Ask Slashdot: What Would Happen If Everything On the Internet Was DRM Protected? 190
dryriver writes: The whole Digital Rights Management (DRM) train started with music and films, spread horribly to computer and console games (Steam, Origin), turned a lot of computer software you could once buy-and-use into DRM-locked Software As A Service or Cloud Computing products (Adobe, Autodesk, MS Office 365 for example) that are impossible to use without an active Internet connection and account registration on a cloud service somewhere. Recently the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) appears to have paved the way for DRM to find its way into the world of Internet content in various forms as well. Here's the question: What would happen to the Internet as we know it if just about everything on a website -- text, images, audio, video, scripts, games, PDF documents, downloadable files and data, you name it -- had DRM protection and DRM usage-limitations hooked into it by default?
Imagine trying to save a JPEG image you see on a website to your harddisk, and not only does every single one of your web browsers refuse the request, but your OS's screen-capture function won't let you take a snapshot of that JPEG image either. Imagine trying to copy-and-paste some text from a news article somewhere into a Slashdot submission box, and having browser DRM tell you 'Sorry! The author, copyright holder or publisher of this text does not allow it to be quoted or re-published anywhere other than where it was originally published!'. And then there is the (micro-)payments aspect of DRM. What if the DRM-fest that the future Internet may become 5 to 10 years from now requires you to make payments to a copyright holder for quoting, excerpting or re-publishing anything of theirs on your own webpage? Lets say for example that you found some cool behind-the-scenes-video of how Spiderman 8 was filmed, and you want to put that on your Internet blog. Except that this video is DRM'd, and requires you to pay 0.1 Cent each time someone watches the video on your blog. Or you want to use a short excerpt from a new scifi book on your blog, and the same thing happens -- you need to pay to re-publish even 4 paragraphs of the book. What then?
Imagine trying to save a JPEG image you see on a website to your harddisk, and not only does every single one of your web browsers refuse the request, but your OS's screen-capture function won't let you take a snapshot of that JPEG image either. Imagine trying to copy-and-paste some text from a news article somewhere into a Slashdot submission box, and having browser DRM tell you 'Sorry! The author, copyright holder or publisher of this text does not allow it to be quoted or re-published anywhere other than where it was originally published!'. And then there is the (micro-)payments aspect of DRM. What if the DRM-fest that the future Internet may become 5 to 10 years from now requires you to make payments to a copyright holder for quoting, excerpting or re-publishing anything of theirs on your own webpage? Lets say for example that you found some cool behind-the-scenes-video of how Spiderman 8 was filmed, and you want to put that on your Internet blog. Except that this video is DRM'd, and requires you to pay 0.1 Cent each time someone watches the video on your blog. Or you want to use a short excerpt from a new scifi book on your blog, and the same thing happens -- you need to pay to re-publish even 4 paragraphs of the book. What then?
The government and business wins? (Score:2)
Re:The government and business wins? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope, nobody wins because the internet would be effectively unusable. We'd all have to go back to the library for our information. Nobody would have enough money to pay the bastards whatever they wanted for the DRM unlock, so... the internet would be unusable.
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Nobody would have enough money to pay the bastards whatever they wanted for the DRM unlock, so... the internet would be unusable.
DRM does not mean that every single thing needs to be paid for. It just means that the consumer cannot freely copy the content and use it somewhere else.
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Sales of loose leaf notebooks and ballpoint pens would skyrocket.
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Nope, nobody wins because the internet would be effectively unusable. We'd all have to go back to the library for our information. Nobody would have enough money to pay the bastards whatever they wanted for the DRM unlock, so... the internet would be unusable.
Oh, I think I can imagine a workable concept for the DRM laden future Internet. We all get charged 10 cents per gigabyte that we download, stream or otherwise consume by our ISPs. The ISPs, already logging everything we do anyway pay all rights holders from the money collected. Done.
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As much as I'd love to skewer the bittorent guys and the video-over-internet data hogs, it'd be totally unworkable since even that tiny amount would be unaffordable by millions of people, starting with kids and going to the aboriginals in all parts of the world. Elon Musk is about to put 800 low earth orbiting satellites into the sky to make the internet available, and this would just make it unavailable to large masses of people. Its the same concept for which the NRA fights every "tax" or other expens
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I can imagine (...) We all get charged 10 cents per gigabyte that we download, stream or otherwise consume by our ISPs. The ISPs, already logging everything we do anyway pay all rights holders from the money collected. Done.
And how does a VPN fit into your imagination?
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I can imagine (...) We all get charged 10 cents per gigabyte that we download, stream or otherwise consume by our ISPs. The ISPs, already logging everything we do anyway pay all rights holders from the money collected. Done.
And how does a VPN fit into your imagination?
If you are involved in a point to point VPN maybe you aren’t paying for content consumption. If you are using VPN as an anonymizer then the people sucking in that content at the other end of your link might be paying instead. Or as the person below suggests we always are paying for the bits we traffic.
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Perhaps we would get more of the old gift culture of the internet back, as in legally free works where the author does not bother with DRM in the first place. The absolute number of those may not increase, but they could gain more visibility when people are angry about excessive DRM and start looking for alternatives.
As an example, I like science fiction novels, and there is quite a bit of free stuff out there.
- The Baen Free Library, older novels that the publisher Baen Books has rele
back to books, to hell with the Internet (Score:2)
and, you know, it would take me until I die to read through my shelves again and the stacks in the library.
Re:The government and business wins? (Score:4)
I just assume the NSA has so many backdoors already they won't really benefit much from whatever additional monitoring possibilities DRM offers.
The backdoors that may exist cannot be legally used in court to prosecute somebody. If the entire Internet has DRM, then that allows law enforcement to legally and easily track user browsing and use it in court.
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Through the magic of parallel construction, they can be illegally used in court to prosecute anybody.
What if all men were made of straw? (Score:5, Funny)
What if all men were made of straw?
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A better question would be "what if most of the present intenet was DRM-protected?" I'd note that there are plenty of sites that use some JS BS to try to stop you from saving images. The answer of course is "people who cared about that would use the rest of the internet".
What do you do now if you don't want to consume DRM video? You stick with YouTube and torrents and avoid Netflix et al.
And then there were two. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd be sure to have a button in my search engine and or brower that said "never list sites contain DRM" So you can choose between the 'open net' and the 'commercial net'.
reminds me of another question (Score:5, Funny)
When my daughter was about 5 years old she asked me "What would happen if a monster ate the whole world?".
This Ask Slashdot question makes about as much sense as my daughter's.
Re:reminds me of another question (Score:4, Insightful)
As far as answering your daughter's question: Well honey, eventually the monster would poop it out and it would look exactly like the world we live in now.
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If cats had machine guns would dogs still chase them?
In technical meetings if someone started asking absurd what-if questions he would trot it out. There was one project where the customer was notorious for bringing up such situations over trivial things where it got used a lot. People here still refer to such discussion when they crop up as cats with machine guns.
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That's actually an eloquently expressed criticism of capitalism.
You're just too stupid to understand your daughter.
screen-capture blocking = ADA lawsuit (Score:2)
screen-capture blocking = ADA lawsuit
since DRM is enforced by the FBI (Score:1)
I'd make my own internet. (Score:2)
I would make my own Internet. I would not be alone.
We would have the DRinternet and the FRinternet.
It would be good. You would know that anything on FRinternet is free from DRM.
So, the whole of wikipedia would be there for a start.
Anyone who wanted to be on FRinternet would have to let go of any DRM.
I would ensure that the domain services are separate so that by design one cannot link to the DRinternet from the FRinternet.
Isn't it called TOR?
What if.. (Score:2)
Internet and Roads (Score:2)
Yeah, I'm going there... what if every road required you to display your drivers license in the windshield to be scanned every time you go anywhere?
Re:Internet and Roads (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I'm going there... what if every road required you to display your drivers license in the windshield to be scanned every time you go anywhere?
Then we would rename "driver's license" with the term "license plate," since that's what a license plate is.
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Current number plates do not display in a machine-readable manner who happens to be driving a vehicle at any given moment.
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That stopped being true at least a decade ago, when more and more speeding tickets were processed fully automatically (by computers reading the licence plates from photos taken by speed cameras).
Some motorways in The Netherlands measure the speed of vehicles over a long distance (so not at a point) and register every single car twice; when they enter and when they exit the area, to calculate the average speed and issue tickets based on that if needed. Fully automated, all machine reading of license plates.
M
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The number plate identifies the vehicle and thereby its owner. It does not identify the human being driving it at any given moment.
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It will be the same person most of the times. I expect 80-90% of the time, maybe even more. Good enough for most tracking purposes.
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Such as when my wife drives our car which is registered to me or when I drove my parents car?
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Yeah, I'm going there... what if every road required you to display your drivers license in the windshield to be scanned every time you go anywhere?
Then we would rename "driver's license" with the term "license plate," since that's what a license plate is.
As long as you mount your license to the plate to identify the current driver I suppose. Though if they go facial recognition on the driver, it wont matter much anyway.
Advice (Score:2)
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My uncle recorded every episode of Cheers on VHS when it aired on TV. He's one step ahead of you.
You'd start earning money (Score:3)
I think most people forget that you post content too. Write a story, a good blog article, take a nice photograph. Wouldn't it be swell if you actually got paid for something that people make popular?
So let's take the recent pay-with-computer-cycles as a decent example of a future ubiquitous micropayments convenience. Download a jpeg? Pay by waiting through ten seconds of computer cycles. You'll survive with short wait times for things that you find interesting.
Of course, when thousands of others download your jpeg, you'll get the cycles in return.
That's a good thing, because the more times currency moves, the better the very same economy. Still-money isn't good for an economy, money-in-motion is a good economy.
The trouble with DRM today is that it over-complicates reasonable convenience. But if that complication were gone, then it simply becomes a standardized form of valuation.
It can be noted that physical sales have taken the same route, hundreds of years ago.
It was easier to just go into someone's yard, and eat the berries off of their trees. Imagine if every berry that you take required you to pay for it with the milk from your farm animals? Well, wait a minute, what if we make something and call it money, that we can trade for berries and for milk, so we don't need to carry around both milk and berries? And what if we make something called stores, and sell the berries in quantized packages, so it's not a per-berry compensation?
DRM is a modern problem. As such, we don't have a modern solution. The moment we devise a modern solution, DRM will become an old problem, just like everything else.
To sum up, the DRM problem is simply an issue of barter -- how can I trade value that I have, for value that I want. I want a digital file. I have this penguin. They simply aren't conveniently compatible -- because the web-site with the jpeg doesn't accept penguins in-trade. The web-site also doesn't accept cash, nor credit cards for simple jpeg rights, all because the mechanism of jpeg delivery isn't conveniently compatible with current mechanism for currency delivery.
That'll change. Give it time. Jpeg's weren't worth anything when they were low-res photos of cats, so we didn't care twenty years ago.
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Hold on. You think you or I would get to profit from a setup like this?
Hahahahaha
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I create more content than I consume. Sorry if you don't. But if you're consuming and not contributing, I'm totally fine with you not profiting. In short, if it's not worth anything to you (neither money, nor time, nor trade) then you really shouldn't be wasting your time with it. Spend that time with your family, you'll feel better.
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Most people create more content then they consume. And most content is crap. See: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat.
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I very much doubt you create more content than you consume, if you just count this story how many words did you read? how many did you write?
Even if you are prolific programmer, do you really think the amount of code you have written exceeds amount of code in the operating system?
Or create movies what director (assuming the director is considered to have created the whole movie alone) has created more movies than they have watched.
Apart from absurdity of the comment that you have created more content than y
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a) we're talking about creating in terms of consuming, not producing. If I write a blog article read by a thousand consumers, I get a thousand points, not one.
b) I am a programmer. I do program web-sites. Some of those web-sites receive a few thousand pageviews per hour. That's fairly typical of a medium business's web-site.
c) For a successful movie director's movies to be watched more times than he himself has watched movies is pretty logical. But we're not just talking about a man's movie watching.
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First I'd prefer to dispense with some misconceptions inherent in your wording [gnu.org], namely that viewing a work somehow "consumes" it, or that works of authorship are "content" to fill a box.
With that out of the way, how should one legally contribute without running the risk of accidentally plagiarizing someone else's work by creating your own work that ends up being too similar?
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This conversation is not based on practical solutions. You'll need to ask the OP how his hypothetical DRM works. For my part in this conversation, it needn't be original content. We know it's mine because you're reading it here. If this exact post has been written by another, you'll pay them when you read it there, and me when you read it here. You, as the reader, selected your source. You pay the store you're at. If you want to buy the same content twice, I won't stop you.
As for your "consumes" issue
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I think most people forget that you post content too. Write a story, a good blog article, take a nice photograph. Wouldn't it be swell if you actually got paid for something that people make popular?
Honestly, no. I have a bunch of stuff: I have a personal website, a reasonable github accout and a blog.
I'm where I am onw on the back of some of the open source software I published. It led to not just my job but most of my career so far. That's great, I make a iving without the hassle of nickel and diming peop
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Sounds like me about twenty years ago. It's easy to like connecting with people when you have few hobbies and lots of time. Fast forward to a time in your life when you have lots of hobbies, and little time, and plenty of people in your life.
I'm not interested in random people, nor in opinions, nor in new hobbies. I've got plenty in my own life. What I want is more time to enjoy the many hobbies and toys that I already have. There's no value otherwise.
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That presumes so much about how those others would behave. It doesn't happen in reality. That's why we invented money, and representational money at that.
You'll find that the return from sharing, as you've described, just doesn't materialize over the long term. Much like so many other economic systems, it works great when everyone is the same as you; it fails miserably in a diverse population where people's needs are very different from yours.
To be brief, when people prioritize their own family over "sha
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Odds are the browser you used to post that was shared with you without requiring you to pay. The site you posted it to doesn't require you to pay. The OS, web server, and perl interpreter the site runs on didn't require payment.
I'm not charging you to read this comment. I'm also not charging people who haven't posted to this discussion.
If we DRM and charge for everything, the additional friction would drag our economy to it's knees in an instant.
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Except that everything you describe happened pretty much exactly as you're describing, for literally everything non-digital.
You pay for each and every piece of fruit that you eat. Every tissue. Every drop of soap. You don't trade, you don't eat for free in your friend's backyard. Your house wasn't built by you and your friends. When you replace your roof, it won't be you and your neighbours doing the work. Instead, you'll purchase each and every shingle, and you'll pay for each and every minute of lab
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Yes, physical things often cost more than non-physical. But even there, there comes a point where nickel and dimeing turns away customers. For example, the grocery store or farmer's marked doesn't charge by the minute. You don't have to pay by the word for conversation with the cashier. No cart rental fee. In most places, no charge for parking.
At one time, some stores got the bright idea that pay toilets could be a thing. Some went out of business, some removed the coin box. On more than one occasion, I saw
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Sounds like me about twenty years ago.
It started 20 years ago after a fashion and it has continued ever since. The desire did not start 20 years ago, the desire is much, much older. The ability for so many to widely disseminate started 20 years ago.
It has continued.
It's easy to like connecting with people when you have few hobbies and lots of time.
It's also easy to like when you have sufficient hobbies and very little time.
Fast forward to a time in your life when you have lots of hobbies, and little time
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Well, we clearly disagree on a lot of things, but it seems not on this one!
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Pay by waiting through ten seconds of computer cycles.
Is that ten seconds of cycles on my Game Boy's 8080-derived LR35902 processor or ten seconds on the latest Intel Core i7? In addition, what prevents a micropayment processor from logging my browsing history and creating an interest profile with which to blackmail me?
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a) on a 2-year-old core i5. you can buy a f aster machine and spend less time, or a slower machine and spend more time.
b) the same thing that stops me from tossing ball-bearings onto the highway, or taking just taking your windshield wipers from a parking lot: laws.
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a) on a 2-year-old core i5. you can buy a f aster machine and spend less time, or a slower machine and spend more time.
Good luck carrying an external cryptocurrency mining coprocessor and the battery to power it if you normally read articles on a smartphone.
In addition, what prevents a micropayment processor from logging my browsing history and creating an interest profile with which to blackmail me?
laws.
Which laws might these be in Slashdot's home country that require micropayment processors to separate that option from interest-based advertising? I'd be interested to follow relevant U.S. Code or Code of Federal Regulations citations.
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You've added your own bias into this. There was no mention of cryptocurrency mining anywhere. Nor was there any mention of existing laws.
The OP fabricated a hypothetical future world where everything has DRM. I fabricated a mechanism by which payments could be made, and privacy laws could be enforced.
If you aren't operating within the OP's hypothetical scenario, then you aren't contributing to this conversation. You're contributing to some other conversation. I'm sure that if you start your own thread,
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So let's take the recent pay-with-computer-cycles as a decent example of a future ubiquitous micropayments convenience. Download a jpeg? Pay by waiting through ten seconds of computer cycles.
Later:
There was no mention of cryptocurrency mining anywhere.
Then what non-cryptocurrency means to "pay-with-computer-cycles" did you have in mind?
Nor was there any mention of existing laws.
I doubt that such laws could be created at all in the current legislative climate of Slashdot's home country. And even assuming a future sea change in the attitude of the US Congress, or an attempt by some other country to aggressively court migrants from the US, I am curious to see what a privacy law would look like that is effective but doesn't impose an undue burden on small businesses. Unless I'm severely misunde
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When I say "pay-with-computer-cycles", I don't need to specify anything more specific, nor do I need to have something in mind. I think the future will include faster forms of transportation. I don't need to be thinking air travel, ground travel, sea travel, catapult, space travel, or stargate travel. I can think in general terms.
As for future laws, you're not going to suggest that the future won't have new or different laws. So don't look at things today and say that they'll never change.
That said, I w
Make your own internet? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well (Score:2)
Since they insist I'm just an owner of a license, I'd sue them for the free replacement of the vinyl data device that they gave me to be able to listen to the 'Dark Side Of The Moon' in 1973 since it wasn't as permanent as they claim.
Really? (Score:5, Informative)
> The whole Digital Rights Management (DRM) train started with music and films
How can I take any of it seriously when they start with a statement like that? Computer games had DRM, (often based on looking up things in the manual) long before folks with dealing with digital music and video.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly.
Back in the 80's we called it "Copy Protection" and we "kracked" (*) that stupid shit because media wears out, companies go out of business, kids damage disks, to LEARN, etc. and we got the legal right to back up our software.
DRM is a big "Fuck You to our legal right."
Sadly most people are wussies to get the law to change due to the country being an oligarchy / plutocracy / corporate shill, etc.
(*) Fucking media hijacked the definition of these words:
* Krack = Crack = to remove copy protection
* Kracker = someone who removed copy protection
* Hack = Quick Fix
* Hacker = Someone who is motivated SOLELY to LEARN. The unwritten "code of conduct" was to NEVER damage _anything._
New hijacked meaning:
Crack = drug
Hacker = someone who breaks into systems for either damage, for profit, espionage, etc.
Now get off my LAN.
Exactely (Score:5, Interesting)
You never forget your first time
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Now that is a sweet krack! Holy crap at age 12 too! Congrats!
Did you ever find out about the typo in the manual for the "Summon Clone" spell? :-) I used a hex editor (hiew?) to view the bit-fields that tagged what reagents were used for ALL the spells. Turns out the manual had a typo. :-/ Whoopsie-daisy.
I have two stories to share:
1. Speaking of XOR protection -- you'll probably want to check out Monkey Island 1 and Monkey Island 2. :-)
I got stuck in MI1 when you are on the ship. I had the VGA version and
DRM for DRM (Score:5, Funny)
I'm okay with DRM products, as long as I can spend Digital Rights Money (DRM) on it.
Digital Rights Money lets me tell the product seller when and on what they are allowed to spend the money I gave them.
Oh, and it requires a connection to my server.
Oh, and if they haven't spent the money by the time I decide I no longer want to run the server, the money is now unspendable.
Yep. I'm totally okay with this DRM for DRM arrangement.
I would use the internet less ... (Score:3)
... and move to some alternative that would presumably pop up roughly 20 minutes into the internet going total DRM.
Coming to think of it that would probably be exactly what the world needs to finally move to some namecoin driven namecoin driven mesh network alternative to the intarweb.
Just.. imagine... (Score:1)
Imagine trying to copy-and-paste some text from a news article somewhere into a Slashdot submission box, and having browser DRM tell you 'Sorry! The author, copyright holder or publisher of this text does not allow it to be quoted or re-published anywhere other than where it was originally published!'.
Now imagine ... reading the text from that news article, one sentence at a time... and then typing it into a text editor. Good lord! People are using their brains as COPY BUFFERS!
Everyone line up for your mandatory lobotomies!
Don't think of it as "everything on the Internet" (Score:2)
Think of it as "everything on home computers." If you take control of the home computers, you can DRM everything on the Internet. What would be the best way to do that? With walled-garden computing, of course. Remember that when the original iPhone launched, iOS didn't have a clipboard or download capability.
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Way back when the tin-foil crowd were Going on about the risks of "Trusted computing" [eff.org]. At the time it seemed so far fetched.
Yet here we are today.
DRM free media (Score:2)
If you're disliking DRM-loaded media, then there's obviously a market for DRM-free media (or the alternative, DRM-lite which comments if you violate the DRM but still allows the user to utilize the content.)
It may seem hard, but still possible.
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Or me creating my own news site that permits basic copy-paste, etc.
How do you plan to pay for your newsroom and hosting?
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Same way Slashdot paid for it's hosting and submission system.
Better question is how to grow quickly enough so that one has a reason to keep the newsroom and hosting, cause plopping down yet another news site isn't going to attract any attention. There's plenty of graveyard news/blogs/websites around, sometimes disappear without warning, etc.
Bankroll+income is always a problem, but that's handled with a proper plan (which depends on how the indy-news site unfolds), finding some staff as well, and someone wh
Aggregation != original reporting (Score:2)
Same way Slashdot paid for it's hosting and submission system.
As for the former, Slashdot is ad-supported. Wouldn't web advertising platforms also start using digital restrictions management for accounting, to ensure that advertisers pay publishers the appropriate amount for an ad impression of a given quality?
As for the latter, Slashdot is an aggregator; it doesn't have boots on the ground doing original reporting. Whose job would it be to do the original reporting?
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No matter how much the big labels want to enforce DRM, there will be plenty of very talented independent artists putting their music up for sale DRM-free in any format you want, at sites like Bandcamp.
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It kind of reminds me of the situation a few years ago when European news outlets "won" the right to not have search engines excerpt their news articles. And how only days later all those newspapers clutched their pearls and moaned about how mean old Google stopped indexing their websites and was sending readers elsewhere.
Spiderman 8?? (Score:1)
Spiderman 8? Well, aren't you the idealist?
Considering how frequently they just summarily reboot the Spiderman franchise, clearly the movie of which you speak will actually be identified as the fourth Spiderman 1... and it'll be a total Anime-styled CGI remake of the 2002 Tobey Maguire Spiderman, which means that it'll be an absolute hit everywhere except for the megalopolis of Japan -- where the locals will have finally outgrown such childish things in favor of the more refined and artistic animation style
Wouldn't that work both ways? (Score:2)
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The software lacks a valid certificate from the digital restrictions management certificate authority. It's the same reason you can't self-publish games for game consoles.
On the other hand... (Score:2)
This will never happen. The folks behind DMCA would never allow "everything" to be protected by DRM - only their interests.
If "everything" had DRM that would include any data that I create. It might be interesting if there was a secure means of personally determining distribution, including copies, for every piece of content I place anywhere no matter what the size of the content (could DRM protection of passwords have a place?). It would be a huge adjustment and break a lot of things initially.
For example,
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Wait, that's potentially huge. It seems to me that DRM on everything, including my own content, means I could severely limit the rights of *anything* I originate, including metadata.
This won't just be "an issue" for Facebook, it'd destroy it. And probably Google. And any business that makes a significant part of their gross from data mining.
That might actually be fun to watch. (Just before the lights go out...)
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Yes, there could indeed be a lot of positive applications for ubiquitous DRM. DRM to secure home surveillance camera feeds, on all of your email, on every photo taken by your smartphone at the moment it is taken, on every word spoken into your smartphone while on a conversation, on every input to your home smart speaker, and on and on and on. It could even rise to the level of awesomeness if it could be had with no government back door.
But, like I said, it will never happen. DRM is only to protect business.
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Facebook would dry up and blow away because they couldn't sell information about you to 3rd parties anymore. Imagine if the information on every form you fill is DRMed and can't be handed over to a 3rd party.
Go old school (Score:2)
Imagine trying to copy-and-paste some text from a news article somewhere into a Slashdot submission box
So, you'll have to go old school on them and re-type what was in the article. Just like I had to do in high-school when copying text from a book...with a pen...and no friggin' auto-correct!
Now, GET OFF MY LAWN!
What happens: The internet replaced... (Score:2)
That is a stupidly easy answer, and it will amaze! (Score:4, Funny)
The internet will [Protected content, you need Slashdot Premium Plus membership to access this post]
The real problem. (Score:2)
DRM is a content destroyer in the long term. There should be a addition made to copyrite law that says any any use of DRM must be continually supported by the creator until such time as they completely unlock the media and make it public domain.
That means if you make a DRM encumbered DVD that 80 years from now you are required to continue to ensure equipment exists at a reasonable price so that the original repurchase of the content can still access it in the original format OR you are required to provide
If Internet was DRM protected? (Score:2)
What would Hhappen if everything on the Internet was DRM protected?
Minitel [wikipedia.org] would have prevailed!
Well (Score:3)
Rather pay than be sold as product (Score:2)
I would rather pay micro payments than have my personal data sold to advertisers and data harvesting companies. Micro payments on the order of what advertisers pay to show me an ad.
Fair Use is where DRM breaks down... (Score:3)
Reference: Wikipedia article on Fair Use [wikipedia.org]
So - there will not be an internet where DRM controls everything because, by the definition defined by the Supreme Court, it can not impede fair use. This of course only applies specifically to the United States of America. Your country may have different laws concerning this subject. (IANAL)
If DRM Applied to the whole internet (Score:2)
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Re:Iâ(TM)ll continue going hiking (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd take up/have time for more hobbies, one of which includes finding places to explore in the warmer months. If the Internet and tech in general weren't as "free" (in quote on purpose) as they are now, I'd just do other things unless there was a crack/hack available.
Too late to stuff that genie back in the (DRM) bottle anyway.....
Re:Not much (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a fine balance between not enough DRM, where copyright holders can't live off their work, and too much DRM that's so expensive and so annoying that people massively turn to piracy and ruin the copyright holders.
The right balance is where the return for copyright holders is maximized. Even greedy bastards like the MPAA/RIAA know it and turn a blind eye to massive copyright infringements that they would much rather didn't happen.
So the OP's point is moot: the internet will never be completely DRM-locked, because it would plain kill DRM in very short order.
Re: (Score:3)
Oh please, the idea that DRM deters piracy is a fallacy. It never has, which is why publishers have been doubling down trying insanely complicated and powerful DRM systems like Denuvo in an attempt to make it so strong that it might actually do something. If publishers were smart they'd make their works affordable and DRM-free for maximum profitability. DRM is a symptom of nonsensical, emotion-based business superstitions.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
The right balance is not where return to copyright holders is maximized it is when the return to society is maximized.
You may need to reward copyright holders in order for them to produce stuff, so there is a balance. But the goal is a better society not make a few people rich.
Re: (Score:2)
As far as I can tell, there's not even TFA on this "submission". La. Zy.
I have a feeling that dryriver's day job isn't paying well enough for him/her (I hope it's a him with that nickname otherwise eww) to keep his Wordpress blog up, and he's posting here in the hopes that there will be enough comments for SlashDot to make the (poor) decision to put him on the payroll. Then he can go back his quest for 100 followers on drireever.wordpress.com or wherever else it is he us
Re:Let's be honest (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an underrated argument. If everything was effectively DRM'd, we would have to find solutions that weren't painful for legitimate customers or for society as a whole. There would have to be some mechanism where fair use could actually, well, be used. There would have to be some mechanism to demonstrate who a legitimate rightsholder was to qualify for the DRM, so takedown mechanisms that can be abused today wouldn't need to exist in the same way. Copyright durations would have to be sensible and there would have to be a mechanism for ensuring works were properly released when the time came. If businesses adopted subscription models and then started hiking up prices once they'd got data locked in, we would soon have laws mandating data portability to promote fair and legal competition (much as the EU is now introducing with the GDPR, albeit for a slightly different reason).
Most of the problems with DRM aren't really problems with DRM, they're problems with DRM denying customers what they legitimately paid for, DRM denying society its side of the copyright bargain, or badly implemented DRM having negative side-effects that are nothing to do with IP rights, such as creating security vulnerabilities or privacy problems.
Of course, in practice such a system would be unworkable for a variety of reasons, but it's an interesting thought experiment along the lines of "What if copyright law were actually enforced robustly?"