Re: Why DRM exists [was Re: Flame Linus to a crisp!]

Alan Cox
2003-04-27T22:42:54Z

On Sul, 2003-04-27 at 23:36, Larry McVoy wrote:
> But you are still missing the point. As long as the feeling is that it is
> OK to reverse engineer by staring at the file formats, the corporations
> will respond by encrypting the data you want to stare at.

And government if it is smart will reply by enforcing reverse
engineering rights *for compatibility* (not cloning), or business
(the surviving bits anyway) will figure it out and do it themselves.

> In other words, it's pretty much hopeless to try and catch up that way,
> you might as well go try and build something better from the start.

You have to interoperate to do that.