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DRM Advocate Violates DRM
Alsee writes "A year and a day after arguing DRM was good for business, acceptable to consumers, and necessary in today's world, JupiterMedia VP and Research Director Michael Gartenberg comes face to face with DRM reality, downloads a circumvention tool, violates DRM, and blogs about his MS Reader DRM issues being solved ... permanently. Perhaps now he would be interested in the EFF Action Center where Americans can quickly and easily ask your Representative to co-sponsor the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act."
Actually for once, the AC's feeble joke is spot on: DRM isn't as much about preventing people from cracking it as it is about having solid grounds to sue infringers.
DRM's more or less open goal is to prevent "casual theft" in the form of playground CD swapping, but it's much easier to sue someone who took deliberate, non-obvious steps to circumvent a protection than sueing someone who just copied something. For infringers, it takes away the "oops I didn't know it was forbidden" excuse.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
He still supports DRM, but only "good" implementations of it.
What he does not get is that DRM *has* to be intrusive to work. DRM is based on having someone other than the owner of the machine control the data on that machine. If you want to move that data to another machine, you have to request permission and it had to be hard to get pewrmission, otherwise people will take advantage of you and copy the data more times than allowed.
DRM is all about control. Control does not work unless you show them who is the boss early on.
An interesting side effect of this is what it is teaching Americans. It is teaching them that they only way they can do what they want in society on a day to day basis is to break the law.
Contemptable laws generate contempt for ALL laws.
Or as Macalypse the Yonger put it...
"Imposition of order = Escalation of Disorder".
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Apple's DRM, in the iTunes Music Store, is hardly there at all. It's "nudge nudge wink wink" DRM, it's "honor system" DRM. They should call it "digital rights hinting". Apple's old "Rip, Mix, Burn" ads pretty much tell you how to remove DRM from their files, if you're not prepared to use any of the widely-available HYMN variants. Just... change the order a little. Yeh, you take a one-time hit in the audio quality... but if you care about audio quality why aren't you buying and ripping CDs instead of lossy-compressed files anyway?
DRM is acceptable when it's just strong enough to remind you that this isn't freely redistributable content, but not strong enough to actually prevent you from breaking it when you need to.
That's what Microsoft doesn't get. That's what Michael Gartenberg doesn't get. Strong DRM will inevitably screw you over. If Apple used strong DRM in iTunes I'd have been really pissed when I ran out of authorizations due to a bad disk that forced me to reinstall my OS a couple of times... because even though Apple was willing to reset all my computers AGAIN, it took a while, and having all my music burned onto audio CDs meant it wasn't actually held hostage by the DRM...
That's why Apple's DRM works. Because it doesn't. If it did, it wouldn't.
You don't seem to get it.
With computers, when you are accessing the data, you are making a copy of it. If nothing else, you are copying it to the framebuffer of your videocard for display.
Any 'effective' DRM that tries to prevent you from copying the data will affect your legal, fair-use rights to access the data.
Until all your own hardware talks to each other and phones home to the DRM makers, there is aboslutely no practical way to DRM something to work only on 'your' hardware. The hardware doesn't know who owns it, and if you are asking for access on multiple hardware platforms, you are asking for copies. One copy = unlimited copies. No matter how you obfuscate, limit or mangle things, it boils down to a simple fact; If you have bunch of data on your hard drive or RAM, in order to do *anything* to that data, you are making a copy of it, and any piece of code designed to prevent that is going to prevent legimate uses (or alternatively the DRM is so weak its irrelevant and you can make unlimited copies)
The whole idea of DRM is so braindead - until they have DRM code running in your brain, it's always circumventable, and to make it hard to circumvent, it will inevitably get into way of legimate uses, as numerous legimate uses *require* making of copies of the data.
It did way back in the day, with copy "protected" floppies. And then abandoning it, and using more copy "protection" and abandoning it, etc.
The computer world keeps learning, and then forgetting.
Perhaps some needs to give free Ritalin to IT industry execs.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!