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Ask Slashdot: What Would Happen If Everything On the Internet Was DRM Protected?
dryriver writes: The whole Digital Rights Management (DRM) train started with music and films, spread horribly to computer and console games (Steam, Origin), turned a lot of computer software you could once buy-and-use into DRM-locked Software As A Service or Cloud Computing products (Adobe, Autodesk, MS Office 365 for example) that are impossible to use without an active Internet connection and account registration on a cloud service somewhere. Recently the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) appears to have paved the way for DRM to find its way into the world of Internet content in various forms as well. Here's the question: What would happen to the Internet as we know it if just about everything on a website -- text, images, audio, video, scripts, games, PDF documents, downloadable files and data, you name it -- had DRM protection and DRM usage-limitations hooked into it by default?
Imagine trying to save a JPEG image you see on a website to your harddisk, and not only does every single one of your web browsers refuse the request, but your OS's screen-capture function won't let you take a snapshot of that JPEG image either. Imagine trying to copy-and-paste some text from a news article somewhere into a Slashdot submission box, and having browser DRM tell you 'Sorry! The author, copyright holder or publisher of this text does not allow it to be quoted or re-published anywhere other than where it was originally published!'. And then there is the (micro-)payments aspect of DRM. What if the DRM-fest that the future Internet may become 5 to 10 years from now requires you to make payments to a copyright holder for quoting, excerpting or re-publishing anything of theirs on your own webpage? Lets say for example that you found some cool behind-the-scenes-video of how Spiderman 8 was filmed, and you want to put that on your Internet blog. Except that this video is DRM'd, and requires you to pay 0.1 Cent each time someone watches the video on your blog. Or you want to use a short excerpt from a new scifi book on your blog, and the same thing happens -- you need to pay to re-publish even 4 paragraphs of the book. What then?
Imagine trying to save a JPEG image you see on a website to your harddisk, and not only does every single one of your web browsers refuse the request, but your OS's screen-capture function won't let you take a snapshot of that JPEG image either. Imagine trying to copy-and-paste some text from a news article somewhere into a Slashdot submission box, and having browser DRM tell you 'Sorry! The author, copyright holder or publisher of this text does not allow it to be quoted or re-published anywhere other than where it was originally published!'. And then there is the (micro-)payments aspect of DRM. What if the DRM-fest that the future Internet may become 5 to 10 years from now requires you to make payments to a copyright holder for quoting, excerpting or re-publishing anything of theirs on your own webpage? Lets say for example that you found some cool behind-the-scenes-video of how Spiderman 8 was filmed, and you want to put that on your Internet blog. Except that this video is DRM'd, and requires you to pay 0.1 Cent each time someone watches the video on your blog. Or you want to use a short excerpt from a new scifi book on your blog, and the same thing happens -- you need to pay to re-publish even 4 paragraphs of the book. What then?
That would be my first thought.
>> What Would Happen If Everything On the Internet Was DRM Protected?
What if all men were made of straw?
When my daughter was about 5 years old she asked me "What would happen if a monster ate the whole world?".
This Ask Slashdot question makes about as much sense as my daughter's.
I'd take up/have time for more hobbies, one of which includes finding places to explore in the warmer months. If the Internet and tech in general weren't as "free" (in quote on purpose) as they are now, I'd just do other things unless there was a crack/hack available.
Too late to stuff that genie back in the (DRM) bottle anyway.....
screen-capture blocking = ADA lawsuit
they'll require a backdoor to everything.
I would make my own Internet. I would not be alone.
We would have the DRinternet and the FRinternet.
It would be good. You would know that anything on FRinternet is free from DRM.
So, the whole of wikipedia would be there for a start.
Anyone who wanted to be on FRinternet would have to let go of any DRM.
I would ensure that the domain services are separate so that by design one cannot link to the DRinternet from the FRinternet.
Isn't it called TOR?
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
There's a fine balance between not enough DRM, where copyright holders can't live off their work, and too much DRM that's so expensive and so annoying that people massively turn to piracy and ruin the copyright holders.
The right balance is where the return for copyright holders is maximized. Even greedy bastards like the MPAA/RIAA know it and turn a blind eye to massive copyright infringements that they would much rather didn't happen.
So the OP's point is moot: the internet will never be completely DRM-locked, because it would plain kill DRM in very short order.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Then people would stop using the Internet and everybody wins.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Yeah, I'm going there... what if every road required you to display your drivers license in the windshield to be scanned every time you go anywhere?
Download as much as you can NOW. Music, TV-series, Movies. Stock up on HDD's (dirt cheap). You will never be sorry. And neither will your friends be...
I think most people forget that you post content too. Write a story, a good blog article, take a nice photograph. Wouldn't it be swell if you actually got paid for something that people make popular?
So let's take the recent pay-with-computer-cycles as a decent example of a future ubiquitous micropayments convenience. Download a jpeg? Pay by waiting through ten seconds of computer cycles. You'll survive with short wait times for things that you find interesting.
Of course, when thousands of others download your jpeg, you'll get the cycles in return.
That's a good thing, because the more times currency moves, the better the very same economy. Still-money isn't good for an economy, money-in-motion is a good economy.
The trouble with DRM today is that it over-complicates reasonable convenience. But if that complication were gone, then it simply becomes a standardized form of valuation.
It can be noted that physical sales have taken the same route, hundreds of years ago.
It was easier to just go into someone's yard, and eat the berries off of their trees. Imagine if every berry that you take required you to pay for it with the milk from your farm animals? Well, wait a minute, what if we make something and call it money, that we can trade for berries and for milk, so we don't need to carry around both milk and berries? And what if we make something called stores, and sell the berries in quantized packages, so it's not a per-berry compensation?
DRM is a modern problem. As such, we don't have a modern solution. The moment we devise a modern solution, DRM will become an old problem, just like everything else.
To sum up, the DRM problem is simply an issue of barter -- how can I trade value that I have, for value that I want. I want a digital file. I have this penguin. They simply aren't conveniently compatible -- because the web-site with the jpeg doesn't accept penguins in-trade. The web-site also doesn't accept cash, nor credit cards for simple jpeg rights, all because the mechanism of jpeg delivery isn't conveniently compatible with current mechanism for currency delivery.
That'll change. Give it time. Jpeg's weren't worth anything when they were low-res photos of cats, so we didn't care twenty years ago.
I've thought about that scenario, too. It'd just be way too easy for the gubment to ban Wifi, WiMax (already licensed anyway), and packet radio for purposes of building your own network. That way only the politician's handlers can decide who gets access to the-one-and-only-Internet. Don't you think they'd just cut off the DIY avenue pretty quick? I mean, that's almost as dangerous as pirate radio. We simply can't have people just, you know, saying whatever they want. You think there is some kind of universal law protecting free speech? What? What is this burst dependent you speak of? Oh...... first amendment?.. Yeah, we don't do that anymore.
Since they insist I'm just an owner of a license, I'd sue them for the free replacement of the vinyl data device that they gave me to be able to listen to the 'Dark Side Of The Moon' in 1973 since it wasn't as permanent as they claim.
>> Dryriver doesn't remember
As far as I can tell, there's not even TFA on this "submission". La. Zy.
I have a feeling that dryriver's day job isn't paying well enough for him/her (I hope it's a him with that nickname otherwise eww) to keep his Wordpress blog up, and he's posting here in the hopes that there will be enough comments for SlashDot to make the (poor) decision to put him on the payroll. Then he can go back his quest for 100 followers on drireever.wordpress.com or wherever else it is he usually writes this drivel.
> The whole Digital Rights Management (DRM) train started with music and films
How can I take any of it seriously when they start with a statement like that? Computer games had DRM, (often based on looking up things in the manual) long before folks with dealing with digital music and video.
I'm okay with DRM products, as long as I can spend Digital Rights Money (DRM) on it.
Digital Rights Money lets me tell the product seller when and on what they are allowed to spend the money I gave them.
Oh, and it requires a connection to my server.
Oh, and if they haven't spent the money by the time I decide I no longer want to run the server, the money is now unspendable.
Yep. I'm totally okay with this DRM for DRM arrangement.
... and move to some alternative that would presumably pop up roughly 20 minutes into the internet going total DRM.
Coming to think of it that would probably be exactly what the world needs to finally move to some namecoin driven namecoin driven mesh network alternative to the intarweb.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
This is an underrated argument. If everything was effectively DRM'd, we would have to find solutions that weren't painful for legitimate customers or for society as a whole. There would have to be some mechanism where fair use could actually, well, be used. There would have to be some mechanism to demonstrate who a legitimate rightsholder was to qualify for the DRM, so takedown mechanisms that can be abused today wouldn't need to exist in the same way. Copyright durations would have to be sensible and there would have to be a mechanism for ensuring works were properly released when the time came. If businesses adopted subscription models and then started hiking up prices once they'd got data locked in, we would soon have laws mandating data portability to promote fair and legal competition (much as the EU is now introducing with the GDPR, albeit for a slightly different reason).
Most of the problems with DRM aren't really problems with DRM, they're problems with DRM denying customers what they legitimately paid for, DRM denying society its side of the copyright bargain, or badly implemented DRM having negative side-effects that are nothing to do with IP rights, such as creating security vulnerabilities or privacy problems.
Of course, in practice such a system would be unworkable for a variety of reasons, but it's an interesting thought experiment along the lines of "What if copyright law were actually enforced robustly?"
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Oh please, the idea that DRM deters piracy is a fallacy. It never has, which is why publishers have been doubling down trying insanely complicated and powerful DRM systems like Denuvo in an attempt to make it so strong that it might actually do something. If publishers were smart they'd make their works affordable and DRM-free for maximum profitability. DRM is a symptom of nonsensical, emotion-based business superstitions.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Think of it as "everything on home computers." If you take control of the home computers, you can DRM everything on the Internet. What would be the best way to do that? With walled-garden computing, of course. Remember that when the original iPhone launched, iOS didn't have a clipboard or download capability.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If you're disliking DRM-loaded media, then there's obviously a market for DRM-free media (or the alternative, DRM-lite which comments if you violate the DRM but still allows the user to utilize the content.)
It may seem hard, but still possible.
Imaging me removing that site from my lost of bookmarks...
Or me creating my own news site that permits basic copy-paste, etc.
Actually, there's a much simpler way of handling this.
ISPs currently bill customers a fixed amount per month, and it would be "trivial" for them to include a copyright quota as part of the bill, similar to what university students paid for printing paper per month. Thus for $5/month, that 0.1 cent can allow the user to view said video, or allow downloading whatever.
Not to mention that those people creating those movies should technically have those free trailers and/or exerpts that encourage people to post them on the blog without having to pay some DRM fee. Then someone discovers that those independent bloggers are more willing to post advertisements for their new movie if there's no DRM costs.
I would take a picture, and load it to Facebook with my DRM. For Facebook to show it to another user, or another user to open it, the browser would need to contact my PC for verification.
and, you know, it would take me until I die to read through my shelves again and the stacks in the library.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
DRM deters privacy for a lot of people, not everyone but if you think DRM isn't helping console sales you're delusional, if anyone could just copy an Xbox or Playstation disc a significant amount of people would.
This will never happen. The folks behind DMCA would never allow "everything" to be protected by DRM - only their interests.
If "everything" had DRM that would include any data that I create. It might be interesting if there was a secure means of personally determining distribution, including copies, for every piece of content I place anywhere no matter what the size of the content (could DRM protection of passwords have a place?). It would be a huge adjustment and break a lot of things initially.
For example, a tweet couldn't be retweeted, or imaged and included in another as an image, without the author's consent. Facebook would have similar issues. Facebook's data distribution restraints could actually be enforced by the users.
If the DRM was designed as the world's biggest blockchain with full data tracking, automated auditing of whether a website has violated its privacy policy would become possible.
Imagine trying to copy-and-paste some text from a news article somewhere into a Slashdot submission box
So, you'll have to go old school on them and re-type what was in the article. Just like I had to do in high-school when copying text from a book...with a pen...and no friggin' auto-correct!
Now, GET OFF MY LAWN!
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
To effectively DRM screen shots would probably require strict prohibition on "side-loading" open source software, confining everyone to a strictly managed official "store". You can see the major OS players going that direction.
And you know, when everything is DRM'd, everything will cost money to have eyeballs on it. (Otherwise, what's the point?) And the problem with charging money for content is that the content owners are typically blinded by dollar signs and price their content out of market. And then complain that their business is failing. (It must be pirates.)
In no time at all, there won't be anything but pr0n. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much 70% of current traffic, so maybe things won't change that much.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The internet will [Protected content, you need Slashdot Premium Plus membership to access this post]
Way back when the tin-foil crowd were Going on about the risks of "Trusted computing". At the time it seemed so far fetched.
Yet here we are today.
I'd be sure to have a button in my search engine and or brower that said "never list sites contain DRM" So you can choose between the 'open net' and the 'commercial net'.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
DRM is a content destroyer in the long term. There should be a addition made to copyrite law that says any any use of DRM must be continually supported by the creator until such time as they completely unlock the media and make it public domain.
That means if you make a DRM encumbered DVD that 80 years from now you are required to continue to ensure equipment exists at a reasonable price so that the original repurchase of the content can still access it in the original format OR you are required to provide a free upgrade.
The problem is what happens when that bug in that old drm is fixed or that codex isn't supported anymore. Millions of dollars worth of products that were sold are now useless to the consumer. So the entities that created them must be held responsible for keeping what they sold usable.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
What would Hhappen if everything on the Internet was DRM protected?
Minitel would have prevailed!
That wouldn't really be their problem. You could teach them how to save a jpeg image in a few minutes. Teaching them how to figure out where it went and how to view the file again would be the challenge.
The same thing I do with idiotic companies that want me to sign a ridiculous NDA with no time limit every time I step into their place. I simply ignore them until they break.
I'd have to again drive across town to buy Infomagic CD-ROM boxed sets to get the new distro of Slackware.
I would rather pay micro payments than have my personal data sold to advertisers and data harvesting companies. Micro payments on the order of what advertisers pay to show me an ad.
Reference: Wikipedia article on Fair Use
So - there will not be an internet where DRM controls everything because, by the definition defined by the Supreme Court, it can not impede fair use. This of course only applies specifically to the United States of America. Your country may have different laws concerning this subject. (IANAL)
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
The right balance is not where return to copyright holders is maximized it is when the return to society is maximized.
You may need to reward copyright holders in order for them to produce stuff, so there is a balance. But the goal is a better society not make a few people rich.
I was , what , 12 ? When I found out my floppy disk original ultima 5 disk stopped working "please insert original". I had started a month before to play around with debug to learn about how to make a ball (actually an ascii O) bounce around a screen. So I went into debug and used it against ultima.com (yes it wasn't even an exe at that time we were still in the 64K segment model). After bypassing the int 3h trap (they were replacing it with a jump to avoid people using it to set a breakpoint) I found out there were about 30 bytes IIRC which were encrypted (started using a single byte key, XOR it against first byte, then add 3 to key, XOR agaisnt next byte etc...). In that XORed area I found out that they were making a strange disk call (can't recall what it was, trying to set it on a track which should not exists but was present on the disk or the contrary) repalced it with 90h / NOP / reencrypted it, exchanged the byte in debug.com write it et voila i could play my legally owned game.
;). It is actually what brought me to in the end land in development. And I doubt any 12 year old would be able to have the same chance or the same start today.
You never forget your first time
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
What would happen if everything on the internet was DRM infected - TIFIFY
Forget about DRM of the content. If DRM of e.g., the rfc's (requests for comment; the 'standards' of the internet) had been enforced, the very structure of the internet would have been closed for every developer or hacker that would have wanted to experiment with it and add to it.
Paai
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Any other questions?
Same way Slashdot paid for it's hosting and submission system.
As for the former, Slashdot is ad-supported. Wouldn't web advertising platforms also start using digital restrictions management for accounting, to ensure that advertisers pay publishers the appropriate amount for an ad impression of a given quality?
As for the latter, Slashdot is an aggregator; it doesn't have boots on the ground doing original reporting. Whose job would it be to do the original reporting?
Imaging a DRM with an infinite recursive loop causing an infinite amount of debt in order to pay for it!
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
It seems to me things like royalties and micropayments for every time someone downloads something is just a poor excuse for someone to counterfeit and print nearly limitless money at the expense of the rest of us and our freedoms. Ultimately it would just be better to pay people for their time once, not worry about trying to get someone getting more money the more popular a piece of content becomes. This idea that someone should automatically get paid more because a piece of content is more popular doesn't really make sense from an economic and social justice perspective. That said, people who do work that gets more popular could end up getting paid a lot more because they could demand more money per hour for the time they spend making stuff.