Source Sauce

The debate wages. Does digital rights management software fringe upon destroying the distribution of open source  and creative commons products? It’s not a simple question and its easy to see the problem on either side.

On the one hand everyone and and their chihuahua in the corporate music/film/media industry wants a way to protect their product once it turns digital. Enter DRM’s many people are aware of DRM’s in the form of MP3’s with time restrictions or burn restrictions, and share restrictions, this is traditionally all  been software based, normally embedded into the MP3 and recognized by software programs as Licensed ect. Wiki for a more precise description. These ensure that millions of copies of the digital file cannot be made of Paris  Hilton’s new cd, and forced upon 12 years olds under the guise of something good for free. In this Case the DRM is actually permissable. It is only applied to works known to be held under copyright law.
However things are begining to change. The Corporate media industry is unhappy that  there is a way to work around this, being software, it takes only a skilled software expert to …. work around the DRM, or just merely making mp3’s of the cds. So they have decided to go a level deeper into this protection and place the restricting ability into the hardware. A perfect example is the  zune, which has the built in feature that when a friend sends you a song to listen to it is a play for 3 days or 3 plays no matter what. even if your friend sent you a song that he has himself created it must follow these restrictions.
Obviously a problem for music that falls under different laws than copyright laws. Say for instance creative commons. The problem is that it would be difficult for these new DRM’s to really tell if the song was created by steve your old roomate or led zepplin and just reconfigured to appear to be Steve’s creation.

So who is right? Is it ok to block all content on the premise that everyone is just trying to get a loop hole added to a solid system that attempts eliminates piracy. Or is it inherently wrong to block all content based on cynicism.

At least one website seems to vehemently against this idea. Defective By design.

I wasn’t able to find a pro DRM site.. ..

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 5th, 2006 at 8:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.