Martin Pool's blog

Cory Doctorow on DRM

Cory Doctorow gave a great talk about DRM, which is now available in wiki form. (It's published using MoinMoin, a descendent of my pikipiki code. Truly we all stand on each others shoulders.) Appetizers:

Here's the social reason that DRM fails: keeping an honest user honest is like keeping a tall user tall.

anticirumvention lets rightsholders invent new and exciting copyrights for themselves -- to write private laws without accountability or deliberation -- that expropriate your interest in your physical property to their favor. Region-coded DVDs are an example of this: there's no copyright here or in anywhere I know of that says that an author should be able to control where you enjoy her creative works, once you've paid for them. I can buy a book and throw it in my bag and take it anywhere from Toronto to Timbuktu, and read it wherever I am: I can even buy books in America and bring them to the UK, where the author may have an exclusive distribution deal with a local publisher who sells them for double the US shelf-price. When I'm done with it, I can sell it on or give it away in the UK. Copyright lawyers call this "First Sale," but it may be simpler to think of it as "Capitalism."

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