Apple's DRM Is Bad For Consumers and Business

BoredStiff writes "Cory Doctorow, noted sci-fi writer and Boing Boing editor, marshals a strong argument against digital rights management in a recent InformationWeek article. His assertion is that there's no good DRM and that Apple's copy-protection technology makes media companies into its servants. Other copy-protection technologies, like Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, are just as bad."

Comments

Yet another one sided argument ....

[binaryDigit]

What is this guy French or something? It smacks more of punishing Apple for being successful vs actually providing some interesting arguments. Many open and designed by commitee efforts have wasted a lot of money and failed (same as closed and proprietary). Being open, in and of itself, doesn't guarantee the consumer that they'll derive the slightest "benefit". Why should Apple reap some benefits for "doing it right"? Isn't that the point of patents, that an inventor be rewarded for innovation (even if innovation is defined by the market and not technology), but over time the market be opened to allow competitors? That seems like the proper way vs saying that we should legalize cloning of products. Watch, if some "little guy" came up with something cool and big corp copies it, then everyone screams about protection. True, once you get the lawyers involved, the little guy gets hosed simply due to finances, but the issue is to fix what's broken vs tossing the baby out with the bath water. Make patents long enough to reward inventors but short enough to eventually allow competition. Make proprietary schemes covered by the same contraints as process, an inventor of a propritary process/item can enjoy exclusive use for a set period of time, after which they must open it up. This gives them time and a fixed date and an incentive to continue to innovate.

Alert the Media

[bensode]

Aggressively beating one's self on the head repeatedly with a blunt object is not good for you!

This subject is being beaten to death can we move along to another story already? There are those on the iTunes bandwagon, then there are those that chose not to jump on the iTunes bandwagon. Good grief what's next? Debate the finer arguments of smoking vs non-smoking in public? Wait bad idea ... smoking around non-smokers causes them to die too.