Misunderstanding of embedded system designers [LWN.net]

Misunderstanding of embedded system designers

Posted Jan 16, 2006 23:19 UTC (Mon) by karim (subscriber, #114)
In reply to: Misunderstanding of embedded system designers by melevittfl
Parent article: GPLv3: a first look

I disagree with your conclusion, but you're not entirely off track.

First, from what I have seen DRM is not going away any time soon.
Partly due to the fact that those producing copyrighted material
(i.e. the artists) have very little understanding of the technology,
its impact, and the rest, which makes them very easily convinced
that they must use every possible means to protect their turf. If
you can scare someone into believing that a foreigner (someone of
a different skin color, religion or -- closer to home -- more
technologically apt) will take away their bread and butter or
put their livelyhood in danger, you can bet they'll use every and
any possible means that this doesn't happen, including requiring
that those he entrusts his "work" to provide firm guarantees.

That's just human nature. And whether free software developers want
to allow developers caught in the crossfire to use a piece of
software or not won't really change much. DRM will remain until
the fear I describe above is present, there's nothing any
software license can do about it -- and that's partly why the
DRM clause in GPL3 is wrong.

You want to make DRM go away? Just don't buy DRM'ed material. It's
as simple as that. The one thing the "creators" will hate more than
the fear of not making money, is actually not making any.

Karim

(Log in to post comments)

Paraphrasing you

Posted Jan 17, 2006 4:30 UTC (Tue) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

I disagree with your conclusion, but you're not entirely off track.

First, from what I have seen spam is not going away any time soon. Partly due to the fact that those advertizing by the means of spam (i.e. those who hire spammers) have very little understanding of the technology, its impact, and the rest, which makes them very easily convinced that they must use every possible means to protect their turf. If you can scare someone into believing that a foreigner (someone of a different skin color, religion or -- closer to home -- more technologically apt) will take away their bread and butter or put their livelyhood in danger, you can bet they'll use every and any possible means that this doesn't happen, including requiring that those he entrusts his "work" to provide firm guarantees.

That's just human nature. And whether free software developers want to allow spammers caught in the crossfire to use a piece of software or not won't really change much. Spam will remain until the fear I describe above is present, there's nothing any software license can do about it.

You want to make spam go away? Just don't buy stuff advertized by spam. It's as simple as that. The one thing the "creators" of spam will hate more than the fear of not making money, is actually not making any.

Misunderstanding of embedded system designers

Posted Jan 17, 2006 18:33 UTC (Tue) by davecb (subscriber, #1574) [Link]

karim said:... those producing copyrighted material (i.e. the artists) have very little understanding of the technology

I'm one of those producers, and I and my (book) publisher found that free, non-DRM'd electronic distribution of our work drove book sales.

Baen has now followed O'Reilly in this, shipping completeley unrestricted PDFs of their back catalog with recent publications...

Some artists in the graphic and performing arts have seen this, though their publishers haven't

--dave

Misunderstanding of embedded system designers

Posted Jan 18, 2006 14:25 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Baen has been doing this for a long time: I think longer than ORA. I have a book I bought in 2001 with a CD-full of other books at the back, in HTML and RTF...