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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."
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."
And proprietary software will be gone by 2030.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
...because of the false sense of security.
There, fixed that for you.
... 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.
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.
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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"?
Those walled gardens can only exist through DRM mechanisms. They were created specifically to make DRM more pervasive on the computing platform. Apple, for example, wants to be the only company that can authorize applications to run on iOS.
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.
> 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.
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.
People keep saying things like this, but believe it or not, the executives running these massively successful businesses are neither stupid nor ignorant
This is demonstrably not true. With just about every major, the industry has declared that it will be the death of them. Remember video tape players being like Jack the Ripper? That want even the first. Piano rolls were going to be the death, as has just about everything new since then.
The industries have demonstrably survived however, and things like videos proved wildly profitable.
So no, your claim is not correct. The executives have a proven track record of having no insight, simply wishing to protect the model as it is today.
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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.
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