Re: Danger of DRM technologies stack

"John Foliot" <john@foliot.ca> writes:

> All of this ongoing teeth gnashing and wailing about DRM is all just noise.
> Vote with your feet. Don't buy the Renault, don't take a Netflix
> subscription, don't use a browser that supports EME/DRM/ABC/DoeRayMe. There
> are choices of open source browsers, so take one, and ship it minus EME
> support(*): if that is truly what the market wants, that browser will
> succeed(**). 
>

People like to say this about DRM, and voting with your feet is great,
but it's also not the only important thing to do. 

Governments around the world, such as the US, subsidize DRM via criminal
enforcement of anti-circumvention rules and the looming threat to do so.

This is a subsidy to encourage the DRM business model, and therefore
changing it has to go beyond mere individual choices not to purchase
individual products. The subsidies actively work against emergence of
other possibilities.

Standardization is another form of incentive/encouragement/subsidy, and
this is one of the reasons W3C should not allow EME to move forward.

> Everything else is fairy dust: wishing and hoping for a better world where
> everyone sings Kumbia and has free everything aint gonna happen. It simply
> won't.
>

Except it can and does happen, *in spite* of the subsidies against it.
We have a fully free operating system, even though it is competing on an
unlevel playing field against the many incentives governments give to
the proprietary software approach. 

We have creative work authors sharing their works under licenses that
allow copying and prohibit DRM, even though there are many subsidies
working against them. It's not crazy to think that we would have a lot
*more* of this kind of creative work distribution if the rules were
changed and if we shot down things like EME each time they were
suggested to a body responsible for a field of play.

-john

-- 
John Sullivan | Executive Director, Free Software Foundation
GPG Key: 61A0963B | http://status.fsf.org/johns | http://fsf.org/blogs/RSS

Do you use free software? Donate to join the FSF and support freedom at
<http://www.fsf.org/register_form?referrer=8096>.

Received on Friday, 22 November 2013 22:16:47 UTC