FSF Sees Hopeful Signs Before Sunday's 'Day Against DRM' (defectivebydesign.org) 124
The Free Software Foundation's anti-DRM initiative "Defective By Design" argues that since last year's annual Day Against DRM, "we've seen cracks appearing in the foundation of the DRM status quo."
The companies that profit from Digital Restrictions Management are still trying to expand the system of law and technology that weakens our security and curtails our rights, in an effort to prop up their exploitative business models. But since the last International Day Against DRM, the TPP trade agreement -- a key pro-DRM initiative -- crashed and burned. And our allies at the Electronic Frontier Foundation brought major legal and regulatory challenges against DRM in Washington DC... If we play our cards right, this may be the beginning of the end of DRM.
On Sunday, July 9, 2017, we will channel this momentum into the International Day Against DRM. We'll be gathering, protesting, and making -- showing the world that we insist on a future without Digital Restrictions Management. Will you join us? Here's what you can do now:
They're asking supporters to plan a protest, translate their fliers into more languages, voice support in videos and blog posts, or make endorsements. And you can also join the "DRM Elimination crew" mailing list or their Freenode IRC channel #dbd for year-round conversation and collaboration with the anti-DRM movement -- or simply make a donation to show your support.
On Sunday, July 9, 2017, we will channel this momentum into the International Day Against DRM. We'll be gathering, protesting, and making -- showing the world that we insist on a future without Digital Restrictions Management. Will you join us? Here's what you can do now:
They're asking supporters to plan a protest, translate their fliers into more languages, voice support in videos and blog posts, or make endorsements. And you can also join the "DRM Elimination crew" mailing list or their Freenode IRC channel #dbd for year-round conversation and collaboration with the anti-DRM movement -- or simply make a donation to show your support.
Re: Propaganda in the summary (Score:2, Insightful)
It is correct though.
They use language that's intentionally deceptive to fool people and lawmakers, and the FSF just fights back.
DRM manages restrictions. So it's fine to call it that.
OK, if we're being honest then... (Score:1)
OK, so can we also stop complaining when people refer to copyright infringement as fraud or theft, and start prosecuting it as a criminal offence rather than treating it as a civil matter? After all, it typically does have the overall effect of permanently removing compensation from a legitimate rightsholder for the benefit of the infringer, and you can only dress it up as "they might not have bought it anyway" or "the rightsholder didn't actually lose anything" if you're willing to completely ignore econom
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Citation needed.
No, it really isn't. This is just basic logic. For example, if everyone did as the infringers do, taking a copy of a work without paying for it, would the creators receive any compensation at all, never mind more than they would have received if everyone just paid directly?
We have libraries for more than 2 kiloyears and they never needed DRM.
And how many of those libraries could buy one copy of a work and then provide infinite copies simultaneously for all of their visitors to keep? Indeed, how many bought works at all? How many works did they even have, and how many librarie
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For example, if everyone did as the infringers do, taking a copy of a work without paying for it, would the creators receive any compensation at all, never mind more than they would have received if everyone just paid directly?
Answer the first: Your logical fallacy is that of the ridiculous example, because everyone doesn't do that.
Answer the second: Even if they did, then people would have to get paid through other means, like touring. That has long been the only way most musicians actually make any money, because of the way contracts have worked.
When it took a skilled artist thousands of hours to produce a single duplicate copy of a book, everything was copy-protected, yet somehow society and culture survived.
When it took a skilled artist thousands of hours to produce a single duplicate copy of a book, nothing was copy-protected. The first known law involving the right to copy books was at A
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Your logical fallacy is that of the ridiculous example, because everyone doesn't do that.
Reductio ad absurdum [wikipedia.org] is not a fallacy unless it involves a straw man [wikipedia.org]. Could you elaborate on where you found a straw man?
Even if they did, then people would have to get paid through other means, like touring.
Not all work is in media and genres that can be performed live. How would "touring" support a video game? Or a movie? Or studio-produced music that can't be readily performed live, such as the second half of The Beatles' discography? Even in the case of a work that can be performed live, touring really only supports the performers, not the authors who wrote the work that the performer pe
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Your logical fallacy is that of the ridiculous example, because everyone doesn't do that.
There is nothing logically fallacious about a reductio ad absurdum argument.
Even if they did, then people would have to get paid through other means, like touring.
And how does an orchestral music composer make their money by touring? An independent game developer? The artist who drew the illustrations for that game's web site? A textbook author? That textbook's editorial team? The thousands of people who contribute to a summer blockbuster movie but aren't the famous lead actors, producers and directors?
The entire point of copyright is that it's an economic instrument. It produces commercial i
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if we had no copyright law and nothing better to replace it, less content would be created and overall the content would be of lower quality.
Perhaps something "better to replace" three-generation copyright [copyrightalliance.org] would involve a shorter copyright term and/or broader compulsory licensing. Otherwise, how does the legal power to ban the creation of fan-made derivative works decades later encourage the creation of a work now?
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This is why I carefully wrote "and nothing better to replace it".
I'm in no way attached to today's copyright system as some sort of global maximum for how well we can incentivize the ultimate end goal of producing more and better works. I think the practical implementations today have many problems, for both producers and consumers, and in particular I have no more time than probably most people here do for the corruption of the basic principle that Big Media lobbyists have achieved in recent times, includi
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This is why I carefully wrote "and nothing better to replace it".
"Nothing" would be better to replace it. It would stop copyright from interfering with rights, it would result in a shakeup of entrenched media companies which abuse the law, and it would have zero administration overhead. Nobody would be imprisoned for sharing research performed in part with public funding with the public. The FBI could stop taking any copyright cases and have more time to work on catching violent criminals.
in the meantime, I have little time for those who exploit the current system at the expense of those who create the works they enjoy and/or those who do pay honestly to support them.
That's why you should be opposed to the copyright cartel, which is made up of a bun
Taking the Fifth (Score:2)
For this post I define "property" as "that which is subject to an exclusive right".
Compulsory licensing is a more difficult question. In theory it might be a good thing, but in practice I am wary of requiring anyone to surrender the control they have of their work by law
In Slashdot's home country, the owner of an exclusive right in a particular property, be it land or a work of authorship, has a Fifth Amendment right to "just compensation" for public use of the property. Constitutionally, a work can enter the eminent domain before it enters the public domain, and "control" doesn't enter into it. Once an author has been compensated enough to cover the cost of producing a work plus enough prof
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In Slashdot's home country, there are already criminal penalties for commercial infringement of copyright on a substantial scale.
As there are in quite a few other places these days. Unfortunately, that does nothing to help someone whose creative work goes viral, as we apparently call it these days, with the result that it is widely yet still illegally shared among a network of friends, via social media or otherwise. It doesn't need to be commercial infringement to pull the bottom out from under the commercial market, and the original creator has just as little compensation themselves regardless of whether someone else was making mone
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if everyone did as the infringers do, taking a copy of a work without paying for it, would the creators receive any compensation at all
If new copies of a work are not available through legitimate channels, what compensation is the work's author losing? Examples include the film Song of the South and the English dub of the TV series Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea.
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In those cases, maybe nothing. But let's be honest, most infringement of DRM-protected works is not that situation at all. The vast majority of online infringement is copying works that are recent and readily available via at least one legal channel.
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The vast majority of online infringement is copying works that are recent and readily available via at least one legal channel.
If it's DRM encumbered enough then it's not readily available, kinda by definition. I have a shitty internet connection by EU standards, though there are people with worse. It's bad enough that for example streaming video is more or less unwatchably bad.
Without DRM, I'd simply buy a video, download it as a file and watch it, just as I do with music. Instead, I buy DVDs (technically
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I have a shitty internet connection by EU standards, though there are people with worse. It's bad enough that for example streaming video is more or less unwatchably bad.
You also can't watch a film if you don't have a screen. You have to buy a device that can show the film to enjoy it. That doesn't mean the distributor has to give you free admission to your local theatre instead, though. I think you're confusing two quite separate issues here.
It's about whitelisting screens (Score:2)
Then let me rephrase the DRM issue in a more germane way that excludes your example of a customer who lacks any sort of screen: "I have purchased a copy of your motion picture and want to be able to watch it on any screen I already have, not just those few screens on your whitelist."
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You also can't watch a film if you don't have a screen. You have to buy a device that can show the film to enjoy it. That doesn't mean the distributor has to give you free admission to your local theatre instead, though. I think you're confusing two quite separate issues here.
You need to stop getting emotionally invested and read what you wrote and my replies. Seriously.
You claimed it was readily available. It's not all that readily available. Buying a screen is a vastly different proposition from selling m
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I have a shitty internet connection by EU standards, though there are people with worse. It's bad enough that for example streaming video is more or less unwatchably bad.
You also can't watch a film if you don't have a screen. You have to buy a device that can show the film to enjoy it. That doesn't mean the distributor has to give you free admission to your local theatre instead, though. I think you're confusing two quite separate issues here.
You're the one who wants to blather about the purpose of copyright supposedly being so that more people can enjoy more works (which is revisionist, history-ignoring bullshit but anyway) and now you're being presented with a clear-cut example of DRM being used to back up copyright law so intensely that it actually prevents that, and you make glib excuses to justify your shitty, oppressive, corporate whore worldview instead of acknowledging that someone is actually being harmed by the technology that you clai
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But serviscope_minor wasn't talking about purchasing a copy of the movie, they were talking about not being able to stream it from a legitimate source because of a technical limitation in their own connection that wasn't the streaming service's fault or responsibility. The work was available on a reasonable basis from a legitimate source, it's just that in this case someone didn't have the necessary equipment to benefit from that particular channel. It's not exactly practical to say that rightsholders must
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It is readily available to the public via streaming, just not to you for reasons that are hardly the supplier's fault. Obviously the entire world does not revolve around the convenience of one specific customer, and I think it's unreasonable to expect suppliers to open themselves up to potentially significant losses just to avoid inconveniencing you. As you point out yourself, you do have other legal channels available to obtain the work.
I've never said you were advocating piracy anywhere, nor do I have thi
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It is readily available to the public via streaming, just not to you for reasons that are hardly the supplier's fault.
The supplier chose to use DRM. It's entirely the supplier's fault. Nobody held a gun to their head and made them do it. If you know otherwise, then let us know who it was, and then we can blame them. Until then, you're a fine example of Stockholm Syndrome as you make excuses for those who abuse you, but you're not saying anything worth listening to for any other reason.
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Obviously the entire world does not revolve around the convenience of one specific customer,
There are literally millions of people in first world countries with worse internet connections than I have. I like how you purposely ignored that and pretended that I'm literally the only person without a great connection.
and I think it's unreasonable to expect suppliers to open themselves up to potentially significant losses just to avoid inconveniencing you.
Your logic is that to prevent people from downloading it
Re: It's about whitelisting screens (Score:2)
That's he crux of the issue. You only purchased the disc. You licensed the content.
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The supplier chose to use DRM. It's entirely the supplier's fault. Nobody held a gun to their head and made them do it.
Incorrect, the movie companies demanded DRM otherwise they will not allow a license.
The supplier is "the movie companies". Who forced digital restrictions management on them?
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A teenager getting a movie of TPB is in no way fraud because there is no element of misrepresentation.
The uploader to TPB misrepresented that he had the right to make the movie available to the teenager under current law.
Can't distribute handheld games without DRM (Score:2)
The supplier chose to use DRM. It's entirely the supplier's fault.
How is it the supplier's fault when all relevant means of delivering a work to the public use digital restrictions management? For example, in the market of video games for handheld devices with physical buttons, both viable platforms (PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS) require use of DRM. The only widely used handheld video game platform that allows DRM-free distribution is Android, which allows the user to temporarily allow installation of APK files from unknown sources. But the problem with Android as a
Re:OK, if we're being honest then... (Score:4, Insightful)
I buy DVDs from the local second hand place and watch them. That way the copyright holders never see a penny of what I spend
Yes they do. The existence of a 2nd-hand market supports a higher 1st sale price. I will pay more for a new DVD or book if I know I can resell it to get some of that money back.
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The existence of a 2nd-hand market supports a higher 1st sale price. I will pay more for a new DVD or book if I know I can resell it to get some of that money back.
I'm not sure I agree. The second hand resale value is pretty pitiful: the shop charges a *lot* more than they pay me for it since they're a shop with costs. And whe the DVD costs 50p at the conuter, there's not much to spread around. Besides, I don't ever sell on DVDs, I give them away to the local charity shop.
There are cases where resale value
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If new copies of a work are not available through legitimate channels, what compensation is the work's author losing?
In those cases, maybe nothing.
Then why isn't the copyright statute written to acknowledge that the copyright owner is losing "maybe nothing"?
But let's be honest, most infringement of DRM-protected works is not that situation at all.
Even if the majority of violating acts are clearly harmful, if there are an identifiable minority of violating acts that aren't provably harmful, it's still unjust to ban them.
The vast majority of online infringement is copying works that are recent and readily available via at least one legal channel.
What's the "at least one legal channel" for, say, the rights to make fan-made mashups of popular recorded music as a comment on the similarity of their compositions? And why is it just to continue to ban trade in the minority
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Then why isn't the copyright statute written to acknowledge that the copyright owner is losing "maybe nothing"?
In some places, it is. As a civil matter, in many jurisdictions a rightsholder could only sue for actual damages, and in the kinds of situation you're talking about there either wouldn't be anyone with standing to sue or the actual damages would be zero anyway.
Even if the majority of violating acts are clearly harmful, if there are an identifiable minority of violating acts that aren't provably harmful, it's still unjust to ban them.
Unfortunately, it's not practical for a functioning legal system to work on such an absolute basis.
For example, as a driver I have an above average level of training and experience, I drive a well-maintained vehicle with above average performance, and
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As a civil matter, in many jurisdictions a rightsholder could only sue for actual damages, and in the kinds of situation you're talking about there either wouldn't be anyone with standing to sue or the actual damages would be zero anyway.
In Slashdot's home country, the copyright owner has standing to sue for statutory damages.
For example, as a driver I have an above average level of training and experience, I drive a well-maintained vehicle with above average performance, and I have an excellent record of safe driving over many years. Should my judgement therefore supersede statutory limits about speeds, passing stop signs or red lights, etc?
I was thinking more along the lines of traffic statutes in some U.S. states that allow cyclists waiting at a red traffic signal to treat the red traffic signal as a stop sign after having waited two minutes. States put this sort of law into place because it's cheaper than upgrading all demand-actuated approaches to reliably recognize bicycles while reliably rejecting false detections in the adjacent lane.
What's the "at least one legal channel" for, say, the rights to make fan-made mashups of popular recorded music as a comment on the similarity of their compositions?
Maybe there isn't one, at least not without doing some work. But surely you're not suggesting this sort of activity is more than a tiny fraction of copying that gets done?
It's perhaps "
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In Slashdot's home country, the copyright owner has standing to sue for statutory damages.
The US is anomalous in this respect, and I think many of us would agree that the US legal system allows far too much exploitation of copyrights when it isn't necessarily justified. Put another way, the problem here isn't the fundamental principle of copyright, it's the nature of the US legal system and its current implementation of that principle.
Even in the US system, my understanding is that someone has to have standing to bring a lawsuit for those statutory damages. In peripheral cases like orphan works,
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No, it really isn't. This is just basic logic. For example, if everyone did as the infringers do, taking a copy of a work without paying for it, would the creators receive any compensation at all
I guess it is basic logic that if a thing that doesn't happen happens then something else that doesn't happen might happen as a result.
I mean sure, but so what? If unicorns invaded and started shitting candy everywhere then the diabetes problem would get worse. EVERYBODY PANIC.
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It's called reductio ad absurdum. The point is to take an argument to its logical conclusion, and show that if that conclusion is obviously silly then the argument doesn't work.
You can argue that if a single person didn't purchase a work but instead enjoyed it via an illegal copy, no money was lost. Maybe they told their friends and resulted in some extra sales. Maybe they could never have afforded it anyway. There are plenty of rationalisations that get thrown around if you only consider a single case in i
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It's called reductio ad absurdum.
Actually no, I think it was more slippery slope than reductio ad absurdum. Slippery slope is't a logical fallacy per-se, but it's not necessarily always valid either.
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You can argue that if a single person didn't purchase a work but instead enjoyed it via an illegal copy, no money was lost. Maybe they told their friends and resulted in some extra sales. Maybe they could never have afforded it anyway. There are plenty of rationalisations that get thrown around if you only consider a single case in isolation.
But you can't argue that if everyone did that then the system would still work, and so if you look at the big picture, necessarily people who break the rules must be causing harm to some degree, because collectively they are responsible for the creator losing out on all their money.
By that logic, we can't have musicians. Sure, some people can be musicians, but what would happen if all people were musicians? No one would farm the food we eat, and everyone would die! Musicians must therefore be causing harm to society, and we should make being a musician illegal.
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A more apt conclusion from your example would be that musicians only get to eat if someone else does the farming. Fortunately, we have the concept of currency, so people from different walks of life can contribute in different ways and recognise the value of each other's contributions.
What you can't have is a lot of musicians who all get to take the farmers' food for free. One musician might not cause a big loss if the farmer was going to have surplus crops anyway, but one thousand musicians all taking the
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Dang, I just had a bunch of mod points and they are gone, wish I could mod parent up. Very well said.
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OK, so can we also stop complaining when people refer to copyright infringement as fraud or theft
Copyright infringement isn't theft, nothing was stolen. It's not fraud, unless you present it as something it's not.
Because while applying DRM on works you're supplying as a permanent purchase is one thing, some form of restriction is necessary in practice for any business model that works on a less permanent basis.
DRM does nothing at all to prevent copying of visual/audible art by those that wish to copy. Thus it is defective by design.
Far from being exploitative, those business models have been some of the most successful of the Internet age at both providing sustainable revenues for producers and providing more, cheaper and more easily accessible content to consumers.
Since DRM fails at its core stated purpose, I'd say there's something else afoot in providing for that revenue. In music, especially, we have demonstrable proof in iTunes, Amazon, etc, that no DRM has actually caused increased legal sales. In gog, we have proof that peopl
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Copyright infringement isn't theft, nothing was stolen.
Of course it was. The economic effect is literally no different to paying for a work legally, enjoying that work as allowed by the deal, but then stealing that money back from the person who provided it to you.
The fact that in the copyright case the money never changed hands in the first place doesn't change the fact that one side is honouring the deal while the other side is not. If you hired someone to provide a service, say cleaning your house or insuring your car against theft, but then refused to pay a
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The economic effect is literally no different to paying for a work legally, enjoying that work as allowed by the deal, but then stealing that money back from the person who provided it to you.
In the case of things that aren't available from its author at all, such as out-of-print works or the rights to make a fan-made derivative work, how much is "that money"?
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I addressed this point in response to your earlier comment. Orphan works and the like are fair points, but the vast majority of cases where infringement and DRM are relevant issues don't fall into those edge cases.
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Please note that nowhere have I either supported or condoned extending the duration of copyright protection to the kinds of multi-lifetime silliness we see today, nor the games sometimes played around using derivative works as a vehicle for extending protections not otherwise granted. I'm as against these kinds of abuses as the next Slashdotter.
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Copyright infringement isn't theft, nothing was stolen.
Of course it was. The economic effect is literally no different to paying for a work legally, enjoying that work as allowed by the deal, but then stealing that money back from the person who provided it to you.
I'm not sure you understand what copyright infringement is nor its effects. Original law was all based on originators (authors) not having their works "stolen" by publishing houses (yes, even then they were unscrupulous) and having copies printed and sold without the author's consent nor compensating the author. Note this still wasn't theft. Heavy civil penalties might actually have made the punishment worse than other crimes, however, and for the time, large scale copyright infringement of even hundreds of
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Also, can everyone who refers to all DRM as defective by design please confirm that they have never rented anything in their lives, nor bought a one-off ticket to visit somewhere or to see something?
Until recently, most tickets' only DRM-like feature was difficult-to-forge authentication features like a holographic ribbon. Now they are all the way up to bar (or grid) codes which are authenticated against a centralized database, wow! Rental of most things other than media involves no DRM. Those things are not protected by technological features, because those technological features would impair their function, potentially precisely at the time you want to use them most. You know, just like DRM on media.
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Until recently, most tickets' only DRM-like feature was difficult-to-forge authentication features like a holographic ribbon. Now they are all the way up to bar (or grid) codes which are authenticated against a centralized database, wow! Rental of most things other than media involves no DRM.
Sorry, perhaps my point wasn't clear. The point I was trying to make was that alternative models to just purchasing everything permanently can be useful for all parties involved. Renting lets someone enjoy a work they might only want to see once while saving money relatively to a permanent purchase, for example.
On the other hand, people who copy a piece of media can actually increase its value, by increasing its popularity.
This is just a pyramid scheme argument. Hey, buddy, if you let me have the work you spent time and money creating for free, I'll tell all my friends, so they can have it for free as well! You'll be r
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On the other hand, people who copy a piece of media can actually increase its value, by increasing its popularity.
This is just a pyramid scheme argument. Hey, buddy, if you let me have the work you spent time and money creating for free, I'll tell all my friends, so they can have it for free as well! You'll be rich in no time!
It's nothing like a pyramid scheme and it has nothing to do with friends. Every person who drives down the street listening to your music increases your cachet, and increases the number of people who want to come to your shows and give you money, go to record stores and buy your product, etc. This is not conjecture, it is a fact, and there is research on the subject. Stop pretending I made it up, that's ignorant at best, and more likely disingenuous fuckery.
It's a convenient rationalisation to say that no money changed hands or would ever necessarily have changed hands, but that's no better than arguing that it's OK to hire someone to provide a service but then refusing to pay for it afterwards.
That is a stupid argument only made by stupid peop
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It's nothing like a pyramid scheme and it has nothing to do with friends.
It is exactly like a pyramid scheme. This is how networking effects work. People who don't want to pay for content tend to attract more people who don't want to pay for content. High value customers tend to attract other high value customers. "Increasing your cachet" with the former group is not just unhelpful, it's actively harmful. And unless you actually are in a market that makes a lot of money from live performances -- which actually covers remarkably little of the creative industries -- your argument
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Stop pretending I made it up, that's ignorant at best, and more likely disingenuous fuckery.
Yeah, OK. Not really interested in debating with someone who resorts to cursing and name-calling. Sorry.
What a convenient way to avoid answering all his valid points!
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OK, so can we also stop complaining when people refer to copyright infringement as fraud or theft, and start prosecuting it as a criminal offence rather than treating it as a civil matter?
How is that related? Furthermore, how is that even valid? Whether it's a criminal or civil matter is defined in the laws of the respective countries. Your /.er opinion has zero impact on what it actually is in each individual case, so there's zero point in making blanket statements like yours.
Also, can everyone who refers to all DRM as defective by design please confirm that they have never rented anything in their lives, nor bought a one-off ticket to visit somewhere or to see something?
And how is *that* related to authored works?
Far from being exploitative, those business models have been some of the most successful of the Internet age at both providing sustainable revenues for producers and providing more, cheaper and more easily accessible content to consumers.
You mean the way in which Netflix provides like one sixth of its catalog in my country, but for the same US price?
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The point is that alternative models to permanent purchases are both viable and useful for all parties involved. You mentioned Netflix, and yes, Netflix is better value in some countries that others. But the fact remains that if I want to enjoy binge-watching a TV show on Netflix today, I can do so from the comfort of my own home, in return for a small fee per month. A few years ago, enjoying the same content at the same rate would have meant going into town, renting one tape/disc with probably 2-4 episodes
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OK, so can we also stop complaining when people refer to copyright infringement as fraud or theft,
No, because it isn't.
and start prosecuting it as a criminal offence rather than treating it as a civil matter?
We already have. Assuming you're American: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
After all, it typically does have the overall effect of permanently removing compensation from a legitimate rightsholder for the benefit of the infringer,
No it doesn't. In the case of criminal copyright, where people are selling
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I'm not American, but in any case, where copyright is a criminal offence throughout the world it is typically only for large-scale commercial infringement that any public authority would intervene.
It's incorrect to argue that the teenager with $10,000 "worth" of movies squirreled away on his hard disk is guilty of anything akin to fraud because there has not been anything in the way of misrepresentation. It's also facile to argue that said teen deprived a company of more money then he's earned in his entire life. There are no possible circumstances under which the studio would have got the money from the teenager equivalent to the full price of all of the films.
If that same kid walked into a car showroom and drove off with a new vehicle that they couldn't possibly have paid for, no-one would say the showroom hadn't lost out because it was never going to make that money anyway.
If that kid hired a world class DJ to play at their birthday party but then at the end of the ni
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I'm not American
My mistake, but similar laws exist in many places. We have them in the UK too.
where copyright is a criminal offence throughout the world it is typically only for large-scale commercial infringement that any public authority would intervene
I don't think there's a minimum threshold for personal gain. But then again the police aren't going to follow up tiny cases in the same way they often don't follow up low level petty theft.
If that same kid walked into a car showroom and drove off
Irrelevant
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I'm not arguing the merits for or against copyright here, but I think your arguments currently lack merit. You have given examples where someone deprives someone else of a valuable physical item or time, neither of which can be duplicated.
It's not hard to find examples that don't have that immediate deprivation element. Can someone take out holiday insurance, go enjoy a holiday when in fact nothing bad happens, and then refuse to pay the bill? Of course not, no insurer would provide insurance without charging up front, and no insurer would refund the premium after the fact if no claim was made and so the insurance was "unnecessary". Whether or not the insurer could still have offered coverage to other customers during the same period makes n
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It is absolutely defective. DRM is the greedy response of a frantic industry desperate to wrest control away from you, at your expense.
When you buy certain classes of things -- like a game -- you expect to have access to it at your leisure, on your schedule and have faith that it will be available when you choose.. Imagine if everyone's Monopoly board went blank because Milton-Bradley went out of business? or simply decided to stop "supporting it" ? What if they decided you can only play their new WEB-BASED
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Because they will absolutely disappear. That is the entire reason for pushing DRM, and all the financial whining is just a convenient vehicle for the agenda.
No, it isn't, no matter how much people keep repeating it or ignoring the more reasonable applications of the same technology. One significant benefit of DRM is that it enables financial models other than outright purchase, which can be in the interests of all parties to the deal. Another benefit is that it can be quite effective at deterring casual infringement by the many people who simply don't understand the rules or know what they're even supposed to pay for. There's nothing morally wrong with either o
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And that's it. Exactly one case.
That one cases covers any rental or similar model, everything from PPV sporting events to binge-watching your favourite comedy show on Netflix via a playlist of the latest hits you enjoy from Spotify. It's hardly an insignificant market. I don't have useful stats to hand, but it may well cover the majority of new content consumption by now. Netflix alone represents a pretty substantial fraction of all Internet traffic today.
That's not "in the interests of all parties". It benefits only the company, and the measures enacted come at the people's expense. Especially so for legitimate paying customers since they are being punished/thwarted for a vague, ill-defined minority of bad actors.
Those legitimate paying customers you are so keen to protect may well be the ones fo
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After all, it typically does have the overall effect of permanently removing compensation from a legitimate rightsholder for the benefit of the infringer, and you can only dress it up as "they might not have bought it anyway" or "the rightsholder didn't actually lose anything" if you're willing to completely ignore economics while discussing a concept that exists precisely to apply something like the economic incentives of physical works to creative works as well.
Except most of us have first-hand knowledge that the RIAA/MPAA/BSA line of reasoning that a copy is the same as a lost sale is blatantly false. I remember swapping MP3 collections with friends and on LAN parties and whatnot, many thousands of imaginary dollars changing hands. I had a full copy of AutoCAD that cost many thousands of dollars alone just to play around with. Even if I had dedicated 100% of my allowance towards paying for bits and bytes it would be fractions of a cent on the dollar. We didn't ha
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Except most of us have first-hand knowledge that the RIAA/MPAA/BSA line of reasoning that a copy is the same as a lost sale is blatantly false.
Claiming that all copies are equivalent to the same number of lost sales is obviously false. Some people couldn't afford to buy in the first place.
But to be fair, claiming that none or only a few of those copies are equivalent to lost sales is similarly absurd. There are plenty of people who copy because they can get away with it but who could perfectly well have paid the asking price if they'd had to or could have saved up to buy a legit copy later.
Oh and about DRM on streaming, that stuff is still available on YouTube/torrents so if it works now I'd say it'd work tomorrow too without DRM because the DRM is actually not working very well.
This is one of the interesting parts of the debate, to me.
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But to be fair, claiming that none or only a few of those copies are equivalent to lost sales is similarly absurd.
Claiming none would be absurd. Claiming that only a tiny minority of them are equivalent to lost sales is definitely true.
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There's nothing definite about it. I've been involved with various experiments on this kind of thing in a professional capacity, and if you're thinking that locking down content only boosts conversions by a couple of percent or something, you are way off the mark.
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Like various other posters today, your argument seems to assume the only way anyone ever legally acquires creative content is through a permanent purchase. In that situation, I agree that DRM is much less relevant. But there are a lot of other financial models for distributing creative content, and some form of restriction is the only way you stop the temporary ones like pay-per-view or subscription libraries turning into the same thing as a purchase but without actually paying for it.
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DRM manages, that is, lessens, the rights. Think "weight management", "anger management", "crisis management" etc.
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Whether you believe it's a misnomer or not, DRM usually refers to "digital rights management" instead of "digital restrictions management" like what's in the summary. The summary reads like propaganda and is full of rhetoric. Slashdot used to actually be a news site, hence the former motto of news for nerds, stuff that matters. Now, it's run by terrible editors and spews propaganda. Slashdot loses credibility with nonsense like that. The management and editors are doing a wonderful job of running this site into the ground.
Maybe we should have a 'Day against Slashdot clickbait' and not post to any clickbait headlines (which is running about 90% now)
Re:Propaganda in the summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether you believe it's a misnomer or not, DRM usually refers to "digital rights management" instead of "digital restrictions management" like what's in the summary.
I would argue that it is usually meant to stand for "digital rights management" but that it does actually refer to digital restrictions management. Once it gets to the user, DRM does not manage rights; indeed, it interferes with actual rights, like fair use. That is why DRM is best referred to as "digital restrictions management".
Slashdot used to actually be a news site
You must be new here. That's never been true. Slashdot has always been a discussion site, and has never been a news site.
hence the former motto of news for nerds, stuff that matters. Now, it's run by terrible editors and spews propaganda.
You must be new here, it has always been run by terrible editors and it has always spewed propaganda. What's different today is all the apologists like you who love sucking corporate cock.
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*applause*
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It's in quote blocks, it's a quote, the quote is correct.
As far as I can tell, Anonymous Coward #54772787 was expecting to see the more conventional expansion of the initialism at least somewhere in the summary, such as language to the following effect: "The FSF uses the term 'digital restrictions management' to refer to digital rights management."
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No, you don't like the stories, but you can always go watch Fox. Nancy Pelosi is a coke dealer in the basement of a pizza shop.... welcome to Fox News. Roger Aisles is dead but his ghost still writes the news copy. Perhaps that's more to your tastes?
One can't have the discussions like here on Fox, unless one is watching on YouTube live and in a permanent chat mode w/ some people & some bots.
You are right about the blockquote, but as Tepples noted, it would have been useful to see 'Digital Rights Management' - the real expansion of that acronym - spelt out somewhere in the summary. Instead, since the only expansion of DRM was provided in the cited space, anybody coming across this acronym for the first time would be left w/ the impression that
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Whether you believe it's a misnomer or not, DRM usually refers to "digital rights management" instead of "digital restrictions management" like what's in the summary. The summary reads like propaganda and is full of rhetoric. Slashdot used to actually be a news site, hence the former motto of news for nerds, stuff that matters. Now, it's run by terrible editors and spews propaganda. Slashdot loses credibility with nonsense like that. The management and editors are doing a wonderful job of running this site into the ground.
To be fair to EditorDavid, the 'digital restrictions management' was from the cited passage, and not something that he himself inserted. It's been one of those acronyms deliberately distorted by RMS (Really Mean Socialist?) to suit his screed
I agree that Slashdot has been losing credibility for a while now w/ too many stories on politics or climate, rather than sticking to computer technology. But last couple of days have been an improvement, w/ discussions like Intel's IoT business, OpenBSD unique ker
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You don't want DRM, then buy DRM-free games of which there are plenty.
Are there plenty of DRM-free video games designed to be enjoyed on the big screen in the living room with one to three IRL friends holding gamepads? Or does "DRM-free local multiplayer" mean going back to tabletop games?
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More precisely, is there a company or game player like Xbox that is DRM free? First that would have to exist, and they'd have to make enough money just selling games and players so that they don't require DRM.
Incidentally, does Steam fall within DRM? Like I play Civ VI on my laptop, but if I had a Steam player, or played it under PlaywithBSD, would I have to buy it again? From what I understand, that single purchase would work on any Steam console that I was logged into, regardless of where I played.
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Consoles were DRM free for years and years. [...] There were no technical measures in place to harden the machine against its owner as there are with today's consoles.
I'm not sure which consoles you're talking about, but the NES, Super NES, and Nintendo 64 have a CIC (Checking Integrated Circuit) designed to block use of homemade cartridges. The GameCube, Wii, and Wii U have a custom drivechip designed to block use of homemade discs.
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Think older consoles. Atari 2600's, Maganavoxes, etc. None of the consoles of that era took any technical measures to block homemade cartridges.
No, but that decision on subsequent consoles had to have come straight out of atari vs. intellivision...
Re:motivation (Score:4, Insightful)
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Why is this group fighting against DRM?
They've written extensively about it, what it is, why they object to it and so on. There are links in TFS, but if you're interested, you can start here:
https://www.defectivebydesign.... [defectivebydesign.org]
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Defective By Design [defectivebydesign.org]
and
Copyrights Must Expire [publicknowledge.org]
and
Copyright Timeline [arl.org]
Just to give you a start...
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Why the fuck should content be protected. The law is quite clear, once that content has been proven of worth to society, it can apply for limited protection. You lying cheating scummy fuckers have been putting out all kinds of shit and demanding for ever protection at tax payer expense, fuck off. Don't want to share your content, than go find a dark room somewhere and lock you self in it with your crap content.
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TPP Crashed and Burned (Score:1)
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Perhaps a case of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.
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Almost no one or nothing is either universally good or bad. In this case, Trump managed to successfully prevent a dreadful trade agreement, or rather a trade agreement with some truly dreadful parts to it. Trump did a good thing there, but doing one good thing in a sea of bad ones doesn't make him a good president.
It's all shades of grey and he's still right down at the "charcoal" end.
If I started a campaign... (Score:3, Insightful)
...most people would not understand what I am talking about.
It does not matter whether it is Widevine CDM, HTML 5 standards [arstechnica.com], Trusted Computing [vimeo.com] or something else.
Most people roll their eyes, when I mention freedom, privacy, and rights in the context of electronics. They often say, "Let them track me. I am not doing anything wrong." or "I need this for work." or "I don't care how it works. Just make it work." They slowly accept their freedom crumbling away.
The general populace is not impressed by:
-Examples where people are stopped or pulled over to have their phones searched.
-By police raids based on incorrect information upon users of IP addresses.
-By illegal seizures of bank accounts.
-By texts used as courtroom evidence on a daily basis.
-By people who are rendered unemployable, stalked, or killed over social media content.
and many more stark examples of their rights being violated.
While I am a true believer in Richard Stallman's wisdom, I find it disheartening to work toward compelling the ignorant masses to do what is in their own best interest. Unfortunately, many seem to be perpetually immune to common sense.
Look at the bigger forces (Score:1)
More and more, folks are feeling entitled. Medical insurance is now considered a "basic right" by many whereas 100 years ago it was not.
More and more, corporations want longer and longer copyrights with copyright term going from 14 + 14 years to 95 or 120 years.
These two forces are on a collision course.
The law makers assume they have the final say. But they don't.
Laws such as the Micky Mouse Copyright law or the DMC that are not respected are weak. Enforcement of laws is mostly by self regulation.