DefectiveByDesign.org is organising a Day Against DRM on October 3rd. You should really get involved.
There doesn’t appear to be too much happening in Australia (ah, we’re an apathetic bunch) but Europe and the US look fairly active.
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Day Against DRM - October 3rd 2006
3 Comments
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DRM is a good thing. Protecting people’s copyright and their intellectual property is a good thing. Unfortunately, using DRM to ensure sales and control markets is not a good thing.
The Australian Consumer Association did a good thing by telling the Sony that ‘no’, modifying your Playstation so that you could buy games from the US that you couldn’t get in Australia, wasn’t illegal. They did a good thing by telling DVD manufacturers that ‘no’, modifying your DVD player so that you could buy and view DVDs that you couldn’t otherwise get in Australia due to zoning, wasn’t illegal.
The Australian Consumer Association should wake up and realise that these companies are, again, using DRM to force us into models of sale and consumer behaviour to ensure their profit lines rather than taking a lesson from cool things like Creative Commons and openning up their products and making them more available. It’s about control, rather than protection of intellectual property. The ACA realised that with DVD zoning. I hope they have their heads screwed on the right way and will do something about DRM. But I am afraid they they won’t.
So I guess, in the end, I’ll hate DRM, and will look for cracks and hacks to get around it. I use dvd region free software so I can watch my Zone 1 DVDs on my Region 4 laptop DVD drive. I’d rather not have to do this. I hate to think what I will have to do in the future with DRM protected movies and music, HDMI to scramble video pictures that will no doubt force me to buy new hardware.
Maybe something will come of this Day Against DRM. Then again, maybe the US courts won’t continue to change copyright laws so that the megacorps can continue to stop things doing into the public domain. M
Matthew
I should have expected this kind of intelligent response from you. If I’d known you were up to anything more than checking my new CSS!
Anyhow, I think you’re right on DRM. Inherently, protection of copyright owners’ rights is critical, it’s just the current implementations of DRM and the business models acoompanying them that are broken. I think, too, that this is probably the thinking of folk like Cory Doctorow.
[…] posted on DRM here at acidlabs before (here, here and here), so my anti-DRM position is well known. In effect, my position is that DRM is futile rather than […]