There are levels of anonymity.
1. The ballots are anonymous as long as the voter wishes to keep it anonymous.
2. The ballots are anonymous regardless of whether the voter wishes to reveal their vote.
I think just having level 1 is probably fine. Plus having level 2 means that a voter can;t check that his/her vote was counted correctly.
Voting is a bad idea, because the dominant family member could have such psychological control over his family members, that they vote according to his will even when in a private booth.
Restricting access to publicly available information is an impossible problem.
Restricting access to publicly available information is indeed impossible. DRM does not do this. It instead restricts access to private information (e.g. a compressed video stream), and allows authorized users access to a transformed version of that information (e.g. a raw DVI signal or pixels on a monitor).
DRM does not really work, and inconveniences and annoys customers who want to make legitimate use of what they bought
It does work, which is why companies continue to use it. It obviously would be nice if it worked better. There are examples of DRM which do not annoy or inconvenience customers (e.g. steam).
Outlawing communication does not work.
DRM is a technical solution not a legal solution. I am not sure why you are conflating these 2 ideas.
Going on a moral crusade and demonizing everyone as pirates does not work.
I hope you are not suggesting I am demonizing anyone.
Therefore, the problem of making money from information must be solved differently.
I am not saying a better solution doesn't exist or can't work. I am saying that it is not impossible that there could be advances in DRM technology that make it less annoying and inconvenient and more effective at preventing unauthorized access. It has already improved significantly over the last decade. Things like HDCP and blu-ray, while far from perfect, are vast improvements for older technologies like macrovision and css. If you are morally opposed to DRM, then I supposed you wouldn't view these as improvements, but I am speaking strictly from a technical perspective.
And, the moral angle: restriction is an immoral way to make money from information.
Why is it immoral? How do you decide if something is immoral?
We've had too many ordinary citizens railroaded in a court of law, given completely over the top penalties, without the plaintiffs having to prove that the defendants actually did anything illegal, because, you know, everyone does it. College students have been forced to give up their dreams of a college education, a mother has been forced into bankruptcy. We ought to have our digital public library up and running by now, but we don't. We should have been doing what Google Books is doing and more, but we can't thanks to our own copyright laws.
None of this has anything to do with DRM, but rather our legal system.
No, people are more likely to produce something if they benefit from it. That's quite different than owning it.
Do you not think one would derive more benefit from owning something they created than merely having access (along with everyone else) to it? For one thing, it is pretty hard to make money charging for access to information that everyone already has access to for free.
Factory work is all about being compensated for producing things that others own.
Actually factory work is all about selling labor to others. A gardener shouldn't own my yard because he "created" the landscaping.
Ownership is a means to aid people in gaining from their productivity. It is not the only means, and may not be the best means
I never said it was. I am saying that "Ownership (physical or intellectual) is immoral" is a subjective claim.
Debates can be had about whether ownership of physical or intelelctual property helps or hinders production in which scenarios (which is in my opinion the only convincing form of argument). Once you say X is immoral, there can be no discourse with someone who does not feel X is immoral.
I am sympathetic to the argument that ownership is detrimental to to the productivity of society in certain areas (like intellectual property). I am not sympathetic to the argument that ownership is categorically immoral.
I wasn't talking about vegetarianism. Animals have to eat other life to survive. Plants are alive. Is it moral to eat, whether that's plants or animals? As to what it has to do with ownership, eating is a taking, a stealing of other lives. The most fundamental thing any being owns is their own body. We should have a care not to be unconscious of the hypocrisy of screaming "thief!" over the mere copying-- not taking but just copying-- of the immaterial, when all of us are takers of food of which nearly all was once alive.
What I am saying is that those kind of moral judgements are subjective. Simply claiming that ownership of physical or intellectual property or living property, is just your opinion. It doesn't carry any weight with someone who does not share that value.
Communism, you say? There are more choices than communism and capitalism.
I don;t think I claimed any kind of dichotomy.
Ownership has many benefits.
I never said it didn't. I was only giving a counter example to your claim that ownership was the only way stop people from fighting over resources.
And you left out one very important benefit of ownership. It incentivizes production. One is more likely to produce something if they are then able to own it. This benefit extends to intellectual property as well, if society enforces intellectual property rights.
since you are now making a utilitarian argument for ownership rather than an ethical one, this is the utilitarian argument for intellectual property.
Why is it moral to eat? Animals depend entirely on other life for food. Plants get energy from the sun and convert raw materials into living tissue, animals mostly can't, and must eat plants or other animals to survive.
I don't know if you are aware, but there are actually human beings that do not eat other animals. I'm not sure what this has to do with ownership.
Ownership is only a legal and social custom to keep order, stop people from fighting each other over who gets to use an item that can only be used by one group at a time, or who gets to consume a perishable item.
It is not the only method to accomplish this. There is also communism. We can have a central authority ensuring that everyone has fair use over all of humanity's collective possessions.
TPM is very different it protects my keys for me, potentially even against physical attacks
I'm not saying TPM isn't different. I'm saying it's an example of a technology that works because of the fact that you don't have complete control over your machine. (i.e. you don't need full control over your machine for that machine to be useful).
Be have a far different opinion of how things are priced, media tends to charge what the market will stand, and used region coding (in many ways part of DRM) to artificially segment those markets. So I doubt that the consumer will see any savings.
I am not a fan of price discrimination either, but it does have some benefits. It allows drug companies to make life saving drugs much cheaper for developing countries, while still making a profit by charging much higher prices to people where they can. If you live in America you will not see any savings. If you live in Somalia, you probably will.
If anything I think prices will go up as piracy gets harder and less user friendly.
It's hard to make a product for less than $0. So for pirates, the price will definitely be going up on average.
In any event I'm talking about the hardware were all paying a hidden amount to support current DRM and implement future DRM.
You are not forced to pay for anything. You are free to support whatever DRM free media you want. The content owners can sell their media in whatever format they like. Maybe they will decide DRM isn't worth it. That's their decision to make.
DRM can not work "better", if I can watch something I can copy it the question is how much loss. Remember that the further up the stack the more places you need to have DRM.
DRM can work better. If the best way you can circumvent DRM is to record your monitor with a camcorder, I think most people would agree that the DRM is working pretty good. Furthermore, interactive media like video games, and other "non-media" things which one might want to prevent unauthorized access to, can be protected with DRM even if you are allowed to "watch it". You can't copy a video game with a camcorder.
I'm more in they should get one or the other, the FBI etc should go after large commercial pirates, the ones feeding the guys on the street selling DVD etc. We should not be going after people making backups or transcoding, things that were legal since the timeshifting case of the early 80's.
The real problem is that the justice system currently imposes penalties that far outweigh the damage caused by the crime of piracy. I don't think many people would have a problem with people being forced to buy the songs they were caught pirating (i.e. much closer to the actual financial damage caused).
This is not an example of a DRM scheme, requiring the the LOC hold in escrow all DRM keys would require a new law. This is about being able to recover our digital heritage generations from now and has really nothing to do with the DRM itself. Merely picking a responsible party who is already tasked with cataloging and maintaining copies of these sorts of things.
Which parties have access to private keys in an encryption/DRm scheme is absolutely an implementation detail. It doesn't require a new law. It could be a public service offered by the government or by a non profit organization, where participation is voluntary. You would be free to buy only DRM media whose keys are held by a trusted 3d party.
Could their be good useful DRM sure, I doubt anybody major will ever implement it. Their are means today that can cost effectively curb piracy the corps involved choose not to use them.
If it's useful, then people will implement it. I don't pretend to know what the most effective piracy control methods are. All I know is that it is possible (i.e. not impossible) for DRM to get better, and that if it does, more people will use it.
If it's immoral to "own" information. Why is it moral to own atoms? They existed well before human beings. Why is it moral to own land? Is the fact that your ancestors and their ancestors claimed ownership of the land a long time ago? Is conquering people and taking their land a good claim on ownership? Why is it moral to own natural resources? Because the resources happen to be within the artificial borders of the thing you called a country?
I am not saying that physical property and intellectual property are not different. They are.
I am saying that the moral question of whether it is moral or immoral to own either is subjective.
Things that are not true:
1. If you can;t accomplish a task with "billions of dollars", it is impossible
2. Zero progress has been made in the field of DRM.
You simply cannot keep unauthorized parties from viewing content without getting in the way of authorized parties viewing the same content. There's probably a law of information propagation which describes this phenomenon.
"getting in the way" is rather vague, so I don;t think it can be a law of anything without being formalized. Furthermore, I don't think DRM needs to be 100% unobtrusive to be effective.
Encryption is not 100% unobtrusive to the people using it. It is still quite effective.
No, I am saying DRM is unfair, period. It's not just the implementation, or the excesses. It is the goal. They are trying to make ideas and thinking no different than material property. They want people to have to buy and sell ideas as if they were no different than material goods such as clothes.
If you are morally opposed to the whole concept of intellectual property, that's fine. That's a value judgement. I am not interested in criticizing value judgements. I am sympathetic to the view that the idea of intellectual property can stifle innovation along with other negative consequences. However, I think if done correctly the concept of intellectual property may foster innovation.
What is the point of driving a single mother into bankruptcy and taking her home away, over a measly 24 songs? Her children certainly did nothing to deserve being kicked out of their home.
You are referring to a legal "solution" to enforcing the concept of intellectual property. DRM is a technical solution to this problem. Imagine if there were no laws but only DRM to try to stop people form piracy. Maybe she is not technically savvy enough to bypass the DRM. Oh well she doesn't get the 24 songs, or is forced to pay for them. Or maybe her kids are good with computers and are able to download some tools to break the DRM, then she does get the 24 songs and the media company loses a few bucks. Either way no one is going to jail. It is only the legal punishments which have the potential to destroy people's lives.
I do agree that equating physical and intellectual property is silly. They have different properties which make the consequences of "theft" different. But just out of curiosity, what would you say to someone who believes it is immoral to own physical property? I am also sympathetic to the view that no one should be able to "own" things like property and natural resources.
DRM requires that there be some part of your device that you do not control.
Not necessarily. This is how current DRM schemes usually work. Also, having a device that you do not have complete control over is not necessarily a bad thing. Look at things like TPM, that work on this premise.
Remember that all this DRM gear adds to the cost to consumers, a massive cost in actuality.
On average. It may actually one day lower the cost to paying consumers by forcing pirates to pay for content as well.
Lets look at audio, sales went up 10% once DRM was removed, do you still think media's requirement for DRM is about stopping piracy vs having control?
I am not talking about specific existing DRM schemes. I am talking about the possibility of DRM working better in the future.
It's fair that media industry can try and stop piracy, they should not get special laws to do so, they should not be allowed to effectively have low level access to every bit of hardware to do so.
I agree that they should not get special laws. I feel like good DRM (i.e a technical solution) could be potentially much better than a legal "solution".
Frankly the best thing the government could do is ditch the protective laws and start heavily taxing all DRM'ed goods and require that the master keys for said DRM be held in escrow by the library of congress or similar with a provision if they fail to continue to manage said DRM they will release the keys and the applicable work goes into public domain.
And this is a good example of a possible DRM solution.
Were at a point where if we do not do something effective DRM means we will loose a massive ammount of our shared culture in the long run. Not a price I'm willing to pay to potentially increase the profitability of fairly small group of corps.
I think it is very important to prevent bad DRM solutions (of the kind that most are today) from flourishing. I just don't think that it is impossible to have good DRM.
Give that some more thought. DRM is unfair, period. Big Media has been running a massive propaganda campaign to convince everyone that piracy is immoral, and no different than stealing. It sounds like they still have you halfway convinced.
So DRM as implemented by Big Media today is unfair, therefore all future DRM implementations by anyone for any purpose are also unfair?
This is like saying GMO is evil because Monsanto is evil.
Think of all the great innovations that have happened. Before those innovations, no one had thought of a good way to realize that particular innovation. Look at something like the field of cryptography. There millennia of failed (i.e. insecure) encryption schemes before truly good encryption was innovated. The fact that a lot of human effort had been spent on unsuccessful cryptography in the past was not an indication that good cryptography was impossible.
There are really hard problems being solved every day. It's foolish to think that past failures imply indefinite future failures.
It never ceases to amaze me how unforgiving people can be. It might make you feel good to say Keurig should die but there are hundreds (thousands?) of people working at Keurig that had nothing to do with this decision and it seems kind of heartless to say they should all lose their jobs because a few executives made a bad decision later changed their mind.
I realize many people might lose their jobs (at a poorly managed company). My hope would be that these people would get new jobs at other companies (possibly even at the company that buys Keurig).
Enron was an utterly corrupt company. The harm done by this company far exceeded any of the benefits of the jobs they provided. People can get new jobs at companies that are not stealing money from society. I'm not even saying Keurig is anywhere as close to as bad as Enron.
Furthermore, if you read my post you'll see that the reason I want Keurig to die is to prevent other companies from following the same path (and hence preventing further jobs from being "lost" or what I would rather call "changed").
In the case of Keurig nobody has lost their job or their retirement savings because of this, it's just a cup of coffee.
It is not the case that retirements are necessarily lost when companies die. It might be the case for employees whose retirement savings is entirely in the form of Keurig stock (which would be really dumb).
I've got no issue with stopping piracy, but DRM does not do that, it restricts usage by people that actually bought it. It removed peoples right to access things when DRM servers go away etc etc.
I don't dispute that most implementations of DRM are not consumer friendly. This does not mean that DRM must necessarily be implemented in a way that embodies all the negative effects normally associated with it.
Maybe someone will figure out a game changing DRM scheme that effectively stops piracy without the negative side effects.
My point was not that DRM as it exists today is good. My point was that that goal of stopping piracy is not an unfair goal to attempt to achieve. As opposed to vendor lock in (where even the goal unhindered by side effects) , was unacceptable.
I am not even opposed to DRM per se. DRM as a means of piracy prevention is fair (although it's rarely implemented in a good way). DRM as a means of vendor lock in is completely unacceptable. If Keurig somehow remains successful, it reinforces the precedent that dabbling with vendor lock in is ok, as long as you apologize when it becomes a PR problem. What would be better is if a huge company goes bankrupt over it, and scares other companies from trying the same thing.
This is the question I asked myself when reading this story. I couldn't imagine why anybody would care so much about these sorts of completely inconsequential secrets. The fact that they are involving lawyers and and threatening litigation, however, makes me feel like this sorority should have it's names changed to something like "Pile of Shit Society" or something, and I'm glad these piles of shit are having their secrets revealed. Maybe the fact that the handshakes are revealed will be a plausible excuse for why you might know the handshake. I sure wouldn't want people to know I was a legacy pile of shit.
Kansas *politicians* might cave because politicians will do anything to get re-elected, and some of those politicians may decide that caving increases their chances of re-election, especially considering Kansas is supposedly a "red state" that thinks the market is better than government regulations.
Municipalities and states which have passed laws around commercial for-hire vehicles are pushing back and saying "you don't get to tell us what our laws are". This has nothing to do with entrenched players pushing back other than them pointing out that if they're subject to those laws, Uber can't come along and claim to not be.
If that is the case, why are they passing new laws? Shouldn't the existing laws be sufficient to shutdown uber?
Furthermore, it is not necessarily the case that laws reflect the will of the people. Many laws are outdated, and fixed problems that no longer exist, or problems that now have better solutions. Just because a law exists doesn't mean it *should* exist.
Slashdot Mirror
There are levels of anonymity.
1. The ballots are anonymous as long as the voter wishes to keep it anonymous.
2. The ballots are anonymous regardless of whether the voter wishes to reveal their vote.
I think just having level 1 is probably fine. Plus having level 2 means that a voter can;t check that his/her vote was counted correctly.
Voting is a bad idea, because the dominant family member could have such psychological control over his family members, that they vote according to his will even when in a private booth.
Restricting access to publicly available information is an impossible problem.
Restricting access to publicly available information is indeed impossible. DRM does not do this. It instead restricts access to private information (e.g. a compressed video stream), and allows authorized users access to a transformed version of that information (e.g. a raw DVI signal or pixels on a monitor).
DRM does not really work, and inconveniences and annoys customers who want to make legitimate use of what they bought
It does work, which is why companies continue to use it. It obviously would be nice if it worked better. There are examples of DRM which do not annoy or inconvenience customers (e.g. steam).
Outlawing communication does not work.
DRM is a technical solution not a legal solution. I am not sure why you are conflating these 2 ideas.
Going on a moral crusade and demonizing everyone as pirates does not work.
I hope you are not suggesting I am demonizing anyone.
Therefore, the problem of making money from information must be solved differently.
I am not saying a better solution doesn't exist or can't work. I am saying that it is not impossible that there could be advances in DRM technology that make it less annoying and inconvenient and more effective at preventing unauthorized access. It has already improved significantly over the last decade. Things like HDCP and blu-ray, while far from perfect, are vast improvements for older technologies like macrovision and css. If you are morally opposed to DRM, then I supposed you wouldn't view these as improvements, but I am speaking strictly from a technical perspective.
And, the moral angle: restriction is an immoral way to make money from information.
Why is it immoral? How do you decide if something is immoral?
We've had too many ordinary citizens railroaded in a court of law, given completely over the top penalties, without the plaintiffs having to prove that the defendants actually did anything illegal, because, you know, everyone does it. College students have been forced to give up their dreams of a college education, a mother has been forced into bankruptcy. We ought to have our digital public library up and running by now, but we don't. We should have been doing what Google Books is doing and more, but we can't thanks to our own copyright laws.
None of this has anything to do with DRM, but rather our legal system.
Does Using an AOL Email Address Suggest You're a Tech Dinosaur?
What's wrong with AOL? It's way better than Prodigy and Compuserve.
No, people are more likely to produce something if they benefit from it. That's quite different than owning it.
Do you not think one would derive more benefit from owning something they created than merely having access (along with everyone else) to it? For one thing, it is pretty hard to make money charging for access to information that everyone already has access to for free.
Factory work is all about being compensated for producing things that others own.
Actually factory work is all about selling labor to others. A gardener shouldn't own my yard because he "created" the landscaping.
Ownership is a means to aid people in gaining from their productivity. It is not the only means, and may not be the best means
I never said it was. I am saying that "Ownership (physical or intellectual) is immoral" is a subjective claim.
Debates can be had about whether ownership of physical or intelelctual property helps or hinders production in which scenarios (which is in my opinion the only convincing form of argument). Once you say X is immoral, there can be no discourse with someone who does not feel X is immoral.
I am sympathetic to the argument that ownership is detrimental to to the productivity of society in certain areas (like intellectual property). I am not sympathetic to the argument that ownership is categorically immoral.
I wasn't talking about vegetarianism. Animals have to eat other life to survive. Plants are alive. Is it moral to eat, whether that's plants or animals? As to what it has to do with ownership, eating is a taking, a stealing of other lives. The most fundamental thing any being owns is their own body. We should have a care not to be unconscious of the hypocrisy of screaming "thief!" over the mere copying-- not taking but just copying-- of the immaterial, when all of us are takers of food of which nearly all was once alive.
What I am saying is that those kind of moral judgements are subjective. Simply claiming that ownership of physical or intellectual property or living property, is just your opinion. It doesn't carry any weight with someone who does not share that value.
Communism, you say? There are more choices than communism and capitalism.
I don;t think I claimed any kind of dichotomy.
Ownership has many benefits.
I never said it didn't. I was only giving a counter example to your claim that ownership was the only way stop people from fighting over resources.
And you left out one very important benefit of ownership. It incentivizes production. One is more likely to produce something if they are then able to own it. This benefit extends to intellectual property as well, if society enforces intellectual property rights.
since you are now making a utilitarian argument for ownership rather than an ethical one, this is the utilitarian argument for intellectual property.
Why is it moral to eat? Animals depend entirely on other life for food. Plants get energy from the sun and convert raw materials into living tissue, animals mostly can't, and must eat plants or other animals to survive.
I don't know if you are aware, but there are actually human beings that do not eat other animals. I'm not sure what this has to do with ownership.
Ownership is only a legal and social custom to keep order, stop people from fighting each other over who gets to use an item that can only be used by one group at a time, or who gets to consume a perishable item.
It is not the only method to accomplish this. There is also communism. We can have a central authority ensuring that everyone has fair use over all of humanity's collective possessions.
TPM is very different it protects my keys for me, potentially even against physical attacks
I'm not saying TPM isn't different. I'm saying it's an example of a technology that works because of the fact that you don't have complete control over your machine. (i.e. you don't need full control over your machine for that machine to be useful).
Be have a far different opinion of how things are priced, media tends to charge what the market will stand, and used region coding (in many ways part of DRM) to artificially segment those markets. So I doubt that the consumer will see any savings.
I am not a fan of price discrimination either, but it does have some benefits. It allows drug companies to make life saving drugs much cheaper for developing countries, while still making a profit by charging much higher prices to people where they can. If you live in America you will not see any savings. If you live in Somalia, you probably will.
If anything I think prices will go up as piracy gets harder and less user friendly.
It's hard to make a product for less than $0. So for pirates, the price will definitely be going up on average.
In any event I'm talking about the hardware were all paying a hidden amount to support current DRM and implement future DRM.
You are not forced to pay for anything. You are free to support whatever DRM free media you want. The content owners can sell their media in whatever format they like. Maybe they will decide DRM isn't worth it. That's their decision to make.
DRM can not work "better", if I can watch something I can copy it the question is how much loss. Remember that the further up the stack the more places you need to have DRM.
DRM can work better. If the best way you can circumvent DRM is to record your monitor with a camcorder, I think most people would agree that the DRM is working pretty good. Furthermore, interactive media like video games, and other "non-media" things which one might want to prevent unauthorized access to, can be protected with DRM even if you are allowed to "watch it". You can't copy a video game with a camcorder.
I'm more in they should get one or the other, the FBI etc should go after large commercial pirates, the ones feeding the guys on the street selling DVD etc. We should not be going after people making backups or transcoding, things that were legal since the timeshifting case of the early 80's.
The real problem is that the justice system currently imposes penalties that far outweigh the damage caused by the crime of piracy. I don't think many people would have a problem with people being forced to buy the songs they were caught pirating (i.e. much closer to the actual financial damage caused).
This is not an example of a DRM scheme, requiring the the LOC hold in escrow all DRM keys would require a new law. This is about being able to recover our digital heritage generations from now and has really nothing to do with the DRM itself. Merely picking a responsible party who is already tasked with cataloging and maintaining copies of these sorts of things.
Which parties have access to private keys in an encryption/DRm scheme is absolutely an implementation detail. It doesn't require a new law. It could be a public service offered by the government or by a non profit organization, where participation is voluntary. You would be free to buy only DRM media whose keys are held by a trusted 3d party.
Could their be good useful DRM sure, I doubt anybody major will ever implement it. Their are means today that can cost effectively curb piracy the corps involved choose not to use them.
If it's useful, then people will implement it. I don't pretend to know what the most effective piracy control methods are. All I know is that it is possible (i.e. not impossible) for DRM to get better, and that if it does, more people will use it.
If it's immoral to "own" information. Why is it moral to own atoms? They existed well before human beings. Why is it moral to own land? Is the fact that your ancestors and their ancestors claimed ownership of the land a long time ago? Is conquering people and taking their land a good claim on ownership? Why is it moral to own natural resources? Because the resources happen to be within the artificial borders of the thing you called a country?
I am not saying that physical property and intellectual property are not different. They are.
I am saying that the moral question of whether it is moral or immoral to own either is subjective.
Things that are not true:
1. If you can;t accomplish a task with "billions of dollars", it is impossible
2. Zero progress has been made in the field of DRM.
You simply cannot keep unauthorized parties from viewing content without getting in the way of authorized parties viewing the same content. There's probably a law of information propagation which describes this phenomenon.
"getting in the way" is rather vague, so I don;t think it can be a law of anything without being formalized. Furthermore, I don't think DRM needs to be 100% unobtrusive to be effective.
Encryption is not 100% unobtrusive to the people using it. It is still quite effective.
No, I am saying DRM is unfair, period. It's not just the implementation, or the excesses. It is the goal. They are trying to make ideas and thinking no different than material property. They want people to have to buy and sell ideas as if they were no different than material goods such as clothes.
If you are morally opposed to the whole concept of intellectual property, that's fine. That's a value judgement. I am not interested in criticizing value judgements. I am sympathetic to the view that the idea of intellectual property can stifle innovation along with other negative consequences. However, I think if done correctly the concept of intellectual property may foster innovation.
What is the point of driving a single mother into bankruptcy and taking her home away, over a measly 24 songs? Her children certainly did nothing to deserve being kicked out of their home.
You are referring to a legal "solution" to enforcing the concept of intellectual property. DRM is a technical solution to this problem. Imagine if there were no laws but only DRM to try to stop people form piracy. Maybe she is not technically savvy enough to bypass the DRM. Oh well she doesn't get the 24 songs, or is forced to pay for them. Or maybe her kids are good with computers and are able to download some tools to break the DRM, then she does get the 24 songs and the media company loses a few bucks. Either way no one is going to jail. It is only the legal punishments which have the potential to destroy people's lives.
I do agree that equating physical and intellectual property is silly. They have different properties which make the consequences of "theft" different. But just out of curiosity, what would you say to someone who believes it is immoral to own physical property? I am also sympathetic to the view that no one should be able to "own" things like property and natural resources.
You seem to be making a lot of assumptions there.
DRM requires that there be some part of your device that you do not control.
Not necessarily. This is how current DRM schemes usually work. Also, having a device that you do not have complete control over is not necessarily a bad thing. Look at things like TPM, that work on this premise.
Remember that all this DRM gear adds to the cost to consumers, a massive cost in actuality.
On average. It may actually one day lower the cost to paying consumers by forcing pirates to pay for content as well.
Lets look at audio, sales went up 10% once DRM was removed, do you still think media's requirement for DRM is about stopping piracy vs having control?
I am not talking about specific existing DRM schemes. I am talking about the possibility of DRM working better in the future.
It's fair that media industry can try and stop piracy, they should not get special laws to do so, they should not be allowed to effectively have low level access to every bit of hardware to do so.
I agree that they should not get special laws. I feel like good DRM (i.e a technical solution) could be potentially much better than a legal "solution".
Frankly the best thing the government could do is ditch the protective laws and start heavily taxing all DRM'ed goods and require that the master keys for said DRM be held in escrow by the library of congress or similar with a provision if they fail to continue to manage said DRM they will release the keys and the applicable work goes into public domain.
And this is a good example of a possible DRM solution.
Were at a point where if we do not do something effective DRM means we will loose a massive ammount of our shared culture in the long run. Not a price I'm willing to pay to potentially increase the profitability of fairly small group of corps.
I think it is very important to prevent bad DRM solutions (of the kind that most are today) from flourishing. I just don't think that it is impossible to have good DRM.
Give that some more thought. DRM is unfair, period. Big Media has been running a massive propaganda campaign to convince everyone that piracy is immoral, and no different than stealing. It sounds like they still have you halfway convinced.
So DRM as implemented by Big Media today is unfair, therefore all future DRM implementations by anyone for any purpose are also unfair?
This is like saying GMO is evil because Monsanto is evil.
Think of all the great innovations that have happened. Before those innovations, no one had thought of a good way to realize that particular innovation. Look at something like the field of cryptography. There millennia of failed (i.e. insecure) encryption schemes before truly good encryption was innovated. The fact that a lot of human effort had been spent on unsuccessful cryptography in the past was not an indication that good cryptography was impossible.
There are really hard problems being solved every day. It's foolish to think that past failures imply indefinite future failures.
It never ceases to amaze me how unforgiving people can be. It might make you feel good to say Keurig should die but there are hundreds (thousands?) of people working at Keurig that had nothing to do with this decision and it seems kind of heartless to say they should all lose their jobs because a few executives made a bad decision later changed their mind.
I realize many people might lose their jobs (at a poorly managed company). My hope would be that these people would get new jobs at other companies (possibly even at the company that buys Keurig).
Enron was an utterly corrupt company. The harm done by this company far exceeded any of the benefits of the jobs they provided. People can get new jobs at companies that are not stealing money from society. I'm not even saying Keurig is anywhere as close to as bad as Enron.
Furthermore, if you read my post you'll see that the reason I want Keurig to die is to prevent other companies from following the same path (and hence preventing further jobs from being "lost" or what I would rather call "changed").
In the case of Keurig nobody has lost their job or their retirement savings because of this, it's just a cup of coffee.
It is not the case that retirements are necessarily lost when companies die. It might be the case for employees whose retirement savings is entirely in the form of Keurig stock (which would be really dumb).
I've got no issue with stopping piracy, but DRM does not do that, it restricts usage by people that actually bought it. It removed peoples right to access things when DRM servers go away etc etc.
I don't dispute that most implementations of DRM are not consumer friendly. This does not mean that DRM must necessarily be implemented in a way that embodies all the negative effects normally associated with it.
Maybe someone will figure out a game changing DRM scheme that effectively stops piracy without the negative side effects.
My point was not that DRM as it exists today is good. My point was that that goal of stopping piracy is not an unfair goal to attempt to achieve. As opposed to vendor lock in (where even the goal unhindered by side effects) , was unacceptable.
You don't think it's fair to stop piracy?
Philosopher's Syndrome: "mistaking a lack of imagination for an insight into necessity".
The fact that you can't think of a good way to implement DRM, doesn't mean that a good way doesn't/can't exist.
I am not even opposed to DRM per se. DRM as a means of piracy prevention is fair (although it's rarely implemented in a good way). DRM as a means of vendor lock in is completely unacceptable. If Keurig somehow remains successful, it reinforces the precedent that dabbling with vendor lock in is ok, as long as you apologize when it becomes a PR problem. What would be better is if a huge company goes bankrupt over it, and scares other companies from trying the same thing.
This is the question I asked myself when reading this story. I couldn't imagine why anybody would care so much about these sorts of completely inconsequential secrets. The fact that they are involving lawyers and and threatening litigation, however, makes me feel like this sorority should have it's names changed to something like "Pile of Shit Society" or something, and I'm glad these piles of shit are having their secrets revealed. Maybe the fact that the handshakes are revealed will be a plausible excuse for why you might know the handshake. I sure wouldn't want people to know I was a legacy pile of shit.
I would buy an affordable tesla just to avoid dealing with car dealerships.
Kansas *politicians* might cave because politicians will do anything to get re-elected, and some of those politicians may decide that caving increases their chances of re-election, especially considering Kansas is supposedly a "red state" that thinks the market is better than government regulations.
If the real problem was that uber was ignoring laws, why was it necessary to pass a new law? Why not just enforce the existing laws?
Municipalities and states which have passed laws around commercial for-hire vehicles are pushing back and saying "you don't get to tell us what our laws are". This has nothing to do with entrenched players pushing back other than them pointing out that if they're subject to those laws, Uber can't come along and claim to not be.
If that is the case, why are they passing new laws? Shouldn't the existing laws be sufficient to shutdown uber?
Furthermore, it is not necessarily the case that laws reflect the will of the people. Many laws are outdated, and fixed problems that no longer exist, or problems that now have better solutions. Just because a law exists doesn't mean it *should* exist.