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DRM is Used to Lock in, Control and Spy on Users, Says Free Software Foundation (torrentfreak.com)
In a scathing critique, the Free Software Foundation is urging the U.S. Government to drop the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions which protect DRM. From a report on TorrentFreak:Late last year the U.S. Copyright office launched a series of public consultations to review critical aspects of the DMCA law. FSF sees no future for DRM and urges the Copyright Office to repeal the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions. "Technological protection measures and Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) play no legitimate role in protecting copyrighted works. Instead, they are a means of controlling users and creating 'lock in'," FSF's Donald Robertson writes. According to FSF, copyright is just an excuse, the true purpose is to lock down and control users. "Companies use this control illegitimately with an eye toward extracting maximum revenue from users in ways that have little connection to actual copyright law. In fact, these restrictions are technological impediments to the rights users have under copyright law, such as fair use." Even if copyright was the main concern, DRM would be an overbroad tool to achieve the goal, the foundation notes. FSF highlights that DRM is not just used to control people but also to spy on them, by sending all kinds of personal data to technology providers. This is done to generate extra income at the expense of users' rights, they claim. "DRM enables companies to spy on their users, and use that data for profit," Robertson adds. "DRM is frequently used to spy on users by requiring that they maintain a connection to the Internet so that the program can send information back to the DRM provider about the user's actions," he adds.
That's what it's for.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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Not to be too much of a snarky prick, but that statement really is kind of a giant 'well no duh'. By it's very nature DRM is designed to allow software makers to control and limit how their products are used in a way to suits only the software maker's themselves. For good, of for bad. And to assume that software companies will always look out for the rights of their customers is a laughable proposition, at best.
Guess which party the "content providers" pushing for DRM have bought?
Yeah, it starts with a D.
Jealous and Angry
Unwilling to get a job
He is a Leftist
And I'm very glad it occurs!
...also in the news, Guns are used to shoot.
Could be a sweet target for breaches.
Just saying...
And in other news, this just in.... The FSF announces that water is wet.
And on top of all those things, it's also used to try and ensure that people get paid for the work they do writing software, making movies and other media. Did TFA even mention that at all?
These are all as obvious as my subject line.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Errrm, ... and this is news why exactly?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Crowdfunding is "also used to try and ensure that people get paid for the work they do writing software, making movies and other media." This was first envisioned in 1999 by Kelsey and Schneier as the street performer protocol and later implemented in platforms such as Kickstarter.
There is a legitimate place for DRM: Where you and the customer WANT someone other than the end user or person with physical access to the device to control the software and, by extension, the hardware.
Examples would be:
* Corporate environments, where IT will want control.
* Devices used by children, where parents or schools will want control.
* Devices which are loaned out or leased, such as a leased car or rental car, where the leasing agency may want to disable the entertainment system if a payment is missed (and the person renting the car is told this up front, of course). In the case of a car, of course, DRM's functions would be limited to tamper-protection and to disabling non-essential features like entertainment while the car is not in the possession of the leasing agency.
* The "utility side" of a device such as cell phone, electric meter, cable modem, or cable-TV box, where the end user clearly understands that "part of the box" is intended to be outside of their control by design, no matter who owns the metal-and-plastic (this is similar to the way telephones were in the mid-1970s in the USA: you "owned" the shell, but "leased" the inside from Ma Bell and weren't allowed to tinker with it). In this case, DRM or similar things should be allowed on the "utility side" but prohibited on the "customer side." In the case of a cell phone, this means just the cell-network interface. Regulations would prohibit the use of DRM to gather or keep info that the company would not be entitled to gather or keep otherwise.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Publishers' lawyers love to use the term “protection” to describe copyright. This word carries the implication of preventing destruction or suffering; therefore, it encourages people to identify with the owner and publisher who benefit from copyright, rather than with the users who are restricted by it.
It is easy to avoid “protection” and use neutral terms instead. For example, instead of saying, “Copyright protection lasts a very long time,” you can say, “Copyright lasts a very long time.”
Likewise, instead of saying, “protected by copyright,” you can say, “covered by copyright” or just “copyrighted.”
If you want to criticize copyright rather than be neutral, you can use the term “copyright restrictions.” Thus, you can say, “Copyright restrictions last a very long time.”
It's a good discussion to have.
But the referenced article is written at a 4th grade level with almost no insight and worse, provides no real examples of what they're talking about.
If you didn't know anything about the topic, you'd read that article and conclude that the FSF doesn't have a f******* clue.
The news is that the FSF's opinion has been included in the comments published by the United States Copyright Office from its public consultation about this issue. There was uncertainty as to whether the Copyright Office would accept FSF's submission, as electronic submission required use of proprietary software written in JavaScript, and there was no option for postal submission. So FSF had to hand-deliver its comments to the Copyright Office in Washington, DC, in person.
Say it isn't so!
FSF divides works of authorship into computer programs, instructional works, works of opinion, and artistic works. Each brings separate licensing issues, as described on the GNU project's list of licenses and comments on the loaded word "consume". FSF ethics do not require works of opinion or artistic works to be free.
Other than digital restrictions management, what's the FSF-approved way for the publisher of an artistic work to offer a service consisting of a time-limited license for a subscriber to experience that work? Is the alternative really to drop rental altogether in favor of selling a durable copy of something that most people are likely to watch only once?
Dear sir,
You should capitalize the name of a language (German/English), and you should use a ( instead of a [ to indicate parenthetical text.
In each of these cases you describe, the owner of the physical device is not its user. Respectively the owner is the company, the school, the leasing agency, or the utility.
But in the case of home entertainment devices sold to the public, the state-law owner is the person who walks into Best Buy with cash and walks out with a device or a copy* of a work. Thus the owner is the user. Yet digital restrictions management blocks the owner from exercising what would otherwise be rights of the owner under statutory limitations of copyright. In particular, DRM abridges the rights of the owner of a copy under 17 USC 107 (fair use for transformative purposes), 17 USC 109 (exhaustion of distribution right after first sale of a copy), 17 USC 117 (making copies or adaptations needed to use a computer program with a particular computer system), and foreign counterparts.
* The law defines "copy" as a physical medium, such as an optical disc, memory card, or hard drive, on which a work is recorded.
Dibertarian?
Because the Ls are the biggest U.S. party whose candidate for President has recently expressed support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Trump is against it, and Clinton became against it once the final version was released, but Johnson is all for it.
Why am I having to read a TorrentFreak article on this? Why is there no mention of it on either http://www.fsf.org/ nor http://defectivebydesign.org/? I don't want to link to TorrentFreak when I share this, nor do I want to link to an obscure PDF file for the original source. It really seems like they should be promoting this on their own site!
"DRM is Used to Lock in, Control and Spy on Users, Says Free Software Foundation"
No shit, Einstein.
Who was the super-genius that puzzled this out?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
It says so here in this pamphlet from Sony!
If you're the Free Software Foundation, you write scathing critiques about how DRM gives lock in, control, and spying ability to the manufacturer. It's what you do.
If you're a manufacturer who sees your hard work being given away for free on teh torrentz, you don't give a shart about the EFF's scathing critiques. It's what you do.
If you want good car insurance, you switch to Geico... It's what you do.
This is the fault of rock stupid Senators and congressmen.
Why "restrictions management"? Digital rights management is perfectly appropriate, where "to manage something" means "to lessen something, or the effects of something". See weight management, anger management, crisis management...
Curso NR 10 online curso NR 10 curso NR 10 online