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

Downing, Thomas
2003-04-30T12:59:56Z

----Original Message-----
From: Larry McVoy [mailto:lm@bitmover.com]

> What seems to be forgotten is that the people who are locking things up
> are the people who own those things and the people who are complaining
> are the people who got those things, illegally, for free.

That is an unfairly sweeping statement. I complain, I purchase; I am
not alone in this.

Second, in the context of the USA, there are two long established
principals that balance copyright - fair use and first point of sale.
The problem with the "bad use of DRM" is that the vendors (who _are_
the owners) of copyright material want to eliminate consumer rights
under these to principles as well.

> The open source community, in my opinion, is certainly a contributing
> factor in the emergence of the DMCA and DRM efforts. This community
> thinks it is perfectly acceptable to copy anything that they find useful.
> Take a look at some of the recent BK flamewars and over and over you
> will see people saying "we'll clone it". That's not unique to BK,
> it's the same with anything else which is viewed as useful. And nobody
> sees anything wrong with that, or copying music, whatever. "If it's
> useful, take it" is the attitude.

First, in many countries, (including USA,) producing a work-alike
alternative has been defended by the courts, as long as such issues as
patent violations are not shown to have occured.

Second, there is _no_ parallel between producing a clone of BK and
making illegal copies of copyrighted material.

> This problem is pervasive, it's not just a handful of people. Upon the
> advice of several of the leading kernel developers, I contacted Pavel's
> boss at SuSE and said "how about you nudge Pavel onto something more
> productive" and he said that he couldn't control Pavel. That's nonsense
> and everyone knows that. If one of my employees were doing something
> like that, it would be trivial to say "choose between your job and that".
> But Garloff just shrugged it off as not his problem.

That's enough to guarentee that my company _never_ uses BK.

> Corporations are certainly watching things like our efforts with
> BitKeeper, as well as the other companies who are trying to play nice
> with the open source world. What are they learning? That if you don't
> lock it up, the open source world has no conscience, no respect, and will
> steal anything that isn't locked down.

Examples? (other than BK ;-)

> Show me a single example of the community going "no, we can't take that,
> someone else did all the work to produce it, we didn't".

You certainly can find patent violations by the score out there in the
open source world - probably copyright violations as well. But how many
are there in what might be called 'mainstream' OS; such as the Linux
kernel tree, XFree86, Gnome, KDE, Apache, etc.? And do not confuse an
independently produced work-alike with theft of IP.

> The DMCA, DRM, all that stuff is just the beginning. You will respond
> with all sorts of clever hacks to get around it and they will respond
> with even more clever hacks to stop you. They have both more resources
> and more at stake so they will win.

The point is that they don't (with a couple of clever and amusing
exceptions) respond with "even more clever hacks", they respond with
things like DMCA. This is also the danger of the motives behind DRM;
just pass a law making it a felony to produce, use, etc. hardware which
does _not_ enforce corporate controlled DRM.

This is why in my first post on this topic I said it was a political
issue, not a technical one.

> The depressing thing is that it is so obvious to me that the corporations
> will win, they will protect themselves, they have the money to lobby the
> government to get the laws they want and build the technology they need.
> The more you push back the more locked up things will become.

Unfortunately, this may very well prove to be true. But laying it at the
door of the open source community (or even piracy other than commercial
piracy, viz. China) is buying into the FUD that MPAA and RIAA spew.
Remember, that when the courts asked the MPAA to produce _any_ evidence
of harm from DeCSS, they were unable to produce _anything_.