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?

Comments

What if all men were made of straw?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> What Would Happen If Everything On the Internet Was DRM Protected?

What if all men were made of straw?

reminds me of another question

[tomhath]

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.

Re:Iâ(TM)ll continue going hiking

[Miser]

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.....

Re:Not much

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

Really?

[JediJorgie]

> 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.

Re:Really?

[UnknownSoldier]

Exactly.

Back in the 80's we called it "Copy Protection" and we "kracked" (*) that stupid shit because media wears out, companies go out of business, kids damage disks, to LEARN, etc. and we got the legal right to back up our software.

DRM is a big "Fuck You to our legal right."

Sadly most people are wussies to get the law to change due to the country being an oligarchy / plutocracy / corporate shill, etc.

(*) Fucking media hijacked the definition of these words:

* Krack = Crack = to remove copy protection
* Kracker = someone who removed copy protection
* Hack = Quick Fix
* Hacker = Someone who is motivated SOLELY to LEARN. The unwritten "code of conduct" was to NEVER damage _anything._

New hijacked meaning:

Crack = drug
Hacker = someone who breaks into systems for either damage, for profit, espionage, etc.

Now get off my LAN.

DRM for DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Internet and Roads

[Geoffrey.landis]

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?

Then we would rename "driver's license" with the term "license plate," since that's what a license plate is.

Re:Let's be honest

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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?"

And then there were two.

[fish_in_the_c]

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'.

Exactely

[aepervius]

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.

You never forget your first time ;). 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.