All you need to do is buy a telescope and try to use it to make yourself strongly aware of how bad light pollution is. It turns out that so-called security lighting often help criminals hide behind "glare bombs", and gives them light to work by without the suspicious give-away of walking around at night with a flashlight in hand.
People want Apple's DRM-burdened low bit rate music because, among the available options for buying the music they want conveniently online, it's one of the best, if not the best, options around.
The range of available options, however, is artificially limited by music labels acting as cartels, and by content providers hiding behind purchased IP legislation which gives them a lot of power at consumer expense. The balance that's supposed to be there is way out of whack, giving big business far, far more protection than is justified by reason of encouraging the production of content consumers want.
Take away Apple's DRM-based product lock-in, and the result would be that Apple would have to work harder to make their music store more appealing, and to make their iPods more appealing. You'd hardly take away all incentive they'd have to even bother with being in the business.
What consumers would most like is high-quality, DRM-free music they can buy easily and quickly online. DRM is not a consumer-desired feature. If consumers have to settle for DRM, they'd at least want it to be as transparent and open as possible, with broad interoperability. Proprietary DRM on low bite rate music with brand-based playback limitations only sells as well as it does because many of us are willing to settle for it when better legal alternatives with the same speed and convenience aren't available -- not because we love those limitations so much.
When what we'd most want as consumers is legal, high-quality, DRM-free downloads, why should we spend our tax dollars on enforcing a system of laws that denies that to us? Good music isn't going to go away because the RIAA and friends lose the ability to reap cartel-based profit margins. Musicians will find ways to continue to profit from making good music.
I still think it's fair to say that, unlike DRM compatibility, the fact that you can only play a Wii game on a Wii is not do purely to gratuitous incompatibility. Each game system has its own set of capabilities, strengths, and unique features, innovations meant to provide consumer value. Forcing a company to share or license the very things that make its own products uniquely appealing would be going way too far. We want to encourage companies to compete in the realm of things that bring us more consumer value.
DRM provides no consumer value, however. It's at best a nuisance to the consumer. There's no good reason for us to provide legal protection for tricks businesses play which add no consumer value, but which are only ploys to limit competition and create consumer lock-in, and which help take away our traditional fair use rights.
There's a big difference between forcing a software company to expend the enormous effort that would be required to make a piece of software run on multiple OSes, and telling a music distributor that they shouldn't gratuitously add artificially imposed incompatibility.
There's a solid technical reason why Wii games only run on a Wii. Technical incompatibility of DRM-locked music, however, is a purely artificially imposed barrier to interoperability. It's gratuitous incompatibility.
Imagine that every car manufacturer operated a chain of gas stations. All cars could run on the same fuel, but every brand of car had a bizarrely shaped fuel intake that would only accept the corresponding bizarrely shaped nozzle. You could only fill up a Toyota at a Toyota gas station, a Ford and a Ford station, etc.
Further, if you dared to try to create adapter for universal fueling, you'd be thrown in jail and fined tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for violating the laws the big car companies paid politicians all around the world to pass, to protect there little lock-in schemes.
You could either go along with such BS, and happily sing the tune the car companies want you to sing ("If you don't like it, you can don't have to buy a car! No one's forcing you! Just by a bicycle and shut up already!"), or you could cheer along the efforts to end protected for deliberately imposed incompatibility and improve things for consumers instead.
Slashdot Mirror
All you need to do is buy a telescope and try to use it to make yourself strongly aware of how bad light pollution is. It turns out that so-called security lighting often help criminals hide behind "glare bombs", and gives them light to work by without the suspicious give-away of walking around at night with a flashlight in hand.
People want Apple's DRM-burdened low bit rate music because, among the available options for buying the music they want conveniently online, it's one of the best, if not the best, options around.
The range of available options, however, is artificially limited by music labels acting as cartels, and by content providers hiding behind purchased IP legislation which gives them a lot of power at consumer expense. The balance that's supposed to be there is way out of whack, giving big business far, far more protection than is justified by reason of encouraging the production of content consumers want.
Take away Apple's DRM-based product lock-in, and the result would be that Apple would have to work harder to make their music store more appealing, and to make their iPods more appealing. You'd hardly take away all incentive they'd have to even bother with being in the business.
What consumers would most like is high-quality, DRM-free music they can buy easily and quickly online. DRM is not a consumer-desired feature. If consumers have to settle for DRM, they'd at least want it to be as transparent and open as possible, with broad interoperability. Proprietary DRM on low bite rate music with brand-based playback limitations only sells as well as it does because many of us are willing to settle for it when better legal alternatives with the same speed and convenience aren't available -- not because we love those limitations so much.
When what we'd most want as consumers is legal, high-quality, DRM-free downloads, why should we spend our tax dollars on enforcing a system of laws that denies that to us? Good music isn't going to go away because the RIAA and friends lose the ability to reap cartel-based profit margins. Musicians will find ways to continue to profit from making good music.
I still think it's fair to say that, unlike DRM compatibility, the fact that you can only play a Wii game on a Wii is not do purely to gratuitous incompatibility. Each game system has its own set of capabilities, strengths, and unique features, innovations meant to provide consumer value. Forcing a company to share or license the very things that make its own products uniquely appealing would be going way too far. We want to encourage companies to compete in the realm of things that bring us more consumer value.
DRM provides no consumer value, however. It's at best a nuisance to the consumer. There's no good reason for us to provide legal protection for tricks businesses play which add no consumer value, but which are only ploys to limit competition and create consumer lock-in, and which help take away our traditional fair use rights.
There's a big difference between forcing a software company to expend the enormous effort that would be required to make a piece of software run on multiple OSes, and telling a music distributor that they shouldn't gratuitously add artificially imposed incompatibility.
There's a solid technical reason why Wii games only run on a Wii. Technical incompatibility of DRM-locked music, however, is a purely artificially imposed barrier to interoperability. It's gratuitous incompatibility.
Imagine that every car manufacturer operated a chain of gas stations. All cars could run on the same fuel, but every brand of car had a bizarrely shaped fuel intake that would only accept the corresponding bizarrely shaped nozzle. You could only fill up a Toyota at a Toyota gas station, a Ford and a Ford station, etc.
Further, if you dared to try to create adapter for universal fueling, you'd be thrown in jail and fined tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for violating the laws the big car companies paid politicians all around the world to pass, to protect there little lock-in schemes.
You could either go along with such BS, and happily sing the tune the car companies want you to sing ("If you don't like it, you can don't have to buy a car! No one's forcing you! Just by a bicycle and shut up already!"), or you could cheer along the efforts to end protected for deliberately imposed incompatibility and improve things for consumers instead.