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DRM Will Be Gone By 2025, Predicts Cory Doctorow (theregister.co.uk)

An anonymous reader writes: It's been two years since Cory Doctorow joined the EFF's campaign to eliminate DRM within 8 years -- and he still believes it'll happen. "Farmers and the Digital Right To Repair Coalition have done brilliantly and have a message which is extremely resonant with the political right as well as the political left." And now even the entertainment industry seems to oppose extending the DMCA to tractors. "The entertainment industry feels very proprietary towards laws that protect DRM. They really feel that they lobbied for and bought these laws in order to protect the business model they envisioned. For these latecomer upstarts to turn up and stretch and distort these laws out of proportion has really exposed one of the natural cracks in copyright altogether."
Doctorow also says that "If there's anything good that might come of Brexit, it's that the UK will renegotiate and reevaluate its relationship to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and other directives. The UK enjoys a really interesting market position if it wants to be the only nation in the region that makes, exports, and supports DRM-breaking tools."

3 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. He clearly does not live in the UK. by SuricouRaven · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If anything, leaving the EU will serve as a pretext to make our copyright laws even stricter, and DRM even more legally-supporter.

    Why? Because very few voters care even the tiniest amount about copyright policy. It's just not an issue in elections, at all, not in the slightest, which means the only voice there to influence MPs comes from lobby groups who are happy to point out the economic success of the entertainment industry and hint at favorable media support and a bit of help with the fund-raising come next election season.

    Only days ago we passed the Digital Economy Act which, among many other things, increased the criminal penalty for copyright infringement from two years to ten. A provision that went largely unnoticed, as most of the attention of even the technical press has been on ridiculing another section of the act introduces another entirely unworkable attempt to restrict access to pornography on the internet.

  2. Re:A bunch of jiberish by GrumpySteen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Obviously you will get very little good content if DRM goes away and artists begin to basically give away their creations.

    Which is why there was very little good content before the first DRM was introduced in 1983?

    Not imposing DRM is not the same as artists giving away their creations. Home taping did not kill the music industry. VCRs did not kill the movie industry.
     

  3. Re:I agree for different reasons by geekmux · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And ordinary users are willingly gravitating to walled gardens because of the increased security.

    Increased security my ass. People don't give a shit about security. Ordinary users are fucking lazy, and are "willingly gravitating" towards anything that can do everything for them without lifting a finger.

    Voice activated assistants and press-to-order buttons hanging on the wall are two prime examples of just how lazy people have become. Getting online to search and order a product manually is considered hard labor for the Siri generation.