DRM Needs To Be Banned Because It’s Toxic | Hacker News Reader

DRM Needs To Be Banned Because It’s Toxic

torrentfreak.com

9 pointsUncle_Sam5 comments

DRM is toxic. Just like lead.

Eating a CD might be bad for your health, but that's where this analogy stops.

I rarely buy DRM-protected content, and will always prefer open formats. (See also: My digital PragProg mountain that I've purchased because they're excellent books and not larded down with DRM.)

However, in a free society the government has no business forcing citizens to create a string of bits in a particular way. Vote with your dollars, not with the hammer of a tyrannical law.

The trouble with "voting with your dollars" is that it doesn't, and can't, work.

When the vast majority of consumers simply consume without consideration of their own rights, there's no way for those of us with the wisdom to stand up for our own rights to gather the critical mass we need for "voting with our dollars" to be more than a blip on balance sheets. There simply aren't enough of us that are critically-minded to make a difference by simply not buying.

People are too accustomed to the status quo - consumers expect things to not work as they want them to. Their expectations of the norm must change before they will join us in rejection of the status quo.

The core of this problem comes from bad legislation. Until that changes, and until those laws are fixed, we can't even begin to set things right.

Simply avoiding bad products is not enough.

Libertarian mumbo-jumbo. When you have any significant evidence that 1° people buy rationally 2° people are free from influences 3° markets do exist in the absence of an overarching organisation such as a state; please do come back with these. You should read less Ayn Rand and more actual science.

I didn't say that we should have anarchy. I said that if I'm going to produce a string of 1's and 0's, I get to arrange them in the manner of my choosing. You need to clearly explain where you get the right to force me via law to produce that string in the manner of your choosing.

If a pressure group limits the choice of customers by unilaterally enforcing limitations, which is generally the situation we've known in software and digital media in the past, we'll simply stick to the (very) suboptimal current situation: DRMs on one hand, generalised piracy on the other. Do you think the current situation is optimal? Did we made much progress since the first copy-protected software in the early 80s? What you propose is going on the same way we did for the past 30 years. As the saying go, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

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