Wiring DRM into the system

Wiring DRM into the system

Posted Aug 4, 2005 8:52 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
Parent article: Wiring DRM into the system

Two points:

It may well be that the industry will get its DRM technology working to the point that it no longer interferes greatly with the life of the average couch potato. If things "just work" for most people, they will be accepted by those people.

But it seems to me that if the DRM isn't getting in the way of most people it has either failed to reach its stated goals (people expect to be able to share songs with friends, back them up, copy them to cd to play in the car, etc) or it's basically gotten to a level where it matches people's expectations. Would that be success? From who's point of view?

This would mean you're OK as long as you conform to the majority (ie enough people are with you to matter). Hmm.

But it is hard to believe that Apple would not also use the TPM, for example, to help ensure that audio files do not escape from the one system where they are authorized to be.

But iTunes right now allows you to copy it a few times without problems and most people are fine with that. If iTunes went back on that I think they'd have a serious problem.

Anyway, if you buy a computer from a major supplier pre-installed with windows and the TPM won't let me wipe the disk and install Linux, well, I'm fairly sure that wouldn't be legal in many juridictions. Only time will tell. The more popular we can make non-mainstream OS's (Linux, BSD, etc) the better our defence.

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