Yes, DRM is inherently distateful - much in the same way any product-crippling is distasteful. As soon as you put an artificial restriction on a product, preventing a useful fuction that would otherwise exist, you lower the value of that product.
That being said, there are times when I might be willing to buy a DRMed product, if something else about the experience was worth the trade-off - a compelling price, better quality content or presentation, etc. I accept DRM on music rental services - because I'm paying very little, with the understanding that the music isn't mine to keep anyway. It's up to the provider to come up with a product that the consumer finds valuable; DRM may or may not be a deal-breaker, but it certainly takes away from the quality of the product as a whole.
Where we run into a real problem is when laws like the DMCA effectively make circumvention of copy protection and access controls (DRM) illegal - it's absolutely wrong to tell me I can't lawfully do what I want with my purchase, just because the producer of the product tried to limit it.
Let's say the people who make my toaster limit it so that it can only lightly brown bread. They've got a super-dooper- Actually Toast Toaster on the market too, and don't want to cut into its sales. But I know a thing or two about toaster-making, and with $2 of parts from radio shack, I can turn this thing into a Cajun cooking machine. Should that be illegal?
The amount of stable releases doesn't mean anything, unless the feature and quality increase is comperable (I can't speak to this - I haven't used all those Debian releases). I can release 10 stable updates of an app a day if the only change is the graphic on the about screen.
I generally agree with your sentiments about Al, but just one thing... how do you suppose a fan leaked it? How would a fan get it, if it hadn't already been leaked?
I know a lot of people who went through that undergraduate experience and still came out poorly adjusted, close-minded, emotionally immature or unstable dolts. The maturing that goes on at college isn't really part of the design; it's just a fortunate side effect some people experience.
This kid has a world of options open to him now (including going back to school, if he so choses). He's clearly operating on a different level than most of his peers. He can find other avenues for personal growth.
There's easily a use, even on the consumer side, for far above 10 MP. But the optics of the camera needs to provide enough detail themselves for that resolution to show you something beyond a lower-res shot. In your example, that presumably wasn't the case. Also, what method were they using for blowing up the 35MM shot? If they were enlarging a scan, what was the resolution on the scan? If the original image was of high enough quality, they SHOULD have been able to generate a much better image with a super-duper-high-res scan of it.
And yet toilets clog or overflow with some regularity (particularly if you eat at Denny's a lot). I wouldn't mind a computer-assisted toilet that could identify an address plumbing problems on its own. I also wouldn't mind if it detected a buildup of the ewww-nastiness and cleaned itself once in a while.
How about I just kick your ass and take that bridge?
Seriously, though, there's no harm in striving for a world without war - it's just a very, very difficult goal to reach. But it's not an impossible one. We're rationale beings, capable of controlling and supressing our undesirable urges. We don't always succeed at doing so, but the ability is there. You insult my mother in a bar, and maybe I throw a punch. Maybe I don't, because I consider the consequence of jail time worse than a bruised ego. Or maybe I do throw the punch, but I stop short of killing you, despite some primal rage rushing through me - because I don't particularly want to get the chair, or because I've got a highly enough evolved sense or morality to see that it's plainly wrong.
"The last stands by itself as the direct object of the verb's action." This is the criteria it meets, in my expanded version. "Whom" is, in that case, the direct object of "was."
I've always considered that an absurd example of the absurdity of avoiding ending sentences with prepositions.
Churchill (or whomever) could have easily said, "I will not put up with the practive of ending a sentence with a preposition."
Alternately, he could have kept his basic sentence structure and used a verb, instead of a prepositional phrase that acted as one. "The ending of a sentence with a preposition is a practice I will not tolerate."
Not true. Someone could always sneak into your home at the middle of the night and replace a bead with a carefully camouflaged bead-looking camera. You never know.
Both points are true - my failable memory is to blame. But there's some irony in that you point to Wikipedia to illustrate one of them.:)
But the overall message is right - that Seigenthaler had a very reasonable concern, and addressed it reasonably. And unlike many who've been wronged, he didn't push for the heavy-handed solution of government regulation; on the contrary, he worried that similar abuses might eventually lead to it, and he saw that as detrimental to the idea of free speech.
Why scoff at Seigenthaler? I met the man a few months ago, and we discussed his history with Wikipedia. He was very level-headed and reasonable about the whole thing. He acknowledged it's an interesting social experiment, but was very worried for what it can do to the reputations of good people if taken seriously as an information source.
It's worth noting that Seigenthaler DID eventually track down the malicious poster. Seigenthaler's an adamant free-speech advocate (and a head-honcho muckety-muck at the First Amendment Center), with an extreme distaste for libel and slander laws - he'd rather see lies and mischaracterizations flushed out through the marketplace of ideas. So he didn't sue, but he did go on TV and demand an apology from the malicious poster. That seems like a reasonable thing to me; the poster embarrassed Seigenthaler through his lies, and Seigenthaler embarrassed the poster through a demand for truth.
Seigenthaler also told me that when the poster's boss threatened to fire the poster, Seigenthaler called and asked the boss not to; he said the matter was settled was the truth was on the record.
He said the incident pushed and strained his belief in the marketplace of ideas, and that he was awfully tempted to go ahead with a libel suit. I'm glad ultimately he stayed true to his core values.
Being able to turn to other countries for a valuable resource = good. HAVING to turn to other countries for a vital resource = bad.
It's particulary bad when many of those countries are hostile to America, or could become so at any point. Our Middle Eastern peers aren't likely to shut off our oil supply any time soon - they like those oil profits, and we're an awfully big consumer - but they COULD. Or they could jack up the price to something even more obscene. They could play major havoc with our economy and way of life with very little effort.
Knowing we have other options would be a good thing.
In a free society, we're only barred from doing the things we -shouldn't be able to do, rather than only let do the things we -should- be able to.
We should be able to take media, aquired legitimately, and come up with our own means of accessing it. We transfered from records to CDs - but it's still perfectly legal to make your own record player, which you might want to do if no one will sell you one. It'll be a real shame if we transfer away from some DRM-encumbered format and can no longer access legitimately aquired media from the time when that format was in popular use, because the content providers (if they're still around) are no longer interested in making players.
Usage licenses are nonsense and nonintuitive. Ford doesn't get to tell me whether I can tinker with my car's engine or what hours of the day I can drive the car; Maytag doesn't get to tell me I can't replace a broken part with one I've reverse-engineered; Sony (or whomever) shouldn't get to tell me I can't play there CDs (or whatever) in anything other than an authorized player. They're free to apply the DRM and make it difficult for me, but I'd better be free to try and crack it.
You're right (although you don't mean to be). You DON'T have to buy any of those things. And if the restrictions on those products made them so unattractive they weren't worth your while, you wouldn't. Let's say you wanted to buy food, but the only food available was laced with a subtle poison that was going to strip 10 years from your life. If it was worth the tradeoff to you, you'd still buy it. If it wasn't, you'd say "fuck this," and start growing vegetables in your back yard.
You've always got options. They're just not always attractive.
There have been plenty of cases where people (re)gained rights without revolution - assuming that we're not talking about a loose definition of the term that equates to any sweeping change. Slavery ended, and so did government-institutionalized segregation. Women got the right to vote. The Japanese were allowed out of their internment camps. McCarthy's blacklisting stopped. Portions of the PATRIOT act were scaled back.
The lovely thing about a Republic is that legislators DO have some incentive to listen to the public, and respond when the public really wants something enough. Corporatism muddies the process substantially, but ultimately, the politicians still need our votes.
That being said, the historic trend is for governments to take more and more rights away - until it's no longer a given that the rights that were once enjoyed are natural to have. It's up to the public to be diligent and prevent that.
I'm not making those assumptions. But I don't want a government to interfere with a process consumers are empowered to direct themselves. Most people aren't informed about DRM. But there's nothing to stop them from getting informed. IF they don't, then so be it. It means they don't care. And the market will respond accordingly, to serve the things they do care about.
I know you can't easily buy the latest movie release without DRM (the vast majority of the time). So? If there are enough people so bothered by the DRM that the product doesn't sell, the policy will change. If there aren't that many people so bothered, than apparently it isn't enough of a deterrent to most people that the producer should have any reason to care. So be it.
I'm OK with DRM staying around, if it's what the free market decides it can live with. But I don't want the government telling me it's illegal for there to be an alternative scenerio. I would hope consumers would wise up and cast off DRM; maybe they won't. But so long as it's legal to circumvent DRM, or to buy products without them (think small, indy producers), I can shop around for a product that suits me.
At the moment, you most certainly do. You can buy most CDs without DRM, and a few stores, such as E-Music, sell a little mainstream music without DRM.
Even if those options go away, there's nothing preventing Joe Garage Band from releasing his music without DRM, to make it more appealing than the corporate-controlled music that has DRM.
I'd argue (seperately) that the concept of copyright isn't really valid, and the sorts of monopolies you speak of with regard to individual works are indeed a problem - for far more reasons than the connection to DRM. But one doesn't need to buy into that argument to see that DRM is an aspect of a product consumers can take or leave, of their own volition.
So what? Game companies can make games that run on only one platform. The company that makes my water pitcher makes filters that can only fit in one brand of pitchers.
The problem isn't the DRM itself. Apple (and others) make intentionally crippled products, limited by this DRM junk. The consumer is free to decide if the crippled product is worth the price he/she is being asked to pay. If it's not, the product goes away, for lack of a market. Maybe some consumers DO find it a worthwhile trade, and the company can flouish because of it. Maybe some don't. If a government interferes with that process, it's interfereing with the free market.
The problem comes in when the government also interferes by making it illegal to circumvent the DRM, or do other "unauthorized" things to products people already have purchased. If Apple wants to sell me a crippled product, but I can make it better by circumventing the DRM, so be it. I haven't done anything ethically wrong until I've redistributed the product (presuming one buys into copyright as a valid concept, which we will for purposes of this dicussion). Maybe that easy circumvention is WHY it's worth it to me ot purchase the product. No one's going to tell me I can't rewire my blender to make it operate past spec, or cram together my own water filter out of parts I find in the store. It shouldn't be any different with media.
The solution is for government to butt out entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, DRM is inherently distateful - much in the same way any product-crippling is distasteful. As soon as you put an artificial restriction on a product, preventing a useful fuction that would otherwise exist, you lower the value of that product.
That being said, there are times when I might be willing to buy a DRMed product, if something else about the experience was worth the trade-off - a compelling price, better quality content or presentation, etc. I accept DRM on music rental services - because I'm paying very little, with the understanding that the music isn't mine to keep anyway. It's up to the provider to come up with a product that the consumer finds valuable; DRM may or may not be a deal-breaker, but it certainly takes away from the quality of the product as a whole.
Where we run into a real problem is when laws like the DMCA effectively make circumvention of copy protection and access controls (DRM) illegal - it's absolutely wrong to tell me I can't lawfully do what I want with my purchase, just because the producer of the product tried to limit it.
Let's say the people who make my toaster limit it so that it can only lightly brown bread. They've got a super-dooper- Actually Toast Toaster on the market too, and don't want to cut into its sales. But I know a thing or two about toaster-making, and with $2 of parts from radio shack, I can turn this thing into a Cajun cooking machine. Should that be illegal?
The amount of stable releases doesn't mean anything, unless the feature and quality increase is comperable (I can't speak to this - I haven't used all those Debian releases). I can release 10 stable updates of an app a day if the only change is the graphic on the about screen.
Wikipedia's stub. I get it. Hah.
I generally agree with your sentiments about Al, but just one thing ... how do you suppose a fan leaked it? How would a fan get it, if it hadn't already been leaked?
Oh great, so now we're going to have a SUPER-HUMAN patent lawyer. He must be stopped!
I know a lot of people who went through that undergraduate experience and still came out poorly adjusted, close-minded, emotionally immature or unstable dolts. The maturing that goes on at college isn't really part of the design; it's just a fortunate side effect some people experience.
This kid has a world of options open to him now (including going back to school, if he so choses). He's clearly operating on a different level than most of his peers. He can find other avenues for personal growth.
There's easily a use, even on the consumer side, for far above 10 MP. But the optics of the camera needs to provide enough detail themselves for that resolution to show you something beyond a lower-res shot. In your example, that presumably wasn't the case. Also, what method were they using for blowing up the 35MM shot? If they were enlarging a scan, what was the resolution on the scan? If the original image was of high enough quality, they SHOULD have been able to generate a much better image with a super-duper-high-res scan of it.
And yet toilets clog or overflow with some regularity (particularly if you eat at Denny's a lot). I wouldn't mind a computer-assisted toilet that could identify an address plumbing problems on its own. I also wouldn't mind if it detected a buildup of the ewww-nastiness and cleaned itself once in a while.
I'd like to see it on the box.
How about I just kick your ass and take that bridge?
Seriously, though, there's no harm in striving for a world without war - it's just a very, very difficult goal to reach. But it's not an impossible one. We're rationale beings, capable of controlling and supressing our undesirable urges. We don't always succeed at doing so, but the ability is there. You insult my mother in a bar, and maybe I throw a punch. Maybe I don't, because I consider the consequence of jail time worse than a bruised ego. Or maybe I do throw the punch, but I stop short of killing you, despite some primal rage rushing through me - because I don't particularly want to get the chair, or because I've got a highly enough evolved sense or morality to see that it's plainly wrong.
"The last stands by itself as the direct object of the verb's action." This is the criteria it meets, in my expanded version. "Whom" is, in that case, the direct object of "was."
No, I meant whomever, but I was arguably incomplete. I might have been better off saying "Churchill (or whomever it was who said this) ..."
I've always considered that an absurd example of the absurdity of avoiding ending sentences with prepositions.
Churchill (or whomever) could have easily said, "I will not put up with the practive of ending a sentence with a preposition."
Alternately, he could have kept his basic sentence structure and used a verb, instead of a prepositional phrase that acted as one. "The ending of a sentence with a preposition is a practice I will not tolerate."
Not true. Someone could always sneak into your home at the middle of the night and replace a bead with a carefully camouflaged bead-looking camera. You never know.
Oh great. What if there are underage kids reading this? You've let the secret out!
Both points are true - my failable memory is to blame. But there's some irony in that you point to Wikipedia to illustrate one of them. :)
But the overall message is right - that Seigenthaler had a very reasonable concern, and addressed it reasonably. And unlike many who've been wronged, he didn't push for the heavy-handed solution of government regulation; on the contrary, he worried that similar abuses might eventually lead to it, and he saw that as detrimental to the idea of free speech.
Why scoff at Seigenthaler? I met the man a few months ago, and we discussed his history with Wikipedia. He was very level-headed and reasonable about the whole thing. He acknowledged it's an interesting social experiment, but was very worried for what it can do to the reputations of good people if taken seriously as an information source.
It's worth noting that Seigenthaler DID eventually track down the malicious poster. Seigenthaler's an adamant free-speech advocate (and a head-honcho muckety-muck at the First Amendment Center), with an extreme distaste for libel and slander laws - he'd rather see lies and mischaracterizations flushed out through the marketplace of ideas. So he didn't sue, but he did go on TV and demand an apology from the malicious poster. That seems like a reasonable thing to me; the poster embarrassed Seigenthaler through his lies, and Seigenthaler embarrassed the poster through a demand for truth.
Seigenthaler also told me that when the poster's boss threatened to fire the poster, Seigenthaler called and asked the boss not to; he said the matter was settled was the truth was on the record.
He said the incident pushed and strained his belief in the marketplace of ideas, and that he was awfully tempted to go ahead with a libel suit. I'm glad ultimately he stayed true to his core values.
Being able to turn to other countries for a valuable resource = good.
HAVING to turn to other countries for a vital resource = bad.
It's particulary bad when many of those countries are hostile to America, or could become so at any point. Our Middle Eastern peers aren't likely to shut off our oil supply any time soon - they like those oil profits, and we're an awfully big consumer - but they COULD. Or they could jack up the price to something even more obscene. They could play major havoc with our economy and way of life with very little effort.
Knowing we have other options would be a good thing.
In a free society, we're only barred from doing the things we -shouldn't be able to do, rather than only let do the things we -should- be able to.
We should be able to take media, aquired legitimately, and come up with our own means of accessing it. We transfered from records to CDs - but it's still perfectly legal to make your own record player, which you might want to do if no one will sell you one. It'll be a real shame if we transfer away from some DRM-encumbered format and can no longer access legitimately aquired media from the time when that format was in popular use, because the content providers (if they're still around) are no longer interested in making players.
Usage licenses are nonsense and nonintuitive. Ford doesn't get to tell me whether I can tinker with my car's engine or what hours of the day I can drive the car; Maytag doesn't get to tell me I can't replace a broken part with one I've reverse-engineered; Sony (or whomever) shouldn't get to tell me I can't play there CDs (or whatever) in anything other than an authorized player. They're free to apply the DRM and make it difficult for me, but I'd better be free to try and crack it.
You're right (although you don't mean to be). You DON'T have to buy any of those things. And if the restrictions on those products made them so unattractive they weren't worth your while, you wouldn't. Let's say you wanted to buy food, but the only food available was laced with a subtle poison that was going to strip 10 years from your life. If it was worth the tradeoff to you, you'd still buy it. If it wasn't, you'd say "fuck this," and start growing vegetables in your back yard.
You've always got options. They're just not always attractive.
There have been plenty of cases where people (re)gained rights without revolution - assuming that we're not talking about a loose definition of the term that equates to any sweeping change. Slavery ended, and so did government-institutionalized segregation. Women got the right to vote. The Japanese were allowed out of their internment camps. McCarthy's blacklisting stopped. Portions of the PATRIOT act were scaled back.
The lovely thing about a Republic is that legislators DO have some incentive to listen to the public, and respond when the public really wants something enough. Corporatism muddies the process substantially, but ultimately, the politicians still need our votes.
That being said, the historic trend is for governments to take more and more rights away - until it's no longer a given that the rights that were once enjoyed are natural to have. It's up to the public to be diligent and prevent that.
Fair point. But as you note, those are arguably bad laws too.
I'm not making those assumptions. But I don't want a government to interfere with a process consumers are empowered to direct themselves. Most people aren't informed about DRM. But there's nothing to stop them from getting informed. IF they don't, then so be it. It means they don't care. And the market will respond accordingly, to serve the things they do care about.
I know you can't easily buy the latest movie release without DRM (the vast majority of the time). So? If there are enough people so bothered by the DRM that the product doesn't sell, the policy will change. If there aren't that many people so bothered, than apparently it isn't enough of a deterrent to most people that the producer should have any reason to care. So be it.
I'm OK with DRM staying around, if it's what the free market decides it can live with. But I don't want the government telling me it's illegal for there to be an alternative scenerio. I would hope consumers would wise up and cast off DRM; maybe they won't. But so long as it's legal to circumvent DRM, or to buy products without them (think small, indy producers), I can shop around for a product that suits me.
At the moment, you most certainly do. You can buy most CDs without DRM, and a few stores, such as E-Music, sell a little mainstream music without DRM.
Even if those options go away, there's nothing preventing Joe Garage Band from releasing his music without DRM, to make it more appealing than the corporate-controlled music that has DRM.
I'd argue (seperately) that the concept of copyright isn't really valid, and the sorts of monopolies you speak of with regard to individual works are indeed a problem - for far more reasons than the connection to DRM. But one doesn't need to buy into that argument to see that DRM is an aspect of a product consumers can take or leave, of their own volition.
So what? Game companies can make games that run on only one platform. The company that makes my water pitcher makes filters that can only fit in one brand of pitchers.
The problem isn't the DRM itself. Apple (and others) make intentionally crippled products, limited by this DRM junk. The consumer is free to decide if the crippled product is worth the price he/she is being asked to pay. If it's not, the product goes away, for lack of a market. Maybe some consumers DO find it a worthwhile trade, and the company can flouish because of it. Maybe some don't. If a government interferes with that process, it's interfereing with the free market.
The problem comes in when the government also interferes by making it illegal to circumvent the DRM, or do other "unauthorized" things to products people already have purchased. If Apple wants to sell me a crippled product, but I can make it better by circumventing the DRM, so be it. I haven't done anything ethically wrong until I've redistributed the product (presuming one buys into copyright as a valid concept, which we will for purposes of this dicussion). Maybe that easy circumvention is WHY it's worth it to me ot purchase the product. No one's going to tell me I can't rewire my blender to make it operate past spec, or cram together my own water filter out of parts I find in the store. It shouldn't be any different with media.
The solution is for government to butt out entirely.