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DRM and Democracy
jar writes to tell us Bruce Perens has a short editorial on why DRM could have an impact on much more than just our record collections. From the article: "Within the last century, electronic communications have increasingly become the vehicle of democratic discourse. Because radio and television broadcasting are expensive with limited frequencies available, the wealthy have dominated broadcasting. The Internet and World Wide Web place into the common man's hands the capability of global electronic broadcasting. [...] In order to protect democratic discourse in the future, the Internet must remain a fair and level playing field for the distribution of political speech. The full capability of the Internet must remain available to all, without restriction by religious, business, or political interests."
But probably not. The truth of the matter is that there will be a 100 petabyte flashdrive that people hand around that has ALL of music on it and the issue will be moot.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
the issue is that most people (in the US at least) don't care about democracy. They use the Internet to search for thinds that require little actual thinking. Right now top searches for Google are: the omen, french open, and father's day. The issue is that people just don't care. People don't care that their liberties are taken away as long as the can watch the game on tv and look for porn on the net.
please excuse my apathy
the issue is that most people (in the US at least) don't care about democracy. They use the Internet to search for thinds that require little actual thinking. Right now top searches for Google are: the omen, french open, and father's day.
... if we all made the same diverse searches ... wait for it ... they woudln't be uncommon or diverse anymore! Just because the most popular searches are brain-dead doesn't mean everyone is brain-dead, it just means that there is a common thread among people.
No... yeah of course those three are going to be popular because they are common. Plenty of people make uncommon searches. But the thing about diverse searches is
How many of those top thousand sites consist of user created content, like groups.yahoo.com and www.blogger.com
If the internet gets destroyed by a bunch of idiots that don't understand the internet, I don't think people will just turn around, bend over, and drop their pants. Instead, I think people will just create their own networks. Think of the "good" old days BEFORE the internet.
Whatever conditions appear when you play the disc are not part of your agreement to buy the disc. You bougth one copy of the DVD, you own it. No question about it.
It's still true that you cannot do everything you migth like with it. But that's because of copyright-law, and not because of any legal-sounding bullshit on the disc itself.
Copyright-law prevents you from, among other things performing the work in public and distributing copies of the work.
This issue is orthogonal to DRM. The problem is restricting what data sources these devices can listen to.
The Online Slang Dictionary
I guess the idea is that once DRM is generalized, it is a trivial matter to switch from a "non-DRMed content is allowed by default" to a "only DRMed content is allowed" stance, and then, to be able to produce content that anyone can actually see, any individual would depend on DRM providers. But surely no DRM "key holder" would even only think of deciding which content deserves being DRMed and which content should be banned, err, bared, from being viewed, or even known of.
If people own something they have the right to protect their items from beings stolen. I'm sure theft is very clearly defined in the law - all types of theft. On the other hand, there is nothing in the world that says people must use DRM. If you think it is an abomination, don't use it and don't buy things with DRM. But here is a question for all of you who think your liberties are threatened buy big business and DRM; when was the last time you baked your own bread or grew your own potatoes or made your own ketchup? Convenience will keep people coming back for more. I will buy my music in whatever format I find most convenient, and so will you.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Indeed it is, here is an old article I wrote about this same subject. From the article:
A system that works best for recording and tracking each and every individual transfer of creative work will serve to diminish that work. A system that works to give that creative work to its audience in its purest form, without restrictions will both reward the audience and the creator (though the artist will not be nearly as financially supported by his work).
We would have never seen many of Da Vinci's works if he had access to technology that imposed expiration dates on his writings. We know he used encryption in his work, so just allow yourself jump a step further.
Meet new people, and kill them.
Yes, the equipment is cheap... but the broadcasting license http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_License will get you. You could set up a pirate radio station, but it's not extremely difficult to track those down. Also, how are you going to get people to listen when they can hear that one song for the fifth time in the hour?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
That is not what we are talking about. Everyone here is fine with the fact that people pay more for more bandwidth. The problem is that the Internet is like a lot of interconnecting kingdoms. Each kingdom wants to make the citizens of every other kingdom pay to cross it's borders. The problem is that to get anywhere, you have to cross dozens of kingdoms. Right now, you just pay the kingdom you live in, your ISP. And the places you go, they pay their own kingdom. And the kingdoms have a deal: Kingdom A lets Kingdom B's traffic cross it's borders and vice versa.
What the tiered internet is all about is extorting more money out of you and the places you want to visit. Anytime you want to visit someplace outside your kingdom, you will have to pay extra. Most backbone level ISPs are owned by media companies. So, say you use AOL. Any time you want to access something not owned by Time/Warner, you wil have to pay a premium or suffer slowdowns or outright blockages.
Will you even be able to find speach critical of Time/Warner? Doubtful. Will you be able to find political speach that potentially damages Time/Warner's interests in Washington? Highly unlikely. Do you see the frightening problem here? I sure hope so.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Re: In order to protect democratic discourse in the future, the Internet must remain a fair and level playing field for the distribution of political speech. The full capability of the Internet must remain available to all, without restriction by religious, business, or political interests.
... You can't allow all political messages without also allowing spam and offensive content.
Be careful what you wish for
Politics and spam already get confused. For example I was recently involved with a news mailing about economic policy, and this triggered spam filters. Why? Because there's a heck of a lot of spam advertising cheap loans, comparing rates, and my email compared interest rates too. But you couldn't unblock my democratic mailing without also unblocking some of that spam.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
I'm sorry, but I left my tin-foil at home on my dresser today. How exactly would DRM suppress freedom of speech (at the heart of the democratic process)?
Simple. When "trusted computing" is out there, then everything must be signed to run. If you want to speak freely, you must sign it. That gets rid of anonymity. Don't think about how DRM now would be a problem, think about when Trusted Computing requires signed DRM on everything. For our own good, of course.
Learn to love Alaska
While in a theoretical world, this makes sense, in reality this isn't what's happened. When you look at the distribution of wealth (or knowledge, or access, or whatever), you find that since the internet these gaps have grown bigger, and while the big players may be new, the truth is out of the billions of sites online, the top thousand sites get 99.99% of the traffic. How's the democracy? How's that "power to the people"? While new technologies may come out that gives the "little guy" a voice for a while, this period goes away quickly as either entrenched companies jump into the fray (i.e. Microsoft/Apple/Dell) or new companies spring up (i.e. Google/Ebay/Amazon).
Yeah but there is a fair playing ground. If people want to see it then they can. You don't think myspace was put up and it just got popular. People found it interesting people wanted to go to that site. They wanted to put up their page on the internet.(Sorry for using mysapce but its a good exmaple) People are controlling themselves, no one is being told you can only go to x sites.
Anyone can make a site, anyone can put what they want on that site (I think we can all agree there are limits to everything) Any site can get popular. When anyone can succeed, and everyone has their own power that is democracy.
Where do you think google, yahoo, craigslist, microsoft, slashdot, digg, apple and dell started from. If I'm not mistaken a couple of those started in a garage. Remember that the american paradigm of opportunity is not guarunteed success, but the chance to be succesful with hard work.
for another the guy seems to completely ignore open formats which will remain so either by virtue of the GPL or by virtue of the lack of a DRM specification (such as MP3) in the standard. while major outlets may end up drm'ed to hell, there will always be a format allowing people to make an internet stream on their own.
This is true, but only if people can play back data that's been encoded into one of these free formats.
I don't think it's very hard to imagine a future where the most common playback device would only play music recorded in a proprietary format: as much as I like the iPod, it's pretty close. It plays MP3 (patent encumbered, although everyone just seems to ignore that), AAC (semi-proprietary, although documented, probably patent encumbered), and Apple Lossless (proprietary, not sure if it's open or not).
Right now we don't see this as much of a problem -- after all, anyone with iTunes can encode to any of these formats. So if I wanted to make a radio show and distribute it, easy enough. But that doesn't have to be the case: suppose the next-generation of CDs weren't easily rippable, or they just came pre-encoded in one of the proprietary formats. Then there would be no need for the average consumer to have an encoder. It would be like MPEG-2 was a few years ago: you could buy a lot of pre-encoded content, but making your own was a real bitch.
Suppose also that computers by default become incapable of running code that hasn't been signed by an approval authority. Even if somebody wrote a free encoded for the non-free formats (which would probably be illegal to import and use), most people probably wouldn't be able to run it. Similarly with decoders for the free formats.
The fact that formats like Ogg Vorbis or Xiph exist won't matter if 80% of the population doesn't have an easy way of listening to them. Alternatives like that will always exist for geeks and people interested in technology, but they're pretty far from mainstream. The majority of the population lives at the whims of whatever's available on the the mass market, and given that they're allowed to vote, it's worth keeping an eye on the situation there, even if you and I and all the other people reading this on Slashdot won't be directly impacted.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The point of democracy isn't necessarily smart political debate, but also coverage of topics the powerful don't want covered. Example: the sony DRM case was brought to light by a techie blogger. If all outlets were controlled by big media, that story may never have broken, setting back the viral DRM agenda at least several months.
So the proper answer to a bad ordinance is to drop the "i" and open up with the ordnance?
This is why those in power boil the frog. In order for them to get what they desire, there must be no flash point, no single act so heinous that the populace says "hey wait a minute!".
The fact is that when the shit hits the fan, you won't be able to fend off a tank with your shotgun. Certainly you can fend off one cop, or fight a dozen to a standoff, but if you're wanted bad enough and your location is known, you won't be on the loose for very long. You may just be sieged until you have to come out or starve, or you may have the authorities go Waco on you. Or you could just be "disappeared" and declared an "enemy combatant".
Did you know David Koresh used to walk to Wal-Mart three or four times a week? If authorities had wanted to arrest him, they could have. Instead they wanted to set a loud example, knowing full well it could go to hell in a handbasket the way it did. The War on Terra is just a logical extension of this existing policy. Both parties are responsible for putting us frogs in the water and heating it up. It's just that one of them lately has been so blatant about it -- it may yet work, or they may get tossed out for the moment. As soon as the furor dies down, it's back to politics as usual, and power grabbing as always.
Of course there is a difference in which groups get scapegoated by those in power, and there is a small handful on both sides who truly believe they are doing what is best for all concerned, but ultimately, money talks and all else walks. We don't have a voice. The bankrupting of the middle class (have you checked debt loads lately?) and of the country itself mean that dissenting voices will be too busy scrounging up enough money to "put food on their children" and not have time to cause problems for government.
Face it, your gun is only going to help you fight off your equally starving neighbor. You won't be putting up any significant resistance to air strikes, commando raids, or even SWAT teams.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
DRM makes filtering much easier though. If Net Neutrality is lost and DRM is implemented, that's really the perfect storm scenario. Then Telcos are given the right to filter at thier discretion and the tools to do so. For example they could block or encrypt content (downloads/streams/VOIP/etc) and require propriatary players. It'll become a standard part of service contracts that the provider can filter content and the customer has no legal recourse. They'd justify it as blocking piracy or child porn or some other absurd law and order excuse. For example, many people could sign up for cheap interent service that requires them to run DRM mail clients (to prevent SPAM supposedly) or even DRM hardware with spyware preventing any unsigned, unapproved content from working. In order for the data to even be transmitted it could require encryption and DRM keys, also forcing the reciever to be DRM'd and using the propriatary apps and formats. It wouldn't happen overnight, that would cause a backlash from the public. But if various Telcos and big media associations slowly ratchet up the DRM and filtering/censorship, people will accept it. People better wise up now before this ugliness gains too much momentum to be stopped. The scariest thing of all is that the general public is clueless on tech matters and many geeks are politcally apathetic. Bad combination.