[advocacy] DRM in OGG - A Proposal

[Peter Harris]

[on the 'goodness' of DRM vs GPL]
> > In that one takes away your ability to exercise rights you legally have,
> > and the other grants you additional rights you didn't previously have.
>
> That's quite neatly put, although legal rights are a slippery concept. In
> practice, how many of these rights are enforceable if you can't afford a
> better team of lawyers than the other side?

Going from theory to practice? Okay.

In practice, how does DRM prevent illegal copying without preventing legal
copying? Yes, there are lots of cases of legal copying. I bought this
song/ebook/whatever, and I'm upgrading my computer. I've even read accounts
of somebody needing to reinstall Windoze, only to find out that all their
wma-encoded music was unplayable now.

Even worse, the real criminals will hack DRM. It will only prevent 'casual
copying' (which is legal in some countries, illegal in others) and frustrate
genuine users. DVD is the first obvious example. A byte-for-byte copy of a
disc is still playable; the DRM only prevents genuine users from being able
to play their movies if they changed jobs and had to move to a different
continent. The DRM is only useful for preventing foreign film lovers from
being able to import movies. It doesn't even begin to prevent copying.

Peter Harris

Criminals hack DRM:

http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/aboutus/mediacenter/NewsDetails.jsp?id=05_21_2
002A1
 http://www.cybercrime.gov/butlerPlea.htm
 see also Macrovision scrubbers and keygen apps.
Casual copying is legal in my country:
 http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/C-42/36746.html#rid-36869

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