this is not my beautiful house [LWN.net]

this is not my beautiful house

Posted Feb 11, 2010 19:09 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: this is not my beautiful house by wingo
Parent article: FOSDEM'10: Maemo 6 platform security

Even if you as a user choose to remain free from coercive relationships like that imposed by DRM, if a significant fraction of people are lured into such a situation, it gives the coercive party more power -- to the point that perhaps there will be no device on the market that preserves your freedom.

That is why it's up to the open source folks to prove to people that having DRM is detrimental. If there are actually compelling and good reasons why DRM should not be used then we need to help people understand it and also prove it.

Right?

This is a good opportunity to do this. Even though the platform is restrictive enough to make DRM seem feasible it's completely opt-out. Prove to people that DRM is not necessary then they can opt-out. Once Nokia and everybody else in the world sees that people are opting out and are not sacrificing freedom for comfort then it will be that much more easy in the future to convince people to make devices more open.

Like the other person said these sort of hand held devices started out with very negative approach to end user freedoms.. but have now started to progress in our direction.

The reality of the situation is that people are, and should be, free to make decisions on what sort of trade-offs they are willing to make in their lives. The world is full of necessary evils and compromises between people with different viewpoints and ethical frameworks. The more we are able to prove that freedom is self-evident then the more freedom we, and other people, are going to get.

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this is not my beautiful house

Posted Feb 11, 2010 20:55 UTC (Thu) by vadim (guest, #35271) [Link]

That is why it's up to the open source folks to prove to people that having DRM is detrimental. If there are actually compelling and good reasons why DRM should not be used then we need to help people understand it and also prove it.

There's nothing to prove. The DRM people amply proved it is detrimental already, with things like activation servers going down and making people unable to play the games/music they paid for. As a consumer there's no logical reason to subscribe to such a scheme. The only reason people do is because large companies put it in front of huge amounts of content, making avoiding it very difficult.

this is not my beautiful house

Posted Feb 12, 2010 15:37 UTC (Fri) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

erm, but surely that is a logical reason for a consumer (access to that huge amount of content)? That's exactly the trade that many people are willing to make (but relatively few readers here).

this is not my beautiful house

Posted Feb 12, 2010 16:33 UTC (Fri) by vadim (guest, #35271) [Link]

It's not a fair trade, though. If you're unhappy with a restaurant's
policies, you can go to another, and get the same food for the most part.
If you don't like an establishment's dress code, for instance, you can
also get your steak at a place that's not so restrictive.

But if you're unhappy with the entretainment media's industry, there's
simply nowhere to go. There's no place that will for instance sell the
same content as on BluRay without the DRM attached. There's no shop that
sells Windows without activation. And some of those things form chains of
lock in: To perform your job you need to access a website, to acess it you
must use IE, and to use IE you must use Windows. You're not entirely free
to make a choice in such a case because the odds are stacked against you.

In a case where you can obtain the same thing with either DRM or without
it, people overwhelmingly go for the option without, as can be seen from
the success of DRM-less web music shops.