DRM good or evil?

Posted Sep 24, 2006 6:35 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: DRM good or evil? by mingo
Parent article: Kernel developers' position on GPLv3

is it evil even if you found it on the street (honestly, some street gang left it there), and by accident you are attacked by a drunk maniac weilding an axe, who kills your dog with a single blow and now threatens to kill you, your wife and your son?

What can I tell you, yes, it is evil but it can have some good uses. Not that leaving automatic assault rifles on the street is generally a good idea, with all those little kids running around and such, but if some responsible adult found it and a drunk maniac attacked said adult at the same time, it could have a good use, yes.

In my case I would probably kill the drunk maniac, the wife, the kid and some other pedestrians based on my lack of expertise. A simple, non-automatic weapon would be better. Now, before you advocate that "combat weapon training is a good thing in some situations", just give me a good old axe and make it even. After all the maniac is drunk and I am not.

Were thus those, "defensive" atomic bombs "evil" too? Or did they save humanity from total destruction?

Total destruction from bombs from the other side? Yeah, really good bombs then.

If you had the choice, and this discovery was inevitable, which country would you have picked to discover the atomic bomb? Nazi Germany? Communist China under the rule of Mao? The Soviet Union under the rule of Stalin? Or maybe the USA?

Doing simple extrapolation from casualty figures, I would answer "anyone but the USA". No other country has used it against humans. This is not some communist opinion, it is cold-blooded extrapolation.

DRM was not invented today, it was in use for more than a decade in probably every desktop chip that you used - and the use of that type of DRM was considered totally good. (the Intel microcode upload mechanism is DRM.)

Ahem. It is most definitely not DRM. There are no "rights" there to manage at all. I think you are confusing encryption and trusted computing with DRM. According to the wikipedia, TC is "an enabler for DRM", but it is not the same. I do not think that TC is evil all the way, even if Stallman does.

I believe you only consider DRM "evil" because you are seeing it used for evil things in things like DVD players.

I believe I consider DRM evil because it is the wrong solution to the wrong problem. First you have to make TC pervasive, then you have to lock down all computers all the way for DRM to work; in the process you must shut down all those pesky researchers, or any loophole will get exploited to death. Distribution of source code is not possible and deployment of new binaries is unthinkable.

When all music is locked down, it is the day that we go back to pre-CD-ROM days. We lose the convenience of digital music, and we lose fair use. So we probably stop buying music.