I’ll repeat myself here, since this I’ve heard this put-down repeated over and over. This is not about the right to play DVDs. This is about the right of citizens to control their own computers.

I’m not laughing.

I can’t stop laughing as I type this. I hope you manage to see the humor in it.

DRM isn’t salvaging anyone’s money or livelihood. Ask the recording industry.

Also, we’re not calling for freedom to tinker. we’re exercising it. Try and stop us.

Because its not your money and livelihood you’re risking with these calls for freedom to tinker.

Tim, we are in agreement on your last post. Stealing content is wrong but not being able to play my iTunes songs on a different device is irritating. However, I knew that to be the case when I bought it – which is exactly why I still buy and rip CD’s. I buy fewer songs from iTunes because the value isn’t there considering the limitations. Don’t you think that ultimately the market will correct the situation by punishing the players that treat their customers as the least important players in the equation? I guess I can summarize my pov on this by saying it just stupid and inflexible to make your product’s user experience suck, but it isn’t immoral or illegal to do it, and the market is the best mechanism to correct it.

This problem isn’t going to go away until someone can provide a reasonable alternative to intrusive DRM that allows the people who create or invest in content to be reasonably confident that they can build a business model around it. That is the one thing that is conspicuously missing in this discussion.

Tim, I do not believe the DMCA makes those businesses illegal at all. If Digg was making a good-faith effort to comply with the law, then they should be shielded from liability. That is what they were trying to do (and I think would have been protected based on their actions). However, the DMCA-activist wing of their user base threatened to leave if they didn’t stop their “good-faith” efforts.

The interesting aspect of this story is just how fragile Web2.0 businesses really are. When a company’s value is based entirely on its userbase (not on its product), they have to do anything they can to protect that asset. Given that Gen X and Gen Y audiences are not slavishly married to brands for life (despite their love of brands) and Web2.0 companies rarely have radically different feature sets from their competitors, they will have to follow every whim of their users. Even if it means effectively breaking the law and opening themselves up to business-ending lawsuits.

Tim, I do not believe the DMCA makes those businesses illegal at all. If Digg was making a good-faith effort to comply with the law, then they should be shielded from liability. That is what they were trying to do (and I think would have been protected based on their actions). However, the DMCA-activist wing of their user base threatened to leave if they didn’t stop their “good-faith” efforts.

The interesting aspect of this story is just how fragile Web2.0 businesses really are. When a company’s value is based entirely on its userbase (not on its product), they have to do anything they can to protect that asset. Given that Gen X and Gen Y audiences are not slavishly married to brands for life (despite their love of brands) and Web2.0 companies rarely have radically different feature sets from their competitors, they will have to follow every whim of their users. Even if it means effectively breaking the law and opening themselves up to business-ending lawsuits.

Violating the DMCA anti-circumvention provision is not the same thing as taking content without permission. There are legitimate reasons to circumvent copy protection. Please don’t confuse (or deliberately obfuscate) the distinction between the two by whining about stealing. DRM doesn’t prevent stealing, and it curbs legitimate uses.

I think most folks here are smart enough to see that companies like Google and Apple have their own agendas. They’re still a lot better, from a geek-libertarian perspective, than the content dinosaurs. Google and Apple benefit from the free flow of information. Content dinosaurs benefit when the flow of information is restricted.

Empathy is not the word I would have gone for. But understanding why a cornered animal bares its teeth is useful.

The point is that they aren’t breaking the law; neither did the last person trying to sell washboards after the electric washer was invented and its not ok to steal their content just because their business model is becoming obsolete, any more than it would have been ok to steal those washboards “because they are made by dinasaurs.” It’s not illegal to be stupid and inflexible, it is illegal (and should be) to steal other people’s content even if they are stupid and inflexible.

They will go out of business if they fail to adapt, that should go without saying. But why does that make it ok for all of us to steal their stuff? And why the moral outrage about their failure to adapt. Were we morally outraged at those dummies who kept trying to sell buggy whips after buggies became obsolete?

I’m not really sure why I’ve gotten involved in this conversation. I may just be proving my ignorance by engaging in this disucssion but I just think the way the discussion has been framed is missing some basic realities.

A friend of mine has a small business producing educational videos. The production costs are staggering for a small company and as soon as a video is produced it ends up on youtube thus making it very difficult to recoup the upfront investment. If there was a reasonable alternative for distribution to DVD that supported a reasonable asset monitization method I guess you could say shame on them for not getting with the times, but there isn’t.

In my mind it is just stealing what people are doing with that content and they rationalize it by saying “those big mean companies are too rich and too dumb to change.” Forums like this just give it a nice “think tanky” sheen of justification. And frankly, I think you are being used. While you are pushing the liberatarian solution onto big content, big search and big apple are just using the dinasaur’s weakness to make themselves into the next generation oligarchy.

I don’t really disagree with you about the business side of things, although I do think that if they get sued, they’ll get a ton of free publicity and strengthen their bond with their readers.

My question is: if your interpretation is correct, doesn’t it bother you that the DMCA—by your own admission—effectively makes Web 2.0-stye businesses illegal? It’s not like Digg’s users are violating laws left and right. I don’t remember seeing pirated content, child pornography, or random peoples’ credit card numbers on Digg’s front page. So if Digg is making a good-faith effort to comply with the law, and they aren’t profiting from piracy, shouldn’t that be sufficient to shield it from liability?