DRM is Used to Lock in, Control and Spy on Users, Says Free Software Foundation (torrentfreak.com) 72
In a scathing critique, the Free Software Foundation is urging the U.S. Government to drop the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions which protect DRM. From a report on TorrentFreak:Late last year the U.S. Copyright office launched a series of public consultations to review critical aspects of the DMCA law. FSF sees no future for DRM and urges the Copyright Office to repeal the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions. "Technological protection measures and Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) play no legitimate role in protecting copyrighted works. Instead, they are a means of controlling users and creating 'lock in'," FSF's Donald Robertson writes. According to FSF, copyright is just an excuse, the true purpose is to lock down and control users. "Companies use this control illegitimately with an eye toward extracting maximum revenue from users in ways that have little connection to actual copyright law. In fact, these restrictions are technological impediments to the rights users have under copyright law, such as fair use." Even if copyright was the main concern, DRM would be an overbroad tool to achieve the goal, the foundation notes. FSF highlights that DRM is not just used to control people but also to spy on them, by sending all kinds of personal data to technology providers. This is done to generate extra income at the expense of users' rights, they claim. "DRM enables companies to spy on their users, and use that data for profit," Robertson adds. "DRM is frequently used to spy on users by requiring that they maintain a connection to the Internet so that the program can send information back to the DRM provider about the user's actions," he adds.
Well, yeah (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: Well, yeah (Score:4, Funny)
Which makes it about the right timeline for the Slashdot front page...
Re: Well, yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
File this under "know your audience:" the EFF is writing for the likes of "series of tubes" senators (and other tech-illiterate government folks), not slashdotters.
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File this under "know your audience:" the EFF is writing for the likes of "series of tubes" senators (and other tech-illiterate government folks), not slashdotters.
This is precisely why the EFF is wasting its breath. Most 'government folks' have no problem with the idea of "controlling users", "spying on users", and "creating lock-in". The EFF's target audience here doesn't know, doesn't want to know, and doesn't care.
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Rule of thumb: if it doesn't clearly improve anything for you, it's for the benefit of the counterparty. A classic example is the presence of artificial ingredients in "food".
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Rule of thumb: if it doesn't clearly improve anything for you, it's for the benefit of the counterparty. A classic example is the presence of artificial ingredients in "food".
Um, every artificial ingredient improves something for you -- whether price, shelf life, flavor, health, nutrition, or something else. Like all things it is a trade-off, in this case one people overwhelmingly choose, but not necessarily a good one (for your measure of good). As a single example, the artificial ingredient "heat" has been used to sanitize and preserve food, while also increasing its flavor and nutritional value -- but when overdone can destroy nutrients and create carcinogens. And while your
Re:Well, yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the main thing that it's for is to give control to channel owners at the expense of copyright owners. Which is weird, because the people who insist on it are copyright owners. The record labels insisted Apple include DRM on their music, so Apple ended up with complete control of digital music distribution until they allowed DRM-free music. The movie studios insisted that Netflix and Amazon include DRM in their streaming offerings. Initially that gave a lot of control to Microsoft and Adobe, who provided the DRM, now it's giving control to Netflix, Google, and Amazon (a huge number of consumer devices such as smart TVs run a Netflix, YouTube, or Amazon video app - if you won't sell your content DRM free, then you can't reach these people unless you go through one of these companies).
Eventually people will learn that not only doesn't DRM reduce piracy (it pisses off legitimate customers and it only takes one person to break the DRM and the DRM-free version can be infinitely pirated), but it also doesn't give any control to the people who insist on it.
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Eventually people will learn that not only doesn't DRM reduce piracy (it pisses off legitimate customers and it only takes one person to break the DRM and the DRM-free version can be infinitely pirated), but it also doesn't give any control to the people who insist on it
I'd argue it is even worse than that.
Speaking specifically about US copyright law, there has been much argument over what the "for a limited time" clause in the constitution actually means.
There seems to only be two facts that are pretty much universally agreed upon:
A) Limited does not mean unlimited or infinite, and
B) The unit of measurement of "year(s)" seems acceptable to use.
The point "A" leaves much wiggle room for congress, and even on a technical level could be anything in the range between (1) and (
What... are you just figuring this out NOW? (Score:1)
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People need to keep saying it and hearing it, though. There should have been a bunch of ads over the last week, where congressional candidates said, "I'm going to try to repeal 1201 and my opponent isn't going to try to do that." But that didn't happen. Until that happens, we are in failure.
Also, this is an issue where the passage of time, itself, is proving the point. 15 years ago even here on Slashdot, though it was already unpopular, DRM had its sincere defenders (people who wanted copyright to wor
You can't spell "DRM" without the "D" (Score:1)
Guess which party the "content providers" pushing for DRM have bought? [opensecrets.org]
Yeah, it starts with a D.
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Clinton is against the TPP (Score:2)
Dibertarian?
Because the Ls are the biggest U.S. party whose candidate for President has recently expressed support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Trump is against it, and Clinton became against it once the final version was released, but Johnson is all for it.
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Re:Election Day Haiku (Score:4, Funny)
On the ocean, tenagra
Temba his arms wide.
FSF being FSF (Score:2, Insightful)
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yeap, is much more... *I thank him to has started/organized the movement, but nowadays I think, many times (but not every time), that hi is bad to the entire movement (by encouraging comments like yours to exist...)
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Duh.... (Score:1)
...also in the news, Guns are used to shoot.
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Or a DDoS. They're kinda popular these days.
That way the whole IoT idiocy would at least finally has a use.
Up-front crowdfunding (Score:3)
Crowdfunding is "also used to try and ensure that people get paid for the work they do writing software, making movies and other media." This was first envisioned in 1999 by Kelsey and Schneier as the street performer protocol [firstmonday.org] and later implemented in platforms such as Kickstarter.
Re:Water still wet, news at 11. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Water still wet, news at 11. (Score:5, Insightful)
Odd. All overboarding DRM did was make me NOT pay for software and search alternatives.
No shit. Has Captain Obvious taken over the FSF??? (Score:2)
Errrm, ... and this is news why exactly?
FSF had to hand-deliver its comment (Score:5, Informative)
The news is that the FSF's opinion has been included in the comments published by the United States Copyright Office from its public consultation about this issue. There was uncertainty as to whether the Copyright Office would accept FSF's submission, as electronic submission required use of proprietary software written in JavaScript [fsf.org], and there was no option for postal submission. So FSF had to hand-deliver its comments to the Copyright Office in Washington, DC, in person [fsf.org].
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Re:BINGO (Score:4, Interesting)
The only lock down on a cell phone should be on the sim with no locked boot loaders or network lock in.
Owner != user (Score:3)
In each of these cases you describe, the owner of the physical device is not its user. Respectively the owner is the company, the school, the leasing agency, or the utility.
But in the case of home entertainment devices sold to the public, the state-law owner is the person who walks into Best Buy with cash and walks out with a device or a copy* of a work. Thus the owner is the user. Yet digital restrictions management blocks the owner from exercising what would otherwise be rights of the owner under statutor
FSF against DRM? (Score:2)
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Say it isn't so!
Have you been living under a rock? It is "Say it ain't so!"
Then what would replace rental? (Score:2)
FSF divides works of authorship into computer programs, instructional works, works of opinion, and artistic works. Each brings separate licensing issues, as described on the GNU project's list of licenses [gnu.org] and comments on the loaded word "consume" [gnu.org]. FSF ethics do not require works of opinion or artistic works to be free.
Other than digital restrictions management, what's the FSF-approved way for the publisher of an artistic work to offer a service consisting of a time-limited license for a subscriber to experi
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Other than digital restrictions management, what's the FSF-approved way for the publisher of an artistic work to offer a service consisting of a time-limited license for a subscriber to experience that work? Is the alternative really to drop rental altogether in favor of selling a durable copy of something that most people are likely to watch only once?
If they are only going to consume the content once, why not distribute a durable copy? Does rental exist because people only want to consume once, or do people only consume once because they have to pay per consumption?
I'll bet video rental wouldn't have existed at all if videotaped movies didn't cost $75 back in the VHS heyday, a price certainly inflated by the movie studios who believed it would undermine cinema viewership.
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What is being "consumed", in the sense of being used up? And is an artistic work just "content" to fill a box?
To answer your questions: It's to price-discriminate between one set of viewers, who wish to view the work once, and a different set of viewers, who wish to view it repeatedly.
And to answer your last paragraph: There was also video game rental in the 1980s, which brought playing a game at home for short period within the same order of magnitude as the price of playing a few rounds at an arcade back
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All that matters is author attribution, payment and the fact that content can and will be copied freely.
Then how should the amount of said payment be determined? The traditional copyright model makes payment proportional to the number of copies sold, on the assumption that the value added by an author through the creation of a work is proportional to the number of viewers that the work reaches.
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Easy. You buy it for full price. Then resell it to someone else who wants to see it for less money, and so on and so on. This is the FSF way (Remember, resel
Original Source? (Score:2)
Why am I having to read a TorrentFreak article on this? Why is there no mention of it on either http://www.fsf.org/ [fsf.org] nor http://defectivebydesign.org/ [defectivebydesign.org]? I don't want to link to TorrentFreak when I share this, nor do I want to link to an obscure PDF file for the original source. It really seems like they should be promoting this on their own site!
Wow, really? (Score:2)
"DRM is Used to Lock in, Control and Spy on Users, Says Free Software Foundation"
No shit, Einstein.
Who was the super-genius that puzzled this out?
rights/restrictions (Score:1)
Why "restrictions management"? Digital rights management is perfectly appropriate, where "to manage something" means "to lessen something, or the effects of something". See weight management, anger management, crisis management...
curso NR 10 (Score:1)