. I think the comparison is entirely fitting if you remember that in this model you (the consumer) don't own the property and therefore DRM is not about protecting your rights either. Viewed from the perspective of a non-owner, the effects of DRM look quite similar to the effects of physical property protection. People are working on fields, in factories and in offices they don't own, with equivalent they don't own and produce things they don't own. They live in space they don't own and increasingly use transportation they don't own. I don't find it hard to imagine at all they'll also consume entertainment and knowledge they don't own. Continuing the private home ownership example, the landlords would certainly see it as a bold defense of (their) property.