DRM

Postat: 2004-06-25 kl. 11.48

Lyssnade precis på Cory Doctrows tal till Microsoft om DRM.

Jason Kottke gjorde en mp3-version av talet (Bittorrent).

Godbitar:

Here's the social reason that DRM fails: keeping an honest user honest is like keeping a tall user tall. DRM vendors tell us that their technology is meant to be proof against average users, not organized criminal gangs like the Ukranian pirates who stamp out millions of high-quality counterfeits. It's not meant to be proof against sophisticated college kids. It's not meant to be proof against anyone who knows how to edit her registry, or hold down the shift key at the right moment, or use a search engine. At the end of the day, the user DRM is meant to defend against is the most unsophisticated and least capable among us.

/ ... /

The player piano was a digital recording and playback system.
Piano-roll companies bought sheet music and ripped the notes
printed on it into 0s and 1s on a long roll of computer tape,
which they sold by the thousands -- the hundreds of thousands --
the millions. They did this without a penny's compensation to the
publishers. They were digital music pirates. Arrrr!

/ ... /

I'm a Microsoft customer. Like millions of other Microsoft
customers, I want a player that plays anything I throw at it, and
I think that you are just the company to give it to me.

Yes, this would violate copyright law as it stands, but Microsoft
has been making tools of piracy that change copyright law for
decades now. Outlook, Exchange and MSN are tools that abet
widescale digital infringement.

More significantly, IIS and your caching proxies all make and
serve copies of documents without their authors' consent,
something that, if it is legal today, is only legal because
companies like Microsoft went ahead and did it and dared
lawmakers to prosecute.

Microsoft stood up for its customers and for progress, and won so
decisively that most people never even realized that there was a
fight.

Do it again! This is a company that looks the world's roughest,
toughest anti-trust regulators in the eye and laughs. Compared to
anti-trust people, copyright lawmakers are pantywaists. You can
take them with your arm behind your back.

/ ... /

American film studios didn't want the Japanese electronics
companies to get a piece of the movie pie, so they fought the
VCR. Today, everyone who makes movies agrees that they don't want
to let you guys get between them and their customers.

Sony didn't get permission. Neither should you. Go build the
record player that can play everyone's records.

Because if you don't do it, someone else will.

(craphound.com: Microsoft Research DRM talk)

Det är tänkvärt. Bra. Satt i relevant kontext.

Här är en kortversion av talet.