Cambridge University’s Ross Anderson has given parliament advice on how to protect the UK from the excesses of technology. An influential security researcher has urged members of parliament to tighten up the law to prevent technology and media companies from abusing patents and digital rights management applications.
when a select few like Dr Dre and Metallica label everyone as a thief and get their cronies in the RIAA and MPAA to jump in bed with Microsoft and others.
DRM needs to be stopped. I hope they take some advice and put an end to the madness.
The select few don’t deserve the right to take it this far.
I see allot of authors putting there stuff under the Creative Commons now. Basically this allows people to redistribute the work without making money I think. Of course they charge for paper versions. To me this is realistic because there is no overhead on the Internet so why charge? I thought it used to be, you could copy something but not make money off of it.
You’re going to make money off of touring like it should be. If you don’t want to tour then you don’t deserve it. I completely think this would better the quality of the music industry and promote better quality concerts, bands, and music – art etc.
The main thing here is that having a very fair process on the Internet for music allows unknown musicians to be known and therefore people get to listen to better music and will want to pay to see you. People are less lazy and everyone is happy.
Actually, there are numerous different Creative Commons licenses. Some allow others to make money on your work, some don’t. You pick the restrictions.
http://creativecommons.org/license
Somebody just realized what the big entertainment companies where up to. Big Brother may finally just remain a literary nightmare.
The war against DRM just began. Everybody, take your credit card, your elector card and prepare to fight!
———-The war against DRM just began. Everybody, take your credit card, your elector card and prepare to fight!———–
Two points:
1, money) I think people already are. Look at Hollywood’s and look at the music industry’s sales numbers over the past few years. Both are not what they should be. Now granted, I don’t think that it’s solely because of DRM, but rather DRM shows up on a list of things.
2, voting) Take a look at what most hollywood/musicians identify as, and who they vote for. I haven’t done this yet, but after you fire up google and find out who these people are and who they vote for you will find out who you need not to cast your votes for.
Edited 2006-02-05 23:12
The article contains a link to a pdf which is Ross Anderson’s “consultation” response to the All Parliamentary Internet Group. This is well worth reading because it describes some of the issues around DRM in clear, layman’s language. These are the kind of arguments that will influence politicians, judges and power-brokers. They show the effects of DRM in the wider world, such as the destruction of competition and price gouging by corporations at either end of the supply chain (consumers at one end and suppliers/creators at the other). If the preamble to the GPLv3 managed this clarity of expression, which sadly it does not, there’d much much less argument about it.
This is what legislation should be used for. Maybe some would say GPLv3 was a good idea to draw a line on DRM, but that would just lead to an island of GPL code surrounded by abusive DRM. The people have to communicate to their representatives to stop abusive/restrictive DRM.
Legal patches to help protect people against laws that were poorly designed in the first place are probably going to be just as effective as software patches designed to protect people against poorly designed software.
Why not just rewrite basic patent law to not allow for so many potential abuses?