Copyright laws have some part in this scheme to fuck the consumer up the ass. That’s not why I’m bitching. My problem is mainly with the music industry. The problems with game software, while they don’t affect me personally, are also a blight on mankind. Sadly, I can see no end in sight, as no amount of posting blogs or inflammatory forum posts are going to make the corporate bigwigs less fond of the extra money they’re being slutty with. I’m all for open revolt and revolution, but unfortunately, the government and business have been in bed together since before the Nixon administration and fuck buddies do not just stop being fuck buddies because the children have vocalized their malcontent. At least before they used to keep it hidden. Now, as comedian/author Lewis Black is fond of saying, they’re out in the open, like two big dogs stuck to each other.

I think that DRM is already on its way out as many of the people who were once the biggest advocates of DRM (iTunes) are now backing away from it. With so much legal open source and illegal pirating available to anyone with a computer, I think that it will become increasingly bad business to offer DRM ‘infected’ products.
Perhaps simple economics will solve this for consumers.

Although I could do without the licensing conditions, I’ve also started voting with my dollars and buying my music at the Amazon MP3 store, and recommending it to others over iTunes — it’s cheaper, has higher-quality files, and can be used on any computer with any app, not just iTunes. Normal people can understand that.

I’m not saying DRM isn’t dumb; I’m just saying. D:

I can’t say DRM is good, but only because nothing that results in an effective loss of freedom for the public is good in my eyes. However, most of the “evil of DRM” that people are talking about is ultimately the fault of copyright law and not DRM.

You see… copyright law, as it is today, is pretty darn oppressive: For example, copyright can prohibits you from acting ethically. You have a piece of beautiful art, or maybe some useful software? Your friend can’t afford it, but would like a copy. You could make one with almost no effort and at effectively no cost, so it would seem unethical to deny him. Yet if you follow your conscience and copy that floppy, you could be infringing the author’s copyright and could be sued and, if not now perhaps soon, face criminal charges, and even be banned from the internet (a proposal which is not unique to the UK).

Most people who have thought about the subject realize that copyright does achieve some important ends. So wholesale abolition of copyright would probably not be an optimal situation even if it might be somewhat better than where we’re headed right now, and of course there are enormous vested interests in the way things currently work. These factors makes the problems of copyright much harder, because we can’t just wipe the slate clean.

Worse, most of the public is completely ignorant about their rights and obligations under copyright. Even if we had an ideal minimalistic copyright system that does only what is needed to promote progress and not a bit more, Joe Six-pack would almost certainly violate it constantly and unrepentantly. “How could I have broken the law? I just clicked a button!”

Here is where DRM comes in: it makes the copyright obligations Joe has been ignoring far more obvious. This might make Joe mad. I say: good! We need as many Joes mad as possible if we’re to achieve a policy change. …. and we need Joe to become educated, because a public that will ignore sane minimal restrictions will always be used as a justification for outrageous over-restrictions.

Beyond being an easy justification for oppressive laws, and preventing a good copyright policy from being effective, Joe’s ignorance in the current legal climate makes him, and an enormous part of the public, into criminals. When the law makes a large portion of the public into criminals over acts they perform without thought then the law can become a serious tool for abuse through selective enforcement. Honestly, I think much of the public might be better off with DRM frustrating their every move if it meant they would be safe from discriminatory enforcement by some law enforcement officer or media conglomerate who doesn’t like their political views or competition and is looking for an excuse to get them banned from the Internet.

Of course, DRM doesn’t stop with those who don’t understand their copyright obligations under the law. It also hurts people who aren’t infringing copyright at all. It hurts artists, it hurts software developers, it hurts people who are simply trying to lawfully consume the works of others. In its usual implementations it is deeply anti-competitive and in order to make the DRM hard to circumvent there are a lot of freedoms which might have to die as collateral damage to reach that end, including the right to publish without the approval of others — a subject which I should really write an essay elaborating on, since it’s a risk far too often ignored by anti-DRM advocates.

So, I do support DRM opposition, but not by advertising and advocating it to Joe Six-pack. To him, we should be blaming copyright rather than DRM. If the anti-DRM activists succeed in vanquishing DRM but fail to restrain copyright then we will not have addressed the root of the problem.