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Open-Source DRM Ready To Take On Big Guns

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the when-good-code-goes-bad dept.

Barence writes "An open-source digital rights management (DRM) scheme says it's ready to supplant Apple and Microsoft as the world's leading copy protection solution. Marlin, which is backed by companies such as Sony and Samsung, has just announced a new partner program that aims to drive the DRM system into more consumer devices. 'It works in a way that doesn't hold consumers hostage,' Talal Shamoon told PC Pro. 'It allows you to protect and share content in the home, in a way that people own the content, not the devices.' When asked about the biggest problem of DRM — that customers hate it — he argued that 'the biggest problem with DRM is people have implemented it badly. Make DRM invisible and people will use it.'"

1 of 520 comments (clear)

  1. Queue the anti-DRM utopians. by RightSaidFred99 · · Score: 0, Troll

    I can see this is going to be a big long cry-fest from the anti-DRM crowd. What a wonderful world you all think you live in where you can just release digital content for all the wonderful people to share out for free and where apparently content is free to produce and content owners shouldn't worry about getting money for their work because they happen to work in a field where there's no perfect distribution model.

    In my world, the real world, DRM is largely a necessary evil. People deserve to get paid for their work. Software and entertainment content requires work to create and the producers have the right to compensation. Couple that with the entitlement mentality rampant today and you'll find without DRM people will just give other people's shit away for free without a second thought, and other people will download said shit for free without a twinge of conscience.

    Hell, I wish we there were no guns, no wars, no murder, no rape, etc... But here in the real world these are facts of life, just like DRM. The goal is to find a reasonable DRM model that lets people do what they want with only modest restrictions on use. If a DRM model doesn't fit that, then don't buy the product.

    Raising issues about a particular DRM implementation is fine. Crying about the concept of DRM is like crying about death or taxes - i.e. pointless.