Slashdot Mirror
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."
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."
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.
And proprietary software will be gone by 2030.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
DRM gone? Not if the powers that be (...lobbying and bribing politicians) have anything to say about it.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I heard somewhere that Video Killed The Radio Star. However, these crazy record companies want Money For Nothing, while the people who used to say "I Want My MTV" now wonder where the music went. When the system burns down, who will be able to honestly say, "We Didn't Start The Fire"?
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.
"... they lobbied for and bought these laws..."
While this is the most accurate statement I've seen in a long time regarding how laws are passed, there's no need to be redundant about it.
Just say they bought the laws, because that's exactly what the fuck lobbying is.
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...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Hey folks! Just to clarify: I said that the UK would renegotiate its relationship to the EUCD (European Union Copyright Directive) and Iain (reasonably enough, given the noisy room) heard OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development). Just a minor clarification, but I'd appreciate an upvote so confused people see it.
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.
Not true at all. They care about security to a reasonable degree. The problem is that A) security isn't their only or most pressing concern and B) most of them are not security experts nor should they be expected to be. Too many programmers write system that fail to assume that the computer will be utilized by someone who does not understand security and cannot reasonably be expected to understand it even if they wanted to.
My parents are delightful people who are smart and capable and they certainly aren't lazy. But expecting them to be well versed in the nuances of computer security is both naive and unrealistic. It has nothing to do with laziness but simply where their competencies lie and what time they have available. You would do a shit job at what they do for a living most likely. That doesn't mean you are lazy or stupid but merely that you have focused your energies elsewhere.
Furthermore there is NOTHING wrong with the expectation that the software you use be designed to be secure and to make your life simpler. If your software doesn't do that for users it will eventually be replaced by software that does and rightfully so.
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.
That's akin to arguing that people are lazy for not wanting to drive to the store to do their shopping. Spending your time efficiently isn't sloth - it's just smart. Spending more time than absolutely required to do a task is idiotic and wasteful. Time is the most precious resource any of us have and wasting it bothering with navigating unnecessary websites out of some misplaced idea of what laziness is is foolish. Maybe you enjoy spending your time jumping through extra hurdles to order something. Personally I have better things to do with my time. I'd rather spend even that modest amount of time doing something that adds value to my life.
I predict that if the UK were to do this, then all future villains in entertainment media produced outside the UK would have strong British accents. All of them.
Also, the UK is whole-heartedly chasing the power-mad 1%-er's dream of citizen repression just as hard as we are here in the US. So I don't think there's any chance at all that they would do this.
DRM's not going away. DRM is the sugar in the authoritarian's tea.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
DRM was introduced as a retaliation by industries as unforeseen copying technologies were being increasingly used to disregard copyright law with no real ability to prosecute all but the few who were practicing it on an industrial scale. Good content without DRM was popular before the 80's because there weren't enough private individuals disregarding copyright regularly that the industries particularly cared... or at least cared enough to want to do something about it.
I'm not suggesting that DRM was a fair retaliation by those industries, I'm just saying that pointing out that it wasn't always around as an argument for why it shouldn't be necessary today is not entirely a valid argument, because there was, in fact, a reason behind it.... Copyright was supposed to grant its holder a monopoly on controlling who could copy a work, and as technology advanced, it was becoming increasingly impossible for the law to enforce a significant number of actual infractions (today it is entirely impossible in all but the same large scale industrial practices that some companies tried to get away with before DRM when they were caught). That one may not place enough importance on what those industries may have wanted or intended to fail to see this reason is entirely immaterial.
The real cure to piracy is to make the legitimate content as easy or convenient for anyone to access as the pirated content is. Adding DRM to content takes it further away from this goa l (at least for some people), not closer.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
We may have a couple good points against DRM, but there have been good points against LOTS of things that are still in place. As long as the people with money and power want DRM and think* it helps, we'll have DRM.
* Note: it doesn't have to ACTUALLY help. All that matters is what the people on top think.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
is another's time management. If you view technology as interesting and exciting then spending hours managing security settings and learning which repositories are safe (and occasionally cleaning up when one goes rouge after it gets bought out by a spammer) isn't a big deal.
If, OTOH, your interests are in say, Law, then you probably spend your days pouring over legal briefs instead of computer code. Speaking of Law, I never hear lawyers say "The problem with my clients is they're _lazy_". And I seldom hear Doctors saying that either. Sure, my doc tells me to eat better and exercise more, but he also recognizes that that's hard to do and takes a significant commitment. It's only computer techs that have this utter disdain for everyone who's not a computer tech.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/