Comment by Tmmrn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tmmrn | Hacker News Reader

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That's a false dilemma. Your choices:

1. Slight inconvenience 2. Strong inconvenience 3. Giving away "content" for free

I propose 4.: No inconvenience for the users, charge as you wish and simply sue the people making money illegally off your works.

Because the argument that it doesn't stop illegal copying anyway is correct. Consumers don't like it: http://www.amazon.com/Assassins-Creed-2-Pc/product-reviews/B... http://www.amazon.com/Spore-Mac/product-reviews/B000FKBCX4/ Those people giving 1 star reviews, those are the people who are interested in the game, research it, many of them probably pay money for it and then they are dissatisfied.

For text articles I think the big problem is really if someone copies an article and has some kind of decent traffic on the copy. This should be trivial to find via a search engine and you can take appropriate action directly.

For music and videos... I am not a friend of watermarks but it may be the best method of just selling drm free and going after those people who share the most "commercially".

It's surprisingly difficult to sue people for IP infringement if they are foreign unfortunately.

I have a friend who published a bunch of her artwork online and later found out via google image search that it was being used by a fair sized company with only slight modification for branding purposes without her being paid or made aware.

She contacted the company in question directly who basically responded "LOL, screw off". At that point she contacted an IP lawyer assuming it would be an easy case. But was basically told the process would cost thousands of $ and she would most likely lose.

Isn't that problem more-or-less another indication of the failure of DRM? That is, only rich people (or other entities with personhood, like corporations) can use the laws in question. DRM increases the cost of the content, and the legal follow-up on real instances of "Intellectual Property Theft" is quite expensive. Either way (increased cost to get content out, or expensive policing) the DRM hurts personhood's with smaller amounts of cash.

> Isn't that problem more-or-less another indication of the failure of DRM? That is, only rich people (or other entities with personhood, like corporations) can use the laws in question.

Until this changes, DRM will be a failure. Likewise, when "property rights" are just a way for rich folks to oppress everyone else, there is no rule of law, and such rights are just a legal pretext for the rich to hire soldiers to bully others. However, when property rights apply to everyone, then they become an expectation of society as a whole. Thieves are successfully prosecuted, the law can act as a deterrent, and the resulting stability allows for the accumulation of wealth in the general populace.

The Internet isn't to that point yet. We're all still barbarians, and if you can take another's livestock and horses, you're clever and a hero to be admired.

Wait, what? In what sense are "property rights" over content a tool exclusively for the powerful? Apart from "Glee", what content provider routinely appropriates and resells independently produced content? Moreover, without the protection of the law, how does any market for independent content exist?

I don't think you've thought this point through carefully.

Finally, your invocation of "might makes right" is comfortably made on Hacker News, where you feel like you have a good sense of both the ability of your peers to screw you over and the causes to which they'd put those abilities to use. Let me just once again inform you that people on HN are far less "mighty", as regards technology, than they think they are. In particular, money buys a whole lot of "might" when it comes to software security.

> Wait, what? In what sense are "property rights" over content a tool exclusively for the powerful?

You misunderstand me. Property rights were once a tool of the powerful. Now they are distributed, for the better. Likewise DRM, except in some limited contexts, is primarily a tool of big companies. It would be better for it to be primarily a tool of the masses.

> In particular, money buys a whole lot of "might" when it comes to software security.

You've made my point. It's just like when firearms were the province of rich people who could afford them. Someone is going to figure out how to sell and market the same tech (polymorphically customized, or with a white box encryption layer) to the masses, who can actually make better use of it than big companies who must oppose whole hacker communities at once.

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