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

Måns Rullgård
2003-04-27T17:26:01Z

Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com> writes:

> 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.

AFAIK, BK is not covered by patents. This means that anyone can
legally write software with similar functionality, without doing
anything illegal, or (IMHO) immoral, as long as no code is copied from
the original product. This applies to other progams, as well. I
don't see anything wrong with taking inspiration from other programs,
when writing your own. Sure, it might not take the same effort to
create a program similar to an already existing one, as to think of
totally new, great idea for how to do something. With your reasoning,
all version control programs are stolen from the first one, whatever
that was (does anyone remember?).

> 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. 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". Good luck finding it. Instead you get "hey,
> that's cool, let's copy it". With no acknowledgement that the creation
> of the product took 100x the effort it takes to copy the product.

Nowdays very few programs show any genuinely new ideas. For the
greater part, they are new implementations of very old concepts. Take
Microsoft. They produce operating systems and word processors. They
were not by far the first to do either of these. Actually, I can't
think of anything where MS has come up with something really new. The
idea of using a display (possibly graphical) with multiple windows was
at one time such a new thing. This does not mean that any subsequent
implementation of such a system is copied, or stolen, from the
original inventor (who was that?). If an idea is special enough, it
can be patented. This protects it from being used by anyone else for
some time. Good examples are MPEG video compression and RSA
cryptography. Fortunately, not everything can be patented.

--
Måns Rullgård
mru@users.sf.net