Some of us knew this 30 years ago [LWN.net]

Some of us knew this 30 years ago

Posted Jul 26, 2013 20:51 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Some of us knew this 30 years ago by shmerl
Parent article: Android 4.3

Vote with your wallet and ignore services which use DRM. This will make publishers change their minds much quicker than any other arguments.

Really? If 1% of anti-DRM zealots will stop supporting publishers then DRM will go away? Newsflash from you: if DRM will increase earnings from "normal" users by mere 2% then this will more then compensate loss from anti-DRM zealots.

Publishes do need users - but they don't need you, personally. Any other user will wallet will do. And since there are many times more users than publishers... DRM stays, sorry.

And as long as DRM stays any platform which does not support DRM automatically becomes second-class citizen: smaller selection of stuff, often higher cost, etc. Individual publishers and/or creators can try to play anti-DRM card and try to attract some users this way, but if platform owner does that said platform quickly goes down in flames. Joe Average cares about ability to watch Netflix today more then s/he cares about availability of stuff tomorrow.

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Some of us knew this 30 years ago

Posted Jul 26, 2013 21:13 UTC (Fri) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link] (2 responses)

No reason to explain that this issue depends on users. And if users have no clue - they won't make an educated choice. That wasn't my point. My point was about those who know, and still support DRM. They can start with themselves. I.e. the fact that many users aren't educated about this issue is not an excuse to support DRM.

Some of us knew this 30 years ago

Posted Jul 26, 2013 22:40 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

Pick your battles. When you protest against some particularly nasty problems with DRM implementation you can be heard by others (content providers included), but when you scream: "DRM? Over my dead body! the only thing reaction you can reasonably expect is "Noted. We'll see if we can organize said dead body".

Situation is similar to discussion about copyleft: push too much and the only thing will be write off of your platform/community/etc as hopeless. Instead of someone who can influence future direction of industry you are written off and can not do anything at all.

Some of us knew this 30 years ago

Posted Jul 28, 2013 6:22 UTC (Sun) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]

Situation is different from copyleft, because saying "use copyleft everywhere" is a tough proposal for those who can't come up with working business based on that (let's say it's hard to sell a game which is 100% open source including artistic assets). Business models which work for some open source projects don't work for every possible product.

DRM however is different, since it has completely no logical reason to exist, literally in any product. Therefore it's completely reasonable to propose to drop DRM everywhere.