Re: HTML5 and DRM - A Middle Path?

On 2013-08-19 11:06 David Singer wrote:
> Well, the artist wants to charge you to listen to his music.  If you don't
> like the price, don't listen. None of us have any 'right' to dictate the
> price the owner sets.  And it is this (the content value) that sets the
> cost, for the most part -- online, LPs, CDs, cassettes -- it doesn't matter
> the form.

If the artist wants to charge me for a performance that's something to be 
negotiated in advance, just like any other serviceprovider
Problem is that the artist wants to charge me for a reproduction of a 
performance when its not him making the reproduction.

Sharing and reproduction and alteration is how culture comes to be. Culture by 
defintion is shared context, nobody truly creates from scratch (e.g disney 
classics are just adaptations of traditional fairy tales, west side story is 
an adaptation of shakespere, etc. etc. etc.)

Furthermore you really can't "own" an idea or concept or joke or song or 
story, by their very nature they cease to be solely yours as soon as you share 
it with anyone. The fact that it is embedded in a book, on a DVD, on a 
harddisk, ... doesn't change that.

All the technical and legal attempts to make that not so are attempting to 
enforce a state that is profoundly unnatural and unstable.

In the words of Thomas Jefferson:

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of 
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, 
which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; 
but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every 
one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, 
too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the 
whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself 
without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light 
without darkening me."

Even if it turns out to be possible to artificially and fully restrict sharing 
the following quote from Eben Moglen eloquently poses the fundamental question 
in this discussion:

"The great moral question of the twenty-first century is: If all knowledge, all 
culture, all art, all useful information, can be costlessly given to everyone 
at the same price that it is given to anyone — if everyone can have 
everything, everywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone 
from anything?

If you could make lamb chops in endless numbers by the mere pressing of a 
button, there would be no moral argument for hunger ever, anywhere.

I see no system of moral philosophy generated by the economy of the past that 
could evolve a principle to explain the moral legitimacy of denial in the 
presence of infinite profusion." 

I've yet to see somebody from the content-industries address this fundamentel 
question adequately, or even at all.
Untill they do the current state of copyright will continue to be seen as an 
abomination by me and an increasing number of others, and so will any DRM as 
that just doubles down on the madness.
--
Cheers, cobaco

Received on Monday, 19 August 2013 21:14:29 UTC