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DigitalRightsManagement

(moved from InformationPropagation)

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is often claimed to foster the spread of information because it enforces control, and therefore recognizes that information is valuable. Being valuable, it ought be possible to buy it and sell it, and therefore a free market would allow information to be where it was needed most (and the price the highest). Others have called DRM Digital Restrictions Management instead, recognizing that DRM builds barriers and doesn't open any new conduits. Therefore, all things being equal, DRM will in fact hamper the spread of information. We're not heading for an Information Society using DRM...

-- AlexSchroeder

I don't like DRM. It seems like a cheap trick by the music and movie industry to preserve their profits, at the expense of global safety. There are a lot of privacy and security concerns involved. If you really need to copy something, and it's totally legal to do so, it's easy for DRM to get in the way. That's bad.

However, I found myself thinking up DigitalRightsManagement, quite by accident, myself. Here's how it happened. I read MobileContent. I've also been reading up on license disputes and conflicts, between wiki. Wouldn't it be nice if, as a part of MobileContent, there was a check to make sure that licenses matched? Because surely, people are going to make mistakes, and not check to make sure licenses are valid. When we're in the age of Futures:MassUseOfWiki, there will be hordes of wiki, and the license on a particular wiki will be this subtle thing. You'll be using tons of wiki. Who can remember all the details? So keep it legal. Have the wiki check to make sure that the licenses match before delivering the pages.

Oh. But that's DigitalRightsManagement.

..!

(...I do have some faint recollection that this issue is discussed on other wiki (C2?) as well.)

-- LionKimbro

Perhaps this is getting too far into philosophy. It somehow feels wrong to enforce the rules using technology. I agree that automatic licensing checks for wikis are nice, and we should provide feedback to users to let them know about incompatibilities (warnings). But create the entire DRM crypto infrastructure? Replacing laws with technology seems like the wrong way to go for us as a society. Where is public control? Where is individual choice? (This is where LawrenceLessig's book CodeAndOtherLawsOfCyberspace comes in.) -- AlexSchroeder

Well, yeah. I agree with that. -- LionKimbro


See InformationPropagation

EditNearLinks: CodeAndOtherLawsOfCyberspace PatrickAnderson LawrenceLessig

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