Yeah, dream on. How long do you think this option will stay available to you? I sometimes get the impression that intelligent technical people on HN can't see ahead 5 minutes into the future, because being a peon without rights is something that conflicts with their self image as some technical sophisticate not subject to the same insults by our overlords as lowly non-techies. But your relative technical sophistication just means you'll lose some basic control over your privacy, data and possessions at t+ε rather than t.
edit: HN would rate limit me if I tried to reply to each explanation with thanks, so: thanks!
t+ε = some point in time a tiny fraction later
For as long as my reader can decrypt ebooks locally.
Because local vs cloud doesn't matter squat if all the devices your have locally are locked down completely and controlled by someone else.
This is a significant concern. We're seeing more and more non-free hardware in the market. Hardware designed to stop us from having access to data and from running our own software. Our computing freedom must be sacrificed in order to have any hope of enforcing these antiquated laws.
Even "unpublished" works can be recreated by those with talent, like Mozart and Allegri’s Miserere.
Why do you think so? If you can tell the difference between a family scene and a screening of a Hollywood film, why can't your camera? It doesn't have to perfect, and you can gradually tighten things down, which is exactly what has been happening for some time.
That's a big "if". I wouldn't guarantee to always be able to tell the difference. And there is a lot of non-Hollywood content which looks a lot more like something out of a Hollywood film than just "family scenes". (People do make their own films, you know, not just recordings of family events.)
> … why can't your camera?
That's asking a lot out of the kind of computing hardware you can reasonably fit into a camera. Even if you assume something like a smartphone with much more computing capacity than a standalone DSLR or mirrorless camera (and a correspondingly higher power budge / shorter battery life), you're not going to be able to train it to recognize every bit of Hollywood content and reliably distinguish it from non-Hollywood content offline. (Online recognition where the camera can upload content to the server for pattern recognition is a different matter, but something like this would presumably be done offline anyway.) The information requirements would be on the order of having all that content downloaded to the phone—never mind the processing involved.
Its not at all hard to believe that in 20-30 years when all the non-drm'ed version are sitting in landfills the analog "hole" will be closed because capture or playback devices will simply refuse to function when they detect watermarks when interacting with unsecured channels.
I acted when ultra-hd was "cracked" and grabbed one of the friendly drives, but its not been particularly useful because there seems to be far less effort in the public to assure that ultrahd disks are readable (look up the details) so its more likely to "miss" these days. The point being that its a giant game of back and forth, and while the "crackers" win everytime they crack something, they are mostly hobbiest fighting against corps with billions to employ engineers who spend their entire day coming up with ways to make it more difficult. Given few of us have electron microscopes and giant supercomputers, it seems really likely they will eventually win given that they learn to compensate every time something is cracked.
Plus, in the past it was pretty easy to buy PC's/etc that gave you full control, these days even with secure boot disabled, you might not be able to get into the lower levels of firmware because the machine simply refuses to accept unsigned updates. Flash it by hand and the bootstrap code integrated on the CPU die refuses to accept it.
That is the unsolvable problem that guarantees DRM will never be able to create a perfect protection device that allows the company to stuff the genie back into the bottle, or the cat back into the bag, at will.
edit: clarity