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."

Comments

Why Net Neurtality legislation is so important

[elrous0]

This subject really applies more to "Net Neutrality" than DRM. When big media controls the pipes, they effectively control the internet, unfortunately. We should stop that now, before it's too late and the Internet becomes every bit as locked-down as the airwaves and big media outlets.

-Eric

That's true, but...

[malraid]

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.

Re:That's true, but...

[Kadin2048]

I think your example of Iraq is flawed in a number of ways. The question there is not `why didn't gun ownership topple his regime?' But `why wasn't his regime toppled, despite a populace that was relatively well-armed?'

I think the answer there is because quite a few people didn't hate his government as much as we'd like to think they did. Maybe they weren't real fond of it, but generally they didn't hate it enough to take to the streets and start shooting. People will deal with quite a lot of repression for their government, if it keeps the lights on most of the time and the water flowing and the gasoline cheap. Saddam did that, and outside of the Kurds I'm not sure if the general population was ever as rebellious as we here in the U.S. like to think they were.

Second, although I'm as big a proponent of gun ownership as anyone, the value of a single person with a gun is limited. Several people with guns is better, but still probably ineffectual in the long run. But a few thousand people with guns, acting in concert, is an army. So really, in order to make much use of your 2nd Amendment rights, you have to be able to exercise your 1st. It's the ability of people to talk and organize that makes them dangerous, particularly when they're armed.

Conversely, you can keep even an armed populace docile, if you can squash dissent early before it has a chance to grow, and you can keep people from talking about what's bothering them, and realizing that there are other people who feel the same way they do. I suspect Saddam's government operated this way quite effectively. Even if you have a gun, you're a lot less likely to do something by yourself than you are if you're standing with other people who share what you believe.

I very much doubt that the drafters of the Constitution ever thought that any one particular right would act as a check against tyranny by itself; rather, it's a combination of our rights: that of the press, of speech, of assembly, to bear arms, to not have soldiers in our homes, which together make it more difficult for a government to oppress the populace. Without any one of those, our position would be substantially weakened versus an oppressive regime; conversely none of those alone would be able to protect us.

Uh...

[everphilski]

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.

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 ... 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.

Re:Freedom of Speech trumps DRM

[aaribaud]

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.

Re:exactly...

[Kadin2048]

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.