Catshanghai

have written about my loathing of digital rights management (DRM) on several occasions, because honest consumers are forced to pay for media such as music and films that works less well than something they could steal for free. I made the mistake of paying for a few really good albums by Joanna Newsome, Nina Nastasia and the Espers on Itunes. When I moved over to Ubuntu Linux, these songs stopped working. I’m never going to make that mistake again. Emusic has no such DRM.

The most eloquent opponent of DRM is Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing. I really enjoyed reading his kindred summary, which shows that he knows far more about media and technology than the companies who try to cripple their products with “digital consumer enablement”. It is good that he puts media corporations in the same company as authoritarian dictatorships. They both fail to understand the changing nature of the world and they desparately cling to their comfortable positions of power by treating other people like perpetually naughty children.

The scene has been set for one of the big ideological conflicts of this century. On one side we will have the digital freedom activists who want information to be open and free for everyone to enjoy however they see fit. The Electronic Freedom Foundation, open source developers, creative commons podcasters, Wired magazine, global entrepreneurs and torrenting teenagers are all in this camp. The other side is populated by record campanies, movie studios, proprietary software monopolies, third world dictatorships and medieval terrorist groups like the Taliban who want to control information, because they are frightened of change or fail to understand it. Google is on the side of digital freedom, but they could easily be flipped and Apple are hippies with totalitarian tendencies like a new age religious cult for architects.

It’s hard not to smile when you read Cory Doctorow write passages like this even if he is summing up a situation that is really irritating. He writes:

When Soviet bureaucrats wanted to impress foreign visitors with the success of the grand experiment, they would visit Potemkin villages – fake towns where actors pretended to be living a life of luxury amid bulging granaries and well-paved streets bustling with happy babushkas pushing prams.

It was a facade, a veneer, a sham. The actors lived in squalor, in crumbling tenements built with the typical Soviet love of concrete.

When entertainment executives are given tours of digital rights management technology, they are being fooled in just the same way. These Potemkin demonstrations depict a universe of happy devices, all seamlessly interoperating, tossing media back and forth to one another in a superbly orchestrated fashion. In this world the honest users are kept honest, are gently turned aside from overstepping their privileges, and are happy to pay a tiny sum for the right to do something new.

Source: Guardian Website