Disney Suggests Mandating DRM On All Media

Ethan Butterfield writes "Cory Doctorow posted this on his blog this morning. Essentially, Disney wants the FCC to regulate all devices capable of recording from any audio broadcasting medium or from the Internet."

Comments

Could this...

[Tuxedo Jack]

Could this possibly tie in with their crappy newly-released PCs? I'd love to get one of those and tear it apart to see what DRM they've put in.

Mickey with a shotgun saying something about a "motherfucking IP infringer" comes to mind...

Re:Could this...

[danamania]

Could this possibly tie in with their crappy newly-released PCs? I'd love to get one of those and tear it apart to see what DRM they've put in.

You can do that, as soon as you buy a DRM-enabled screwdriver to undo the DRM-enabled screws on the DRM-enabled case.

Re:Could this...

[Dwonis]

No, you'd get charged criminally.

Re:Could this...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can do that, as soon as you buy a DRM-enabled screwdriver

That'd be license the DRM enabled screwdriver.

Re:Could this...

[Master of Transhuman]

Right On!

Hack the Mouse PC!

Boycott Disney movies (shouldn't be too hard - there isn't any nudity in them, right?)

Disney and Microsoft - up there with Exxon and Enron as the most disgusting companies on Earth.

Re:Could this...

[fireman sam]

Not quite... In Soviet Disneyland the DRM-enabled licenses screw you

Only a matter of time before it happens

[kaltkalt]

That being said, I'm not surprised that it's Disney who made the official proposal. I give it 10 years before DRM violation arrests are second behind drug possession arrests. Buy prison stock now.

Re:Only a matter of time before it happens

[abulafia]

That's amusing, but a fatally flawed argument. Lots of different rebuttals are available, but I'll just pick two.

First, the logical fallacy: you treat the decision to invest in prison stock as a binary choice, with the operative decision variable being your family's well being. Leaving aside the assumed perfect knowledge ("If you know for a fact that"), the choice is not a binary; you could invest in: prisons, starting a business, a drug habit, a house ... Attempting to pick the right option is extremely complicated, as anyone making those choices knows, and hardly a binary choice.

The ethics-based reason this line of thought is flawed stems from choice theory and arguments against moral relativism. Without getting in to all the details,

- the harm of an injustice is constant, whether it happens to me or to someone else. The "damage factor" of an injustice done is therefor nonvariant.
- Making a choice may well be a gradient operation, but the consequences of that choice is not - actions are observable things with observable consequences, and don't become "more bad" or "more good" due to other consequences of the same action.

This becomes obvious if you pick a different hypothetical: suppose someone gives you a big red button, announces that pressing it will kill some random person you've never met. They then offer you some huge some of money to press it. No matter what amount of pressing (ahem) need you or your family may have (feel free to stack this scenario out with a child dying of a treatable disease, etc.), pressing the button doesn't somehow become more morally acceptable. It may have a positive (saving your kid) as well as a negative (cold, calculated murder) outcome, but it doesn't somehow "cancel out".

Now, various attempts have been made to quantify gradients of acceptability ("if you could go back in time and kill Hitler's mom..."), and accord for doing nasty things can and sometimes is given for twisted situations (notions such as justifiable homicide), but that doesn't change the base proposition: namely, doing wrong that has positive externalities is just that; both an immoral act and a moral act.

Without all the philosophy, I learned this lesson shortly after I started driving. That I dodged a cat improved the world, in that there was a cat with a longer lifespan. That I hit a telephone pole harmed the world, in that I knocked out power and screwed up my car. My car wasn't "one cat's worth" less harmed, nor was the cat "one twisted bumper's worth" more alive.

Now, add in imperfect knowledge, acknowledgement of responsibility for harm, and the full range of choices for investment decisions... you see where I'm headed.

It must be okay

[TheM$Man]

Since Disney is not M$ then this cannot be that bad of an idea. Now if M$ had thought of this, then it'd be a totally different story, it would be bad bad bad. Why? Because M$ is bad, they told me so!

Re:So...

[jejagua]

Up next: DRM for your brain. Maybe now I can get rid of all those silly TV theme songs constantly playing in my head.

nice!

[sometwo]

Then we won't be able to listen to Disney music?

Bring it on!

Re:Mickey

[Anonymous Coward]

"You know what annoys me? Mickey Mouse's birthday being announced on the television news, as if it's an actual event. I don't give a shit. If I cared about Mickey Mouse's birthday I'd have memorized it years ago. And I'd send him a card: "Dear Mickey, Happy Birtdhay, Love George." I don't do that. Why? I don't give a shit. Fuck Mickey Mouse! Fuck him in the asshole with a big rubber dick. Then break it off and beat him with the rest of it. I hope Mickey dies! I do, I hope he Goddamn dies. I hope he gets hold of some tainted cheese and dies lonely and forgotten behind the baseboard of a soiled bathroom in a poor neighborhood, with his hand in Goofy's pants. Mickey Mouse. No wonder no one in the world takes our country seriously. We waste valuable television time informing our citizens of the age of an imaginary rodent!" -George Carlin

Right

[Lord Apathy]

I believe when I say, "Fuck That", I speak for all of us.

Re:So...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Duh. They don't want to get rid of them, they just want the DRM to auto-deduct $9.99 per insanity-inducing thought loops of the song.

Wait til you see your bank balance the month after the UHF seinfeld/friends marathon...

Sorry, broken link

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct one

clothes

[sacrilicious]

Boycott Disney movies (shouldn't be too hard - there isn't any nudity in them, right?)

I must have the director's cuts of some of those Disney movies, because I just got through watching The Jungle Book and there wasn't a stitch of clothing on that oh-so-friendly bear. Also, in Dumbo they try to draw your attention away from it but if you freezeframe it you see that the mouse doesn't have pants on, just a shirt...

Re:clothes

[cammoblammo]

And nobody seems to get upset that a movie that has as it's crucial scene an elephant and pantless mouse getting absolutely $&^*!faced still gets a 'G' rating.

What were the censors thinking?

Let the people vote!

[t_allardyce]

Actually i think they might be on to something here - we live in a democratic society right? so how about we put it to the people, do you want:

a) Mandatory devices on all digital audio recorders that control what you can and cant record and recording off digital radio (just like you used to record off analog radio) to be illigal.

or b) No high quality digital _Disney_ radio service

Yes we can all live without Disney (i've been living without them for years)