Re: DRM nonsense

On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 11:15 PM, David Singer <singer@apple.com> wrote:

> Because that is why the copyright owners go to all that trouble; they want
> to be remunerated for their work (not unreasonable), and they want it to be
> easier to be honest than not.
>
DRM makes it harder to be honest, not easier.


> You seem to have some other motivation for DRM in mind.  But you don't
> seem to state it; could you?
>
Platform lock in.


> Almost any distribution method makes some legitimate acts hard.  It's
> legitimate for me to lend my books to my family in the UK, for example, but
> a total pain in the neck to ship them.
>
It's hard to find a method of that does less to prevent illegitimate uses
yet does more to make legitimate uses harder than DRM.


> You have a different model of what happens when content is unprotected
> than many creators and owners of content, I am afraid.  I don't think we
> should be telling them how to run their businesses.
>
That's just the thing. You are telling them how to run their business. DRMs
are deployed exclusively by big distribution platforms. You won't find
Trent Reznor or any Indie artist trying to setup some DRM system himself.
It's something an artist gets shoved into after signing a contract, often
unknowingly after the distributor repackaged and resold their content to
third and fourth parties. It's exclusively the domain of companies like
yours, and Microsoft and Netflix.

This has all ben re-hashed quite a long time before now, and I find it
quite unnecessary to do so again. The debate on the merits of DRM has come
and gone and left a consensus except apparently here that it's a bad idea.