FSF: Tim Berners-Lee just gave us an opening to stop DRM in Web standards

Presumably when you say "my bike," you're implying ownership. The analogy falls apart because you don't own DRM-protected works in this context. You license them. It's similar to prohibitions on removing the anti-theft system on a leased car.

> A lot of activity prevented by DRM are legal, at least in some juridiction, so practicing them is not piracy.

> It is not the case with DRM.

I can't reconcile these two statements. The former alludes to the real exemptions in the DMCA and similar laws; the latter falsely claims they don't exist.

That's the core function of LRBY, actually. You publish your content on the network and set the requirements a person must meet before they can download it. The protocol itself enforces these restrictions.

That's pretty much the entire point.

If your definition of 'DRM' must include 'restricts what users can do with it once it's decrypted' then there is no form of DRM that actually exists anywhere and will likely ever exist because it's not likely it is possible for anything to meet your criteria.

Any sort of 'FOSS' DRM is going to behave exactly the same. You can have a system that controls access to content on networks and controls how it's decrypted and such things and be entirely open source, but the only way you can control how things are used once it's ready to be 'consumed' is through hiding how a system functions and hoping your customers will not be allowed access to circumventions. Such a system is antithetical to free software/open source.

> Being the first to publish something on LBRY does not imply that you are the original creator and/or the holder of the copyrights

You can say the same thing about publishing articles in a newspaper or putting a movie on a blueray disk or anything else. Just because you are first to publish doesn't mean you have the legal right to publish it. Whether or not you have the right to publish anything via a 'DRM' system really doesn't enter into it anywhere.

> Anyway, the real threat (as perceived by the pro-DRM crowd) is less that the same content will be republished on LBRY under a different name, and more that once it's been downloaded from LBRY it can easily be uploaded *anywhere*.

The REAL purpose of DRM is so publishing industries can control distribution.

The publishing industry for any type of media; whether it's radio, tv shows, movies, or music or even pictures is obsoleted by the internet.

The purpose for these companies is to provide a means for customers to gain access to art, knowledge, and entertainment. Prior to the internet the capital expenditure required for 'content creators' to reach a wide audience was so high that publishers/record labels/studios/etc would essentially force artists and other people to sign over their copyrights in exchange for payments extracted from their distribution networks. Advertising artists, maintaining relationships with store fronts, running studios, hiring engineers, backup bands, and running the factories necessary to produce media on large scale was something that no individual or small group of people could afford on their own.

Now the bulk of necessity for these industrialists is essentially gone. There are purposes for them, but the internet changed the power dynamic significantly between customers, artists, and publishers. Having a pool of massive capital to maintain and large business overhead is increasingly a liability, not a asset.

So that is where DRM comes in.

Cable companies, Sony, or Apple or whoever else controls the DRM controls the ability for the actual 'content creators' to reach a audience. They have the 'keys', more or less. The challenge is getting large numbers of people suckered into depending on their 'poison pill' networks, hardware, and software. Then they can maintain their dominance by controlling the pathway between creators and customers.

So are you going to convince Disney or Turner Broadcast Systems to use LRBY?

Probably not, unless they have absolutely no other choice. But the same thing goes with any other 'standardized' DRM system they don't control.

And remember the subject: Efforts to create open source DRM. If you want a standard open source DRM solution it's going to look and behave a lot like LRBY. That is about as effective as it can get.