OSNews

This is a truly wonderful and must-read piece. It clearly shows that DRM, and the associated issues of vendor lock-ins and proprietary formats, go way beyond IT; they are really fundamental issues about preserving our way of life in the digital era.

The basic agenda of the content industry, which is being achieved with the collusion of the two commercial OS vendors, is to take control of the desktop PC away from the buyer/user, and put it into the hands of the content supplier/OS supplier.

The problem is, the price we will all pay for this is in two categories. In financial terms, the costs this will impose on society because of crippled PCs will be astronomical. In constitutional terms, our ability to do what we will with content we have bought and PCs we have bought, will allow all kinds of limitations of access to information which are incompatible with functioning democracy as we have known it.

The article, by concrete examples, makes this wondefully clear. The thing the author does not point out is that only the US and some European countries are going to cripple themselves like this. China will not, of that you can be sure. China, remember, is where the PCs are all made. So the endgame of all this kowtowing to content providers is really serious competitive disadvantage for any company operating in the jurisdictions where their whims have been crystalized into legal standards for OS and hardware.

I do believe content producers should be paid for their work. Perhaps locking and encryption are legitimate ways of ensuring this happens. But crippling everyone's computer in pursuit of enforcing this, as the article demonstrates, is like solving the problem of drink driving by prohibition. The costs exceed the benefits by a factor of thousands, and the costs fall on all, while the benefits accrue to a very few indeed.