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Comment by SkyBelow | Hacker News Reader

>That doesn't seem like a very enlightened ethics discussion.

That is an apt summary of my college ethics discussions. Even in cases where the professor was doing their best to encourage discussion, the majority of the class couldn't think beyond first order effects and hypotheticals would quickly get emotional and devolve into character attacks.

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Yeah. I was shocked at how many -CS MAJORS- were pro-DRM.

What does being a CS major having to do with being pro-DRM? Isn't it mainly an economic/philosophical standpoint on copyright?

I believe it's something more to do with the OP's (mistaken) idea that CS majors are somehow more likely to be "hackers" or people who exchange pirated software or wares -- when really there's only a handful of people who know how to crack the DRM in the first place (which requires some degree of technical know-how) and then those people distribute the pirated goods to others (whose technical literacy may be far less, even if it's still enough to distribute the pirated material on down the line).

It's a bit like thinking all painters are in favor of graffiti, or all musicians are okay with "sampling" and remix culture.

Actually, it comes from the author's belief that CS majors should know that, A. DRM at best delays cracking, never prevents it, and B. That it ends up hurting the legitimate users, not the pirates, and C. That the more efficient it is at A, the more likely it will cause B. As even when I was in college, that was the case (I asked some of the students to give me an instance where a piece of desirable software was not available illegally within a week of release date. They were unable to provide one (in fairness, since then there have been a few cases of less desirable releases that went longer; nothing that had the attention of all the major cracking groups). I also asked if they were aware of some of the issues at the time (such as securom's huge issues, the installation of rootkits by some, the inability to use when moving computers, etc), they were not, despite having explicitly chosen the topic to do research on for the class. They went into the topic with the expectation that DRM is just a good thing, and even when researching it, only sought out sources that enforced that bias. Which shocked me, given they should be technically literate enough to know the issues, and the greater nuances involved.

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