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."

Comments

I agree for different reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

DRM will be gone because most of us will be using devices in walled gardens and will have to get content from the iTunes, Amazon, Play, whatever.

Now jail broken devices or Linux? Well, you are gonna have to get your stuff from sources that have broken the walled garden content - and risk getting rooted, crap content, or something.

Re:I agree for different reasons

[Applehu Akbar]

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

Re:I agree for different reasons

[TheRaven64]

There's only one thing that will kill DRM: when content producers realise how much power it gives to content distributors. DRM on music is completely gone now. Why? Because the big four record labels realised that requiring DRM was giving Apple a much stronger negotiating position than them (want your music to work on iPods? You had to agree to Apple's terms or provide your music DRM free). With TV movies, we're increasingly seeing Netflix and Amazon get a similarly strong position. Netflix maintains streams for around 80 different types of device, including a load of set-top boxes that don't have upgradable firmware. Want to reach those customers? License your content to Netflix or allow it to be distributed without DRM (pretty much anything can play back plain H.264).

I quite enjoy the fact that the organisations insisting on DRM are the ones most harmed by it.

Re:I agree for different reasons

[cfalcon]

> Increased security my ass. People don't give a shit about security. Ordinary users are fucking lazy

I disagree.

Personal anecdote: My mom started using the internet in the late 90s / early 2000s. Every time I visited her, I'd have to clean up all kinds of stuff for her. It was a constant nest of toolbars and other random shit she clicked on. She would sometimes install security updates, sometimes not, but there was always a nest of vipers under the hood of her laptop. She had no idea how to fix that, but she was aware it was an issue.

Eventually, she got a Macbook. She LOVED that Macbook, and used it for over ten years. She never had that malware issue with the Macbook, obviously. Mostly, now she uses ios devices.

She was motivated to keep crap off her machine, but she wasn't motivated enough to jump through the hoops needed to achieve enough mastery of her system that she could tell the difference between good and bad choices. When presented an option that offered her more security at a higher price, she took it. The ability to be her own sysadmin was not that amazing compared to her apparent ability to be tricked into installing crap.

Nowadays, she would be safer with a Windows box than she was back then. But that ship has sailed, and she's still much safer with her ios stuff than she ever was on an open platform.

I don't know how representative her case is, but I imagine, reasonably. There's definitely users who wish their machine was more secure, and of the set that don't have a need for advanced features, and can afford a proprietary solution, walled gardens are viewed as a boon.

Re: I agree for different reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple, for example, wants to be the only company that can authorize you to run applications on iOS.

FTFY.

Remember Apple only delegates certain permissions to their device "owners". You can't do anything on those devices beyond turning them on, unless Apple grants you that ability.

If they want to they can disable the device by via a remote reset to trigger an activation lock, then refuse to activate it. It's the sole reason why Apple should have lost that lawsuit made by the FBI. They (Apple) claims that the end user is responsible for the device, but they also maintain their greater-than-the-end-user-will-ever-have control over it. It would be very interesting to see Apple found legally liable for any and all crimes originating from their devices because of that. That may give you a DRM free world at least at the hardware level, by making it too financially / legally risky to lockout the user completely, but I'd imagine we'd get EULAFAA (End User License Agreement For All Act) that shifted all legal liability to the powerless end users as profit protectionist, pro-incarceration legislation before that.

A bunch of jiberish

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the article and this guy never really addresses what comes next after DRM. Obviously you will get very little good content if DRM goes away and artists begin to basically give away their creations. Sadly their is more and more people who will take advantage of anything they can get for free then paying for. Nobody feels obligated to pay the artist. Then they use some excuse as they do it because of government control, or big business control. Maybe DRM will go away, but protecting what you created and worked hard to develop will not. To expect that everything will be open sourced and freely available is not accepting reality.

Re: A bunch of jiberish

[Entrope]

Yeah, the UK will be the only country in the world to authorize DRM-tools... And then they'll get sanctioned like Antigua & Barbados almost got sanctioned over Slysoft's AnyDVD, or an international court will authorize unlicensed copying of UK-authored works. Unlike countries that have been sanctioned like that before, the UK has quite a lot of valuable copyrighted works. Doctorow is, as is often true when it comes to political topics, delusional.

Re:A bunch of jiberish

[TheRaven64]

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

Why is that obvious? There are two stages involved in consumers getting good content. Step one, someone has to create it. Step two, someone has to distribute it. The first step is difficult and (often) expensive. The second step is basically free with the Internet. If your economic model is to do the first step for free and then charge people for the second, then you're going to have problems.

This is not how content creators actually work, typically. They provide a sample (chapter of a book, pilot for a TV show, whatever) for free and then a content distributor (TV channel, publisher, and so on) pays them up front enough to create the full work, in exchange for the rights to try to make money from distribution. It's easy to imagine cutting out the middle man. Put the pilot for a TV show online for free (pilots are fairly cheap to produce, because they typically don't have the special effects done by the time that they're made available to networks) and then ask people to fund the whole thing. When it's finished, make it available for free and ask for funding for the next season or sequel - the fact that it's freely redistributable makes it easy for fans to share copies with other people who might want to pay for the next project (whether it's a direct sequel or something else from the same creator).

Re:A bunch of jiberish

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Home taping did not kill the music industry. VCRs did not kill the movie industry.

Home taping and VCRs also didn't allow a single source to provide unlimited 100% perfect reproduction of the original works and redistribution of those copies to large numbers of people within a matter of hours.

It's reasonable to debate how copyright should work, or even whether it should be replaced, in our modern age. However, it won't get us anywhere to talk about the concerns of 2017 in the context of the technology of 1987.

Highly improbable

[squiggleslash]

Individual farmers may be furious at John Deere here, but there's a massive difference between that and a lobby big enough to actually get Congress to take action and pass laws. On top of that, there's a massive difference between passing a "right to repair" law aimed at pacifying upset farmers, and a "right to build your own Blu-ray disc player" law.

Add to that the fact that DRM would have to be effectively outlawed to prevent it from actually being used, and, well, how is it going to disappear? Because, sure, it'd be nicer if it became legal to try to break DRM, but there are people all over the world who are breaking DRM anyway, a law change making it legal probably isn't going to affect whether Hollywood et al continue to use it.

I'm skeptical. I hope he's right but I just don't see how he could be.

Delusional...

[blahplusplus]

... all modern videogames have just been rebranded "mmo" or "online or always online" it's still drm, smite, league of legends, dota 2, all the f2p games where game devs want money with no ownership for gamers. The man is smoking something to believe drm will disappear it has gotten worse, every server locked game is a drm'd game. Hell the game industry has been experimenting with encryption and virtual machines like denuvo.

Windows 10 basically wants to re-engineer the whole application environment so that people don't have access to their own files via encrypted file systems, etc. What of Magicka: wizard wars?

http://www.pcgamer.com/magicka...

The whole game industry is basically destroying games willy nilly and steam has been slowly hiding the fact they encrypt game files and make it difficult for people to modifiy the games they paid for. Shit's out of control and it's because the average person is grade A tech illiterate moron.

With Rights Come Responsibilities

[ytene]

Whilst the Digital Industries (currently predominantly music, film, television and software) pile on ever more restrictive rights, both they and the law seem to be overlooking the need for the reciprocal terms in this arrangement.

If a company (say a game studio, for example) wants to enforce an always-on internet connection as part of their DRM control over their software, then at the same time it is only fair that the same studio commit to hosting the on-line services required to play that game for a minimum period, even after sales of the game stop. Either that or the studio must issue a "final update" patch to allow players to continue to play the game in solo mode.

Our society is well aware what happened to the ill-fated Zune music player, developed by Microsoft as an iPod competitor - but which failed to gain the market share it needed to survive and so was cancelled. Shortly after that, when Zune players were unable to connect to the Mothership, their integrated DRM simply bricked the devices. Owners of Zune players lost not just their investment in the devices themselves, but all the music they had purchased with it, too.

There are other complexities. We've seen news stories of people who have left [sometimes huge] iTunes music collections to their children as part of their estate, only to have Apple attempt to tell those children that they could not inherit the assets purchased by their deceased parent because the children were not party to the original agreement and therefore had no legal right to access the content... it is only a matter of time before 8K TVs and media players are released - I am waiting for the announcement that the media players will all be internet-only devices.

I share the anger and frustration of other slashdotters with respect to this one-sided and corrupt state of affairs, but fear that for as long as the majority of people continue to purchase DRM-protected content, those of us who understand how are rights and freedoms are being eroded will remain out of luck. The vast corporations we are dealing with care about one thing and one thing only: profit. The only thing that will persuade them to change their minds and step back from DRM will be a direct challenge to that profit.

Nothing else will make a difference.

Sad but True

[ytene]

I just hope that if the human race survives another couple of thousand years - and if we're able to move past the current control structures in our society - that dictionaries may well have entries such as:-

Democracy - n. A form of government popular up until the mid-21st century, in which groups of populations known as nations were governed by a tiny minority of representatives. Although the selection of the minority was originally intended to be fair, open, transparent and above-board, the mechanisms of democracy proved to be ideal for corruption, the formation of monopolies, indentured servitude and dictatorships - the very things that the democracies were formed to defeat. Eventually, democracy fell out of favour after a steady succession of corruption scandals showed how large multi-national corporations were colluding with governments to keep populations in poverty and indentured. Overthrown by the AI-led coups of 2066 through 2068 and the subsequent introduction of Egalitocracy, in which, by law, every government decision is undertaken transparently and through the use of one-citizen-one-vote digital voting systems.

Of course they oppose extending the DCMA

[Registered Coward v2]

when it will impact groups that have lobbies as powerful as theirs. If the farm lobby is successful, there may be collateral damage to the entertainment industry. Changes in the law may not be limited to right to repair or such changes may be broadly interpreted by courts to allow things the entertainment industry fears; such as circumvention technology that gives users access to DRM protected materials. Since what is at issue is software it's not hard to imagine a scenario where changes to the DCMA have unknown, potentially far reaching implications and that is what the industry fears. Now if only some gun manufacturer introduced software that required you to use a factory technician to clean your gun...

DRM is a blunt instrument used badly

[sjbe]

DRM are a necessary evil if you want a rental market.

The concept of "renting" an intangible product with near-as-makes-no-difference zero marginal cost to reproduce is more than a little absurd. If you need DRM to protect your product then your product is overpriced and you will induce piracy. A from Princess Leia seems to fit here rather well.

With the ability to easily copy and distribute digital media, it is hard to tell if extra copies are being made unlawfully.

Doesn't necessarily matter if they make extra copies. It matters if they DISTRIBUTE extra copies. It's not hard to determine if someone has a the legal right to distribute a given bit of copyrighted material. They have an absolute right to so-called fair use copying. DRM is a problem in large part because it attacks the wrong issue. It is an effort to inappropriately control distribution via controlling copying but copying is not the same thing as distribution. DRM is a blunt instrument that restricts all copying whether or not it is legal or desirable.

So, I know DRM is evil and we do not want that. What are the alternatives that can keep traditional shops open? I am all ears.

Implicit in your question is that we should care about keeping "traditional shops" open. I'm not convinced that is an important consideration.