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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

> Why can't we have nice things? This world is so distopian.

Bonus: As technologists and developers, we are actively creating this dystopia! I'm sure a non-zero portion of HN's audience is hard at work implementing DRM, locking users out of products they own, and coming up with new roadblocks for users. Perhaps someone reading this very comment implemented this exact Blu-Ray DRM in a devices's firmware. To the rest of us, it's dystopia, but to that person, it's just another JIRA ticket Boss says they need to implement, so they do.

Blame the evil managers all you want, but you, dear reader, are the one writing the code and hitting Commit.

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While I acknowledge the irony you are pointing out, even that is a feature of the world we live in, where humans are unable to coordinate. Eliminating DRM is just one of the many wonders we could accomplish if we could "simply" coordinate the efforts of all software engineers on the planet.

Because if you don't implement DRM, then you simply raise the marginal price that it costs a company to do so, and you make another engineer – who is willing to implement it – marginally richer, thus indirectly rewarding behavior you despised in the first place!

The only ways to eliminate things like DRM are to either globally coordinate all software engineers' efforts (probably impossible), or somehow... socially change the incentives such that DRM is a net-loss for content producers? Also seems probably impossible.

By far the easiest way to change incentives is with legislation and a 'right to access'. Of course easiest != easy.

I realized the futility of taking an ethical stand in software, early in my career. I was a junior developer, and my next project was to write code to cheat a benchmark. I managed to work up the courage to tell my boss I had a problem with doing that, and he said "Hey, fine, no problem. We treat our developers well here" and was totally cool about it. I got another ticket to work on instead. Bill, two cubicles down, was happy to go and write the benchmark-cheating code.

I still refuse projects and jobs I consider unethical, but realize it's pissing in the wind until there is some larger coordinated framework (like a Hippocratic Oath for developers).

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