Re: Mozilla blog: DRM and the Challenge of Serving Users

On 2014-05-16 11:48 David Singer wrote:
> On May 16, 2014, at 10:39 , Gervase Markham <gerv@mozilla.org> wrote:
> >> To those of us that are against DRM the absence of DRM support is a
> >> positive bullet point, a competitive advantage, a feature, not the
> >> opposite.> 
> > If you were a significant proportion of the world's population, I'm sure
> > things would look very different.
> 
> Indeed, that a product is capable of doing something does not mean you have
> to use it. A feature of a product that is irrelevant to you does not make
> it less of a feature, 

the feature is not irrelevant to me, 
the feature is abhorrent to me

(and as should be abundantly obvious by now, that's not just me but pretty 
much every end user that has an opinion on the subject, hence the apologetic 
qualifiers of 'we don't like drm, but...' we keep seeing)

> and certainly an alternative product in which the feature is not present
> does not mean that that absence is, in itself, a feature. 

hence, yes, the absence is definitely a feature

> I am sure that there are things that can be done with ordinary
> kitchen knives that I would disapprove of.  I simply choose not to do them;
> I don’t hobble myself by not buying knives.

very broken anology: 
you hobble yourself by buying a kitchen knive to which a complicated black box 
is attached that will actively stop you from using the knive in a way it deems  
(correctly or not) unacceptable
Absence of DRM would be 'simply choosing not to do them'

the effort put into supporting the addition of that black box will by necessity 
be diverted from effort that would have gone into other more useful features or 
bug fixes, so in that sense it also takes something away

-- 
Cheers

Received on Friday, 16 May 2014 10:34:42 UTC