Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

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Media distributors have all the right to modify their works in any way they feel like. It is after all their property and they should enjoy the Property rights associated with it. If they want to encrypt it, scramble it, create CDs with strange sectors, they are completely free to do so.

My hardware however is not theirs, it's mine. I should have the same property rights to my property as they should have to theirs. Goods that still are controlled by the manufacturer has thus been designed to infringe on my property rights after ownership has been transfered. It is wrong, and should be illegal.

DRM is a technical design to corrupt property rights. The actual owner has none of the rights in "Bundle of rights"¹. One losses any of the control associated with property rights². It removes the concept of private property in ways we should never allow. It is simply a worse crime in history than eminent domain, mostly because everyone nowadays carries it in their pocket.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundle_of_rights

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_rights

Lets not forget the laws against reverse-engineering.

Lets not forget that people were seriously wondering if "jail-breaking" their iPhones is illegal or not. Thats how far it has gone. Its a disgrace to anything that a democratic liberal society is.

What is next, you are not allowed to run a certain program on your devices? Then it will be illegal to access certain web-sites with your devices. Then perhaps it will be illegal to have read a text on a print-out. Watch out, citizen, what you are writing is illegal, you are not allowed to do that!

Remember Eben Moglens talk on the war against general purpose computing.

It is already illegal to access certain websites. It's just that those websites are generally considered morally abhorrent. I'm not necessarily arguing against your point, except to say that slippery slopes are generally more complicated than the people warning against them think they are.

If you're referring to "the children," I can't recall a case when someone asserting that we were starting down a slippery slope after some child-protection legislation had been passed has been wrong.

All of these national level DNS website blocks were sold as kiddie porn blocking.

"What is next, you are not allowed to run a certain program on your devices?"

That's what software licensing decides. I can have perfectly valid executable binaries on my computer but if I don't have a license to use them, then it's technically illegal to ./execute

Thats is true. Im no angel but I do not have pirated and unlicensed software on my computers, thats one of the reasons I only use Linux and pay for IntelliJ. At least with software we have an option.

I was saying that more in the context of oppressive regimes, sorry I mean safe democratic governments, that some programs are illegal to write.

If you (the collective "you", not you specifically) did not subvert their property rights through piracy, they would not feel the need to subvert yours through DRM.

It's a mistake to think that content creators are in the business of selling bits and bytes, and then complain about not being allowed to trade those bits and bytes as you would physical property.

The reality is right there in the name: it's called "intellectual" property. What you think you paid for, the disc or the bandwidth or the bits, is simply the medium used to deliver that which what you really paid for.

"Intellectual property" is weasel words made up by those who most benefit from it. There is no such thing. There are exclusive rights, given by We the People, and not for any other reason than to advance science and the useful arts. Anything else is selfish egotistical aggrandizing.

> "Intellectual property" is weasel words made up by those who most benefit from it. There is no such thing.

Yes, there is.

> There are exclusive rights, given by We the People, , and not for any other reason than to advance science and the useful arts.

No, they're given by Congress. The power to give those rights is given to Congress by the people via the Constitution, but Congress is the one giving the exclusive rights. And that limitation applies to the subset of intellectual property which is dependent on the copyright clause in the US, which isn't all of intellectual property.

But, in any case, even where that applies, it illustrates the existence of intellectual property, since an exclusive right with regard to something protected in law is what property is.

Real property is an exclusive right protected in law with respect to land. Tangible personal property is an exclusive right protected in law with respect to some tangible object not permanently affixed to the land. Intangible personal property (of which intellectual property is a subset) is an exclusive right protected in law that is not attached to land or to some tangible object.

So you mean if you make use of other's "intellectual property", you derive no benefit from it? If not, why do you make use of it? Maybe there's a reason we as a society have accepted the concept of Intellectual Property

Also: if you don't make use of it, why do you care what they do to protect it? Firefox and Chrome are open source, and as the refrain goes, you can always remove any DRM bits you don't like and use that.

All property rights are exclusive rights granted by law for the public good.

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